Columnists
At eleven years old, my father, Mark King, moved to a farm in Wisconsin near a tribal nation. There he befriended an Indian boy his age, and the two forged a bond grounded in the purest form of childhood friendship: shooting things. Their favorite pastime was target practice with arrows
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Roaring Camp was not the sort of place where good news happened. In 1850, if a gunfight broke out, nobody paused their card game long enough to notice—French Pete and Kanaka Joe once shot each other clean through right in front of Tuttle’s grocery, and someone simply leaned
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It was early on the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving—the kind of gray, muted morning that makes you wonder if the sun took an early holiday. It had rained more days than not that week, and everything was soaked: the yard, the fields, the road, even the air felt waterlogged.
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Cowboys in the Old West didn’t have therapists, bullet journals, or apps reminding them to drink water and ‘practice gratitude.’ What they had were long days, stubborn cattle, bad coffee, and enough silence to make a person hear thoughts they didn’t know they had. And when life got
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When my dad, Mark King, was young, he didn’t just ride horses — he made them question their career choices. Dad’s world smelled like leather, dust, and courage. He worked rodeos across the West, hazing cattle, chasing steers, and eventually—because apparently sanity was negotiable—riding broncs. That’s
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When my dad was a boy, he brought a horse to school. That sounds like a setup for a joke — and in a way, it was — but to him, it was just another Tuesday. He must’ve been eight or nine when his mother decided he was destined for the
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Halloween decorations are beginning to fill the stores, some classic and some strange. I saw one in Tractor Supplies of a cow draped in a sheet, supposed to look like a ghost. I half expected to see a “Battle Born” logo on the side of the sheet. Every Halloween we’
Have you ever seen a situation that seemed beyond healing, beyond any redemption, that suddenly turned around? This is a saga with a surprise ending. Lillie grew up in a small town in rural Wisconsin and, in high school during the depression, got pregnant to a rich boy who didn’
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What is the ‘wild west’ to you? For most people it’s both a place and time, a moment in history around America’s civil war when horizons expanded, and opportunities were available to those tough enough, recklessly ambitious, or simply willing to seek adventure far beyond our settled east
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King's Corner column for the August 15, 2025 issue So where did they all go? The gold rush in California, followed by the silver rush in northern Nevada, brought a flood of people to our region during those boom years. An entire generation grew up mining the Sierra
King's Corner column for August 8, 2025 issue Some people have a life-long love affair with horses. And while some live that out on trails following mountain streams, or in dressage competition rings, or as mounted police officers, my dad’s – Mark King’s – adrenaline-filled passion came to
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King's Corner column for August 1, 2025 issue The stretch limo was solid white. The handsome man standing in the middle of the limo, so that the top half of his body was visible above the sun roof, was wearing a solid white tuxedo and a huge smile.