Issue

An artist turned land agent used his paintings to promote paper townsites in Minnesota. Though most of these settlements failed to materialize, his charming record of an opening frontier remains

Who was the prosperous Negro in the long-lost painting? Scraps of evidence pieced together have revealed him to be

Long before Frémont, Jedediah Smith mapped huge regions between Salt Lake and California. He ranks beside Lewis and Clark in the annals of American exploration

The crusading conservationist thought he had saved the fur seal from extinction. Then from the Pribilofs, home of the last great herd, came an alarming telegram:

Sixty-five years before the bomb destroyed Hiroshima, a medicine man from Sf. Louis dreamed up a weapons system “so terrible and devastating” as to banish war forever. He would be, he modestly admitted, the savior of mankind

The aged ex-President grew giddy and his family became alarmed as the mask-maker’s formula hardened around his venerable head

Could ironclads successfully attack land positions? No one knew. Into the very “nest of the rebellion,” sewn with mines and ringed by bristling forts, steamed the proud monitors of the Union fleet