One More For The Road

Bill Sniffin and Andrew Rossi keep arriving to the Cowboy State Daily news meeting at the same time.....

One more for 5 29 26

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<title>One More For The Road: Friday, May 29, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

One More For The Road: Friday, May 29, 2026

 Bill Sniffin and Andrew Rossi keep arriving to the Cowboy State Daily news meeting at the same time.....

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Tourism

On a cold winter’s night in the 1950s, a young Marine named Wayne Schell found himself in a desperate scramble under the hood of his 1950 Oldsmobile on a lonely stretch of Route 66. 

A tiny pinhole had developed in the radiator, and Schell was trying to figure out how to fix it so he could get home — without forking over his hard-earned money for a motel room.

“When you’re a young Marine, you can’t really afford a motel or anything,” Schell said with a chuckle. “You drive nonstop.”

The Marine riding with him to share expenses came up with a bright idea. Or so it seemed at 1 a.m.

“Well, maybe I can put this pencil tip in it to block it,” Schell recalled him saying. 

But the radiator was so rotten, the pencil just busted open an even larger hole.

The road trip home was over. At least for that night. 

Schell and his riding buddy had no choice but to rent a motel room for the night, one of the only times he would ever stay in a motel room along Route 66 back when it was an actual American highway. 

Schell, who is 90 — almost as old as the 100-year-old highway itself — recalls sharing the motel room with a significantly chastened pal. 

“I wasn’t mad at him,” Schell said in a soft voice, memories crowding in. “He tried to help me, and it just didn’t work out.”

The next morning, the two Marines found a radiator shop to fix the problem.

“He wouldn’t guarantee the work because we were out of town,” Schell said. “And he charged me like $20.”

It was half a week’s pay for the average male worker at the time. A small fortune — especially for work that had no guarantee.

“But I ended up using it for three more years,” Schell added. “So it worked. I got through. I made it home.”

The memory is just one in a million that Schell has of driving America’s Mother Road, Route 66, a name synonymous with America and legendary road trips. 

Schell, who joined the Marine Corps in 1956, is among the dwindling number of Americans alive today who has driven the entirety of Route 66 from Navy Pier in Chicago to Santa Monica Pier in California, a roughly 2,400-mile trip. 

He didn’t just drive it once, either. It was a regular trip home for the young Marine. 

“I lived in Illinois, about 100 miles southwest of Chicago,” he said. “I went to bootcamp in California, and then got stationed at 29 Palms in California.”

He made the drive home as often as he could in a 1950 Olds with a 1956 Olds engine and three Stormberg 97 two-barrel carburetors, usually in one long 40- to 45-hour sleepless trip.

The thing he likes to remind people who have never driven the route when it was an actual highway is that there was no such thing as a freeway then.

“Route 66 went through every little town along the way,” he said. “You had to stop at stoplights and stop signs. There was traffic, which wasn’t bad then.”

Some towns had posted limits of 30 mph, too, and friendly police to remind those who weren’t paying attention to their speed. 

U.S. Route 66 doesn’t officially exist anymore. The federal government decertified it in 1985, a year after the last interstate highway bypass was completed in Williams, Arizona, wiping it off the map as a U.S. highway — at least on paper.

But that didn’t kill the route. The Mother Road lives on in the heart and the imagination, which has made it feel more alive than ever. 

“It’s a road for God’s sake,” Route 66 historian John Hinckley of Arizona told Cowboy State Daily. “But it literally has an international fan club. There are Route 66 associations in Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Italy — and they organize events and publish books.”

A 2018 Route 66 Festival in Europe where Hinckley was invited to speak brought more than 20,000 people from 10 countries to celebrate America and its legendary Route 66.

“It has evolved to represent the quintessential American experience,” Hinckley said. “It truly is the entire American story made manifest. It’s in any chapter of our history — even our prehistory. You have villages in New Mexico along Route 66, like Laguna Pueblo, and the chapel there was built in 1699. The village is 100 years older than that.”

Portions of Route 66 were laid on top of the Santa Fe Trail and the Buell Wagon Road, Hinckley added. 

“The Buell Wagon Road was laid on top of a 1,000-year-old Native American trade route,” he said. “And then you have the world’s first electric vehicle museum being established on Route 66. So it’s the entire story of America, and the story of our immigrants is all peppered through Route 66.”

