Badlands

"I was a guard for Wells Fargo and Company. The Company had its fair share of holdups and I had a belly full in fending off a few attempts. I rode shotgun on the coaches transporting gold, letters and people across the Badlands. They say in those days, when the white settlers came marching across the western US, that they stirred up the dead and spirits of old things. Many reports from military outposts or relatives writing to family back east, wrote of a land filled with strange and unexplained wonders and terrors. Some people entered the Badlands on their own merits, an inhospitable piece of land that stretched on for miles. They went searching for gold or to stake their claim and were never heard from again; others went in and a few came out insane in the mind with the things they had seen. People whispered stories around campfires about the dead rising, blood-drinkers, cannibals and people being shape-shifters roaming the land. There was talk of beasts that were real man-killers. This is why some places became ghost towns overnight. I even heard a few accounts of strange beings coming from the heavens to pay us a visit. They say that the Natives had a lot to do with these things. That they were conjuring up the old spirits to ward off the white man's evil love for gold and land. I call that just plain nonsense. Now, Frank, I tell you, I have seen some strange things in my days and I can't explain it all."-Lewis R. Thompson, (former Confederate with the 43rd Battalion Cavalry troop with Mosby Rangers, WF&Co agent, miner and Pinkerton detectiveRide along the dusty trail in the Badlands for a slice of the strange and bizarre as told by Mathew Wilson, Juan J. Guti?rrez, Dorothy Davies, John Thompson, Scathe meic Beorh, Earl and Paul Dick, Gerry Huntman, Bruce H. Murkuson, Greg McWhorter, Vivian Caethe, J.A. Campbell, John H. Dromey, David Pointer and others.