Just in case someone doesn't know, I also work for a handful of other blogs. Over at mental_floss, I do a feature article twice a week. Often I throw something together at the last minute, or pull something out of my files that I've collected over a long time. And sometimes I get really into an idea and spend many hours putting it together. You never know what subjects will be popular and which will fall flat. This past weekend, I put a ton of time and work into an article that ran today, but doesn't seem to be drawing much interest at all, and it's bummed me out a little. Then I remembered that Scaramouch told me years ago that I could plug my other stuff here. I rarely do that, but I'd like to share what I learned about Wild West shows. You know, Annie Oakley and the guy who came up with riding horses off a diving board and the cowboy who used his pet coyote in a vaudeville act.

In the latter part of the 19th century, before television, radio, or even movies with sound, traveling exhibitions were the biggest form of entertainment most people encountered. The wild west show merged the entertainment of the circus with the adventure of the new west and brought it to crowds of the eastern US and beyond. The stars of the wild west shows were as famous as world leaders and military heroes -or even more so!