Hinckley has been traveling Route 66 since 1959 and has been watching its transformation with fascination ever since, including how it’s become woven into the fabric of American legend.

The story that illustrates this best to him is the conversation he had with a gentleman who had grown up behind the Iron Curtain listening to Radio Free America.

“He knew that song about getting your kicks on Route 66,” Hinckley said. “He grew up watching bootleg copies of Easy Rider. And he said the American road trip, specifically Route 66, came to symbolize freedom for his generation, like the Statue of Liberty did for a previous generation.”

Americans, meanwhile, are finding ways to live out their dreams on Route 66 all up and down the route — freedom of another kind.

For example, in Stroud, Oklahoma, a young couple has restored the old Skyliner Motel. Elsewhere, retirees have brought back neon-lit motor courts. Multi-generation cafes, founded by penniless immigrants, have family members who are keeping the dream alive that their grandfathers began. 

That’s made Route 66 into a kind of 2,400-mile, small-town neighborhood, Hinckley said. 

“It’s America’s longest small town,” he said. “It’s evolved into this linear community.”

On any given night, you can find yourself at a place like the Roadrunner Lodge in Tucumcari, New Mexico, roasting marshmallows around a fire pit with a couple from Germany and a traveler from Scotland who is playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on bagpipes. 

Hinckley once ran into a caravan of strangers who spontaneously decided to convoy together to the Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, Texas, for a slice of “ugly crust” pie, so named because the cafe’s legendary pastry chef, Joann Andrews, famously cared more about the rich flavor and flaky texture of her pies than making a perfect crimped edge.

Midpoint Cafe, meanwhile, gets its name because it is exactly 1,139 miles from Chicago and 1,139 miles from Santa Monica, which makes the cafe a must for the ultimate Route 66 experience.

“You find inspiration all along the route,” he said. “The magic is the people.”

Route 66 wasn’t the first coast-to-coast highway, although it’s frequently portrayed that way. That honor actually belongs to 

, which goes right through the middle of Wyoming.

“This is another challenge with Route 66,” Hinckley said. “As with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, it’s become such a legend that separating fact from fiction is a real challenge.”

From its earliest days, Route 66 benefitted from what Hinckley calls the best press and publicity any road has ever had.

“Cyrus Avery was a pioneer in a lot of these early highways,” Hinckley said. “And he and a bunch of visionaries got together and created the U.S. Highway 66 Association. The idea was to petition and lobby to have the road paved from end to end, and to promote the road — a kind of quasi Chamber of Commerce.”

The group hit the ground running with their publicity campaign — literally. 

“There was a sports promoter trying to get backing for a transcontinental foot race,” Hinckley said. “So they jumped on board and said they’d sponsor it as long as he would agree to do it on Route 66.”

The purse for the 1928 race was $20,000, a phenomenal amount of money for the time. The average American family earned less than $1,500 per year. A purse of that size could purchase multiple homes outright. 

Runners from all over the world, from amateur to professional, came to vie for this huge Route 66 purse.

“A 19-year-old Cherokee boy from Oklahoma entered the race,” Hinckley said. “Total amateur from some little farming community. By the time they got to the end of Oklahoma, he was leading the pack and he eventually won the race.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It was a huge, international media frenzy."}]

There would be more smart media campaigns after that. The Highway 66 Association partnered with the Olympics, for example, to advertise Route 66 as the scenic way to get to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“Then you had the ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ and you had the song, ‘Get Your Kicks on Route 66,’ which has turned into one of the most recorded songs in history,” Hinckley said. "The 'I Love Lucy'television show even got in on the act with a four-part episode of Desi and Lucy going on a Route 66 trip with the Mertzes to California.

Finally, in 1960, came the “Route 66” television series starring Martin Milner and George Maharis as two young men traveling across the country in a Chevrolet Corvette. A heady list of guest stars included Robert Redford, Lon Chaney Jr., Boris Karloff, Robert Duvall, Walter Matthau and William Shatner, among dozens of others.

The series ended in 1964 after 116 episodes and two Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

Route 66 itself ultimately became a victim of the interstate highway system — I-10, I-15, I-40, I-44 and I-55 — which rendered it obsolete and diverted traffic from its businesses.

Schell might not have been a tourist when he was driving Route 66, but he made plenty of great memories along the way.

