Western Fever

Newspapers of the day described young men with a burning desire to get rich on the frontier as having a bad case of "western fever," and by 1836 Gideon Truesdell had surely caught it. He struggled with life on the frontier until he amassed a million-dollar ($68 million today) fortune in the lumber, agricultural, cattle, and mining businesses. Late in life the Chicago Fire nearly wiped him out, and at the age of sixty-three he started over in Silver City, New Mexico, in one of the roughest towns in the old west. He made a good living in the cattle business, and it was at his son's hotel that the family became acquainted with teenager Henry Antrim, also known as Billy the Kid, who lived with them for five months. Academic scholars agree that the Truesdells knew him well, and that they liked him. When silver was discovered in Tombstone, Arizona, Gideon organized a cattle business that made him affluent. A year later, he died at the age of seventy-one after an accomplished life during a fascinating period of history.