United States Army Paymaster Maj. Joseph Washington Wham (rhymes with bomb) is riding in a dougherty (canopied ambulance) on his way to pay “all...

Fires were always a menace to frontier towns. The boomtowns of Prescott, Bisbee, Jerome, and Tombstone all burned to the ground at least once during...

Approximately 250,000 abandoned mines exist in the state of Arizona, testifying to the scope and impact of mining on the state. Naturally, at the...

How accurate was 1999’s You Know My Name, about Bill Tilghman? James Patrick Gaines Orangevale, California Like most Western movies—not that close...

It was 1908, and a group of men came together to film a silent Western called The Bank Robbery. It’s not clear if it was based on a real crime, and...

I used to devour those Lash LaRue comics when I was about ten or eleven. We all liked him because he used a bull whip instead of a six gun. He was...

Temple Houston—the son of Sam Houston—was famed in Texas and Oklahoma as a brilliant attorney. He proved it in 1899 when he defended alleged madam...

Mining town Clifton, Arizona, took advantage of the local’s mining expertise and blasted a jail out of hard rock. Ironically, the man who ramrodded...

In the history of the West, June will forever be remembered as the month in 1876 that saw the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or “Custer's Last...

Branding the American West: Paintings and Film, 1900-1950 (University of Oklahoma Press, $39.95), edited by Marian Wardle and Sarah E. Boehme, is a...

The American West’s awe-inspiring vistas—the seemingly endless prairies of the Great Plains, the great wall of snowcapped granite peaks of the Rocky...