“My 1950s Oldsmobile was all fancied up,” he said with a chuckle. “You know, like a young kid does. I had been keeping this at my parents’ house in Illinois. So that first time, I flew back home on an airplane, but when I got off leave, I drove the Oldsmobile back to 29 Palms.”

The sights along the way were incredible to a “young kid” as Schell referred to himself. 

“They used to have Tipis along Route 66 and the rattlesnakes,” he said. “I was seeing rattlesnakes and all kinds of things.”

There was no Cadillac Ranch yet, but there was a little diner on the west end of Albuquerque, where he stopped to have an innocent cup of life-saving coffee.

“There was an old Mexican fella eating a bowl of chili and I thought, ‘You know, that looks pretty good,’” Schell said. “So I ordered a bowl, and it was the hottest chili I’d ever eaten in my life. I had tears coming out of my eyes, and I never got sleepy anymore that night. That’s for sure.”

There was also a restaurant somewhere near Amarillo that offered a 32- or 36-ounce steak for free — if you could eat it all in one sitting.

“I think they still have that one today,” he said. “But I never tried it. I knew better. I wasn’t going to be able to eat that much.”

Schell still drives over portions of Route 66 to this day. Last year, he drove it to a family reunion in Illinois. 

“I’ve got a new Corvette now, and I’m driving a Lucid all-electric car,” he said. “I’ve had it a couple of years and it has 86,000 miles on it. I like to drive.”

Schell usually works in a stop at a resort he owns near Tucson, Arizona, which takes him on a lot of backroads the rest of the way to Illinois.

“It’s really amazing,” he said. “You get to see all these little towns off the beaten path where Route 66 used to go. You can still do that on rural roads, and these are pretty nice roads.”

His favorite of these towns is one in the southwest corner of Kansas, which is full of old Victorian homes overlooking a river.

“It’s a beautiful city, and no one ever talks about it,” he said. “It’s one of the nicest cities in the country. So, you discover things, you know? It’s neat to be able to discover these hidden gems, tucked away, that nobody even knows about.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Inspiring New Legends"}]

The Route 66 shield is one of the most recognizable in the world, Hinckley said. He’s read claims from some experts that it’s even more recognizable than the Coca-Cola logo. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He believes it. "}]

He’s seen the signs tacked onto barns in the remotest corners of Poland and Ukraine, as well as themed diners in Spain, not to mention bars and roadside cafes across America, both on and off of Route 66. 

“Route 66 has always been the route of dreams,” Hinckley said. “And every day the road is inspiring people to do amazing things.”

Like the people trying to rollerblade the entire Route 66. Or the Irish ultra-cyclist riding his bike from Santa Monica Pier in California to Navy Pier in Chicago in 10 days — a world record, set just a few weeks ago.

“I met a World War II veteran and the short version of this is when he got out of the Navy in 1946 in Norfolk, Virginia, him and his wife, newly married, went to California and they drove Route 66 most of the trip,” he said. “They did it on a 1940 Harley in a sidecar, because that was all they could afford at the time.”

In the early 2000s, they decided to celebrate their wedding anniversary by recreating the trip. 

“They restored a 1940 Harley Davidson sidecar and they lived in Florida, so their plan was to drive to Oklahoma and continue to California,” Hinckley said. “Well, she got sick and passed away before they could make the trip. And he was diagnosed with lung cancer.”

Doctors took out one lung and part of his other lung, but that didn’t mean the trip was off.

“He told the doctor, ‘I promised my wife I’m taking her to California,’” Hinckley said. “So he rigged up his side car with his oxygen tanks and equipment and he put his wife’s ashes in the side car and went from Sarasota, Florida to the Santa Monica Pier on a 1940 Harley Davidson in a sidecar.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Where The Map Finally Ends"}]

Walk the Santa Monica Pier today, and it’s a microcosm of Route 66 mythology, caught up in one single place.

Chinese protestors march the pier, pleading to be saved from the “evil CCP,” while evangelists try desperately to save the souls of the beaded and bangled tourists walking by. Some are wearing thong swimsuits and T-shirts and little else, while others are swathed in Puritan-style clothing, buttoned up to the neck.

At the end of the pier, a man in a somehow spotless white suit sings “What a Wonderful World” with such conviction it’s impossible not to believe it in that moment. 

It is a wonderful world, even when it sometimes isn’t. 

Somewhere along that same boardwalk is a shop that claims to be the official last stop for Route 66, selling souvenirs — affordable, if tiny, pieces of the road’s magic.

Technically, Hinckley said, that shop isn’t located at the actual end of Route 66. That’s at Olympic and Lincoln in Santa Monica.

But technicalities don’t overcome emotion in such a moment. Of course, the tourist who has arrived at the end of Route 66 is going to take a little stroll on the famous Santa Monica Pier that’s just two blocks away and find that last little Route 66 stop. 

Wayne Schell Route 66 Inset Arizona Nicholas Klein via Alamy 7 12 26

<title>America’s Longest Small Town: Why Route 66 Is The Quintessential American Experience | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Historic U.S. Route 66 is America's longest small town — a 2,400-mile neighborhood that one historian calls the "quintessential American experience." 90-year-old Wayne Schell has driven the entire route dozens of times and continues to drive it today.

America’s Longest Small Town: Why Route 66 Is The Quintessential American Experience

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Wyoming Life

Former Yellowstone National Park Ranger Carl Dunrud was no stranger to danger when he came up against four boys in the wilderness of Wyoming. 

 and rode a buffalo for a Wild West show stunt before buying a dude ranch at the height of the Great Depression. 

He had paid $2.50 an acre for the former Kerwin mining claim to serve as the starting point of his pack trips into the Absaroka Range for his Double Dee Dude Ranch, and was focused on making a living, not tracking fugitives.

However, the many guests Dunrud and his wife, Vera, were expecting didn’t come. 

As they struggled to feed their family and survive the monotony, Dunrud got the urgent call from the warden at the Wyoming Industrial Institute in Worland, now called the Wyoming Boys' School, about four teen inmates on the run. 

Despite his misgivings, Dunrud agreed to help, although he knew this task might prove more dangerous that lassoing a walrus.

“I was reluctant to stop breaking sod since I had just taken the rough edge off four young horses, but the pay was quoted at the unheard-of price of a dollar an hour, and I could keep my own time,” Dunrud wrote years later in his autobiography, “85 Years of Adventure.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Boy Called Sunshine"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"It was after midnight in 1932 when the telephone rang at the Double Dee. "}]

The warden explained that four teens had escaped two days earlier, and no one had seen them since. Their tracks had just been discovered on Gooseberry Creek, about 20 miles southeast of Meeteetse.

Their leader was Sunshine, and it was his tracks that helped them identify the teens. He was wearing cowboy boots with steel plates on his heels. One heel was worn to a sharp point, so there was no mistaking who it was.

“We think they are heading across the mountain for Dubois,” the warden said. “Will you go and see if you can intercept them?”

The warden offered to send a trustee to Dunrud who was Sunshine's friend, and who the warden hoped would be a help

in apprehending Sunshine. The boys were traveling slowly, and the warden said there was no doubt they were tired and hungry.

Except, they were now armed. The boys had been tracked to Clarence Dollar's sheep wagon. They had robbed it of groceries, a .30-30 rifle and ammunition.

“Now remember, Sunshine is dangerous. He's young, but he's a pretty tough hombre,” the warden said. “The other boys are just kids.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Industrial School"}]

, the Wyoming Legislature passed a law in 1911 that established a “Reform Institution” to serve and house young male felons like Sunshine. The Wyoming Industrial Institute opened its doors in 1915 and by the time Sunshine and his boy gang were housed there, the institution was self-sustaining.

The school maintained a productive farming operation manned by inmates and was considered a model of self-sufficiency, especially during the Great Depression. The idea was that the wards, boys ages16 to 25, would learn life skills and a useful trade.

Sunshine would have been expected to help with the chores related to fattening the Hereford cattle for market, milking the dairy cows and caring for the sheep, hogs and chickens. Gardens and large fields of sugar beets were also planted and the boys were employed in a small, on-site cannery.

According to State Archives records the sale from the excess products equaled $86,700 for the 1928-1930 biennium, which is equivalent to $1.1 million today. By the time Sunshine was working in the fields, the institute was making an average of $700,000 in today’s dollars per year.

Sunshine obviously had enough of forced labor and escaped, taking with him three other boys.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Ski Patrol"}]

The snow still lay deep on the mountains between the Double Dee and Dubois, so Dunrud took along old “Agony and Torture,” the hickory skis he had used on patrol in Yellowstone.

“I had traveled almost 3,400 miles on patrol as a ranger,” Dunrud said. “I figured that I could make better time on these old skis than the boys could on foot.”

Sunshine’s trustee and friend arrived at the ranch early the next morning. Dunrud saddled two horses and they rode 12 miles to the rimrock on Chimney Creek. He then sent the trusty boy back to the ranch with the horses.

“I had a bite to eat from food I had rolled in my bedroll and stayed in the lee of the rimrock that afternoon,” Dunrud said. “I decided to stay in the same spot that night while I scouted around for tracks.”

Dunrud had reasoned that if the boys were ahead of him, he could overtake them easily because they had been on foot on short rations and had been sleeping on the cold ground for two nights. After Dunrud climbed the rim and walked around on top, he could not find any signs of the boys.

“There was nothing to do but go back to my makeshift camp and wait,” Dunrud said. “On my way back, I almost walked into the boys coming my way."

[{"type":"text","text":"Dunrud would have run “smack into them” except that their dog barked."}]

“I still hadn't seen the boys, but I heard them call the dog,” Dunrud said. “They were only 100 yards downhill from me when they started running.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Dunrud raced downhill and identified Sunshine's tracks."}]

“The boys were running down a well-worn elk trail in high gear,” Dunrud said. “It was no use trying to outrun these young boys, especially since they had a head start.”

Dunrud went back to his “spike camp,” picked up his bedroll, and climbed the rimrock again. He followed the boys' tracks until dark.

“I had been warned that they were armed and could be dangerous, so I didn't want to come upon their camp in the dark,” Dunrud said.

The next morning, Dunrud headed back to the Double Dee. He figured they would have to come within a half-mile of the ranch if they were still planning to go to Dubois.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Sunshine Escapes"}]

At daybreak, Dunrud drove up the Wood River Valley toward Kirwin to a sandy place where the boys had to cross. He found no tracks there, so headed back to where he had last seen the boys' tracks.

He stopped at the sawmill to let the men know about the fugitives and discovered fresh tracks from Sunshine.

“I was only about two miles from where I had seen the boys' tracks the day before, when it began to snow hard,” Dunrud said. “It snowed intermittently for two days as I tracked the boys down Wood River.”

At one point, the boys stopped at the Paul Foster ranch and asked for matches. Once more, they had eluded Dunrud.

their escape with determination, Dunrud noted, but now they were faring badly in the snowstorm and had no food as they headed toward Cody.

“When they got to a telephone, three of the boys had been “bad men” long enough,” Dunrud said. “They called the school collect and asked them to come and get them.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Sunshine was not about to go back and left the boys behind."}]

“To the best of my knowledge, Sunshine never was apprehended nor ever was seen in these parts again,” Dunrud said. “Maybe he changed his name and became an honorable citizen, or maybe he was one of the lawless men that we read about in the newspapers or hear about on the radio.”

For a man who had captured live polar bears and rode a buffalo, it left quite an impression that Dunrud was outwitted by a boy criminal who had disappeared into the Wyoming wilderness, never to be seen again.

Sunshine 2 Carl Dunrud dude ranch 7 11 26

<title>How A Legendary Ex-Yellowstone Ranger Chased Down The Notorious 'Sunshine' | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Although young, "Sunshine" was already a dangerous inmate at an institute in Worland. When hand three others escaped, a legendary former Yellowstone ranger was called to hunt Sunshine down. "He's young, but he's a pretty tough hombre,” the warden said.

How A Legendary Ex-Yellowstone Ranger Chased Down The Notorious 'Sunshine'

Journalist Margaret Coel’s journey to become The New York 

 best-selling author of a fiction series about mysteries and murders on the Wind River Reservation began with a question: Who was this “Left Hand” that had his name everywhere in Boulder, Colorado?

“We have Left Hand Creek, Left Hand Canyon and Indian Mountain,” said Coel. “The town of Niwot is named for him. Niwot is the Arapaho word for 'left hand'."

Coel discovered that Left Hand was a Southern Arapaho who would bring his people to Boulder to their winter camping area each year.

“I always thought he was a really well-known unknown,” said Coel, who lives in Boulder. “We all knew his name, but we didn't know who he was, and I got interested in him as a journalist.”

She intended only to write an article, but when she 

about him, such as he was fluent in English in the mid-1800s, her curiosity was piqued. Her article became her first book, “Chief Left Hand.” Published in 1981, it is still in print and selling.

“I started coming to the reservation then and began to get to know the people,” Coel said. “I met some wonderful people and learned some stories.”

