Congratulations to the Western Writers of America annual Spur Award winners in biography, nonfiction and fiction presented in Lubbock, Texas, June...
Rough Drafts 7/15
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Articles
On the Western Trail of the Civil War with Walter Earl Pittman
Today, historian Walter Earl Pittman calls his wife’s home state of New Mexico home. A current resident of Roswell, Pittman is Southern by birth (a...
Sitting Bull’s Nemesis
“Lakotas will kill you