To describe Joseph Rutherford Walker as a typical frontiersman would be to label Abraham Lincoln a typical president. Walker was a man of many firsts: The first to guide a government survey party assigned to map the Santa Fe Trail; the first to find a navigable route over the Sierra Nevada Mountains to California; the first to lead an emigrant train over that route; the first white man to set eyes on the Yosemite Valley; and the first to discover the gold that initiated Arizona as a territory in

January 2017
In This Issue:
Features
Western Books & Movies
More In This Issue
- Lane by a Foot
- Clint’s Career Cut Short?
- True West’s Best of the West 2017: Western Wear
- Antoine Leroux
- Bonanza’s Bing Russell
- When Did the Practice of Branding Livestock Begin in the U.S.?
- Some Bad Beef Between Robert Ford and Jefferson Davis Hardin?
- True West’s Best of the West 2017: Firearms
- Cliff Hanger
- Jack Elam Gets Cut
- What Happened to Mart “Old Man” Blevins of the Pleasant Valley War?
- What Bacon Did Trail Cowboys Eat?
- Mack Hughes’ Cowboy Christmas
- A Mapmaker’s Tragic End
Departments
- If Billy the Kid would have been given a fair trial in the Cahill incident, would the Kid have been convicted of murder or a lesser charge?
- What is a Cowboy?
- How Many Indians Died at the 1876 Battle of The Little Big Horn?
- True West Moment: Horses Hate Horseradish
- I’m a Fan of AMC’s Hell on Wheels. Is the Route Constructed from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sacramento, California, Still In Use Today?
- Black Bart’s Bad Day
- Crown City’s Old Vistas
- True West’s Ultimate Historic Travel Guide
- Denver’s Unsinkable Hostess
- Buffalo Bill Lies Here—Or Here