Scotty Ratliff, a Shoshone, was especially helpful to Coel when she first came to the reservation. The first time she said she met Ratliff, Coel had an appointment with Arapaho elders. As a journalist, she was all set with questions.

"Margaret, zip up your lips. You don't ask anything,” Ratliff said to Coel. “You just sit there, and they will tell you what they want to tell you and you will learn things you wouldn't know to ask about.”

She always abided by his words and connected with people on the reservation.

“I just kept coming back and getting to know more people,” Coel said. “They were so friendly to us.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Catholic Father And Arapaho Lawyer"}]

“Left Hand” had introduced Coel to the publishing world and she decided her next project would be to write fiction.

“I thought maybe I could do that and set it on the Wind River Reservation,” Coel said. “I wrote the first book, “The Eagle Catcher,” and ended up writing 22 novels set on the reservation.”

The focus of Coel’s fiction is a mission on the reservation based on St. Stephen's Mission, which she calls St. Francis Mission in her books. Coel has two main characters, the first of whom is a Jesuit priest who she said came from her dreams.

“They're not based on real people, and they're probably not a composite,” Coel said. “I call them my dream people.”

Her second character is Vicky, an Arapaho lawyer who is determined to use the white man's law to help her people instead of 

“I realized I had this white man on the reservation solving all the problems, and I knew what was wrong with that picture,” Coel said. “I thought, no, we need a really strong Arapaho voice, and we need a woman.”

That gave Coel the idea for Vicky Holden, so named because “she's holding on.” Coel describes her female lead as a “a holding-on person”  who is a lawyer and there to help her people.

“Those are my two people, and they get involved in solving crimes,” Coel said. “I've laughed about that with Father Drew at St. Stephens. Father John doesn't have time to be a priest. He's so busy being a detective.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Stories Find Her"}]

Coel said she loves history and many of her novels go back in time. Through her fiction, she tries to show how 

 still affects the way people live today.

“Eye of the Wolf”, for instance, deals with the Bates Battle and the animosity and uneasiness between the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes. Even though they live together, inter-marry, and have to 

 different people and were traditional enemies.

“A couple of my Arapaho friends have said they're pretty sure the government deliberately put the Arapahos on the Shoshone Reservation thinking they would kill each other, and then that would be the end of the government's problems,” Coel said. “Isn't that horrible? There's probably some truth to it.”

 first book that hit the New York Times bestseller list was “The Lost Bird.” It was a novel about Indian babies stolen from the reservation and put on the black market.

“What I found out in doing my research was that it was alive and well,” Coel said. “It was pretty horrible and these people were finding out they had been taken from a tribal family.”

The details Coel came from the newspaper accounts of stolen children rediscovering their families.

“One of my Arapaho friends, Virginia Sutter, said to me, 'If something happened on one reservation like that, you can be sure it happened on another',” Coel said.

She created a story then about a young Arapaho infant who was stolen from her parents.

“When that book came out, it made the New York Times bestseller list, which was exciting,” Coel said. “But I also got a phone call from a young Arapaho woman who asked me how I knew her story.”

The woman told Coel she had been taken from her family as an infant and adopted into a white family in Longmont,

 but she knew they were not her family. When she 

to the reservation, she discovered who her parents were. Just like the characters in Coel’s fiction, her mother was dead but she found her father.

“That happened in my book,” Coel said. “My main character had been taken, and I had a whole plot about how that happened which was just like this young woman's real story.”

When Coel got the call that this book made the 

 thought they were about to cancel her contract because she wasn’t selling enough books.

 that her book had resonated with readers. Over the years, different books in her murder mysteries have made the best-selling list.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Mixing History With Mystery"}]

“I love bringing in the history and seeing how history is still important today,” Coel said. "It still impacts us."

She said that as a historian, she does not take liberties. Occasionally, small facts must be changed to make her stories flow better, but in those cases she lets her readers know.

In “Buffalo Bill's Dead,” Coel wanted to tell the story of Buffalo Bill 

, his Wild West Show and what it meant to the Arapahos who were there. It became a mystery about the theft of artifacts in the past and present.

When Margaret Coel first started writing history – then murder mysteries – she just shut up and listened to the Arapaho elders she met with. This ability to listen led her books to the New York best-seller list and ended up mirroring real life more than she expected.

One More For The Road: Friday, May 29, 2026

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