The autumn air, still and breathless.  Deathly light crept from thin clouds to illuminate Bob Dalton’s footfalls as he and the rest of the gang exited the alley near the crumbling Coffeyville jail. They held…

Our Market grocery store and butcher shop celebrates its grand opening today in Humboldt. Yet amidst all the fanfare, it’s easy to forget how long a road it was in getting here. In what follows,…

Time for a wider perspective. But in order to get there we’re going to have to climb to reach a vantage point high enough to provide a more encompassing story of southeast Kansas. Luckily, I…

The past is full of horrors. And although they have seemingly passed, such events still haunt in the present, demand our attention and force reevaluation of our values. One such nightmare occurred at a place…

It’s through division that the One begins to multiply. That’s just what happened in August 1870, when a station was built near the highest point between Kansas City and the Gulf of Mexico along the…

The train calls. Do you hear it? Though you can feel it in your bones, that strange magnetic energy that holds you in place despite tons of speeding and unstoppable machinery careening your way. Near…

What makes a house a home is memory. Whether log cabin, wood frame, brick or native stone, such materials activate and retain an imprint of those who dwell within them. Those memories may again be…

Buster’s back. The Buster Keaton Celebration will return to Iola in September after a four-year hiatus.  Starting in 1993, annual festivals honored the legendary screen actor and innovator who was born in Piqua. When a…

The afternoon sky was cloudy and dark as I knelt down near the base of the Bressner Pasture waterfall in Woodson County. A gurgle of bubbles bounced from the tangle of sandstone boulders, and a…

Joe Exotic, the Tiger King, and other celebrities visited Humboldt Middle School Wednesday to talk about their ties to Kansas. “My interest in the beloved felines started when the local game warden called me about…