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...

Recently somebody asked me about the Oklahoma State University Cowboy’s mascot “Pistol Pete.” The West in the early 1900s had an abundance of...

Many have heard the story of the eccentric millionaire of the Victorian Era who spent the last 38 years of her life building, always building, a...

No matter how big our problems have been, at least one guy always claims to have the answers to everything. You know, that drunk guy at the bar....

In the 1960s, Joe Beeler rode his horse daily on a six-mile trip to his mailbox from his home on Oklahoma’s Quapaw Reservation. He hunted. And he...

During the years around 1900 a slippery outlaw named Rufus Nephew aka “Climax Jim” managed to foil lawmen again and again. One time he was indicted...