"For a dime, they gave you a legend. For the truth, you have to look deeper."
Welcome to the Dime Library, where award-winning author and historian Matthew Kerns strips away the pulp-fiction polish of the Old West to find the real men and women beneath the dust. From the stage-lit stardom of Texas Jack Omohundro to the gritty reality of the frontier scouts, we explore the authentic history that built the American West. If you want stories that are better than the movies and backed by the archives, pull up a chair.
On August 27, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.”
But Ontario has been renamed before.
The word comes from the language of the Wendat people, whose homeland once stretched across the Great Lakes region before disease, war, removal, and government policy scattered their descendants from Quebec to Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
This is the story of that word: where it came from, what happened to the people who spoke it, and why a name that has survived kings, governors, empires, and four centuries of mapmakers may have something to tell us about this week.
The lake is big. The lake is beautiful. It has heard this before.
28 Aug 2026
A Tennessee Tribute to Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton died this week in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 80.If you live outside of Tennessee, you're likely going to be puzzled, in the coming days and weeks, by the way her passing is about to dominate your social media feeds. Because you're going to see post after post from people down here, all mourning this woman they've never met. Some of those posts will be maudlin. Corny. Some, God knows, will include folks holding up candles and crying and holding impromptu wakes in a Dollywood parking lot. One of them will be this one. I'll try to help you understand why.
24 Dec 2025
Buffalo Bill's Christmas Story
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Christmas
"Mine has been a stormy life and a perilous one... but incidents like this are like shafts of sunshine." — Buffalo Bill Cody, 1887.
Step back in time to Christmas Eve in the Colorado gold fields. Join us as we read a rediscovered 1887 interview where Buffalo Bill Cody describes the time he turned a gang of rough-and-tumble miners into a secret society of Santa Clauses. It’s a story of vigilantes, gold dust, and the unexpected tenderness found on the American frontier.
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5.0 / 5
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Spotify
4.4 / 5
14 ratings
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