If Joe Boot had never met Pearl Hart, he might have lived an uneventful life as a miner and businessman. But they did meet, and they did plan a stagecoach robbery. They got caught, and the capture catapulted Pearl Hart into infamy but left Joe Boot totally ignored in the hulabaloo that followed.
On May 19, 1969, while shivering in my front yard in Jamestown, North Dakota, with a shovel in my hand, a well-rehearsed litany of curses emerged from my frosted lips as I set about removing a small portion of the foot of snow that had plopped down upon us the previous evening. But then, as I swore and shoveled and shoveled and swore in rhythmic fashion, a strange calm came upon me with the realization that life is too short.
In the long run, Billy Stiles fared much better as a criminal than as a lawman. He escaped death many times while running from the law, but died while trying to enforce it. Stiles was born in 1871 and grew up near Casa Grande. He served twice as an Arizona deputy sheriff, but spent much of his early days as a train robber, bank robber and killer.
GLOBE — Most ancient ruins in Arizona are just that — ruins. Overseen by government agencies, they are stabilized but never rebuilt because the philosophy is to preserve, not restore. But the old pueblo here, known as Besh-Ba-Gowah, has been partially rebuilt and nobody’s getting their nose bent out of shape.
CHANDLER — After summer monsoon winds knocked down several large trees on the SunBird Golf Course in 2005, the course operators decided that, rather than tear out the stumps, they’d turn them into works of art. So they hired local artist Bob Jordan, commonly known as “Chainsaw Bob,” to convert the stumps into sculptures.
