In the cool, pre-dawn hours on a June night in 1918, a train engineer closed his cab window as he chugged toward Hammond, Indiana. He drifted to sleep, and his train bore down on the idle Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Train. Soon after, the sleeping engineer's locomotive plowed into the circus train. In the subsequent wreckage and blaze, more than two hundred circus performers were injured and eighty-six were killed, most of whom were interred in a mass grave in the Showmen's Rest section of Chicago's Woodlawn Cemetery. Join local historian Richard Lytle as he recounts, in the fullest retelling to date, the details of this tragedy and its role in the overall evolution and demise of a unique entertainment industry.

1791 marked one of the worst military defeats the United States Army ever suffered. As Major General Arthur St. Clair led both regular Army and militia levee soldiers to the banks of the Wabash River, Native Americans rose to stop them and stop the Army they did. In this fascinating study, Richard Lytle gives historians, genealogists, and local history buffs a monumental resource for the study of St. Clair's soldiers. Not only a detailed narrative of this campaign, this is also the most complete roster of soldiers available, and a comprehensive description of their origins, equipment and organization. This resource assembles in one place both the narrative and hard to find reference materials that genealogists and historians need to research and better understand this seminal event in America's westward growth.