Death on the Frontier

Notes from the Frontier author's new novel coming soon!

For sound, please click the note icon in the bottom right of the video.

Special thanks to Oscar-Winning Dances with Wolves co-composer Peter Buffett for use of his spectacular music from 500 Nations.

Pioneer Survival Guides in the 1800s

The mortality rate of westering pioneers was very high. Perhaps the greatest cause of death was pioneers not knowing the basics of survival.

1800's Human Hair Funeral Art

As early as the 1400s in Europe, creating hair art to memorialize the dead began, especially because epidemic and plagues took a high toll.

Death Photography

In the 1800s, Victorians were intimately acquainted with death. The Civil War, the bloodiest war in America's history, touched every family.

In Praise of the Working Man & Woman

The cogs of the Industrial Revolution loomed grinding and monstrous over the individual worker and killed workers at spectacular rate.

Death on the Trail

The Oregon Trail has been called a 2,000-mile-long graveyard.

Pioneer Cemeteries

Today, all of us know of pioneer graveyards. They are lonely plots overgrown on random roadsides, with crumbling gravestones.