From the birth of the nation until the 1840s the fur trade was one of the vanguards of American industry. It would be comparable to the Henry Fords,...

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show created an image of the Old West that lingers today. One of the forgotten but most important aspects of the show was...

Fans of short fiction—especially Westerns—have suffered a dearth of options in recent years as major publishers seem to shy away from these...

Curly Bill Brocius, the leader of the cow-boys in southeastern Arizona, was reportedly always laughing. In the early 1880s, the outlaw was suspected...

October 1, 1917 Frank Hamer wants to go home. The Texas Ranger has just testified at the Callahan County Courthouse in Baird, Texas, in a murder...

The Most Interesting Man in the World—at least the guy who played that character in the beer commercials—has a strong connection to Westerns. His...

Abbie Ware Crabb Keith well knew how lonely and isolated ranch life could be. Perhaps that's why the newsletter she founded in 1923—theArizona...

What is a soogan? Kurt House San Antonio, Texas A soogan is a quilt or wool blanket wrapped inside a waterproof tarp. Given its bulk, the cowboy...

Over the years—and we’re talking many years—it went by several names: Sonora Road, Kearny Trail, Gila Trail, Butterfield Stage Trail, Old Gila...

Not long ago a True West subscriber wrote and asked me if any Englishmen ever became lawmen in the Old West. The Masterson brothers, Bat, Ed and Jim...

In the fall of 1880, Doc Holliday shared a room in Prescott with John J. Gosper, the acting governor of Arizona. Historians want to know how...

Whether frontier pioneers lived in a sod hut in Nebraska, an adobe in Arizona or a frame house in Texas, they all needed a way to cook and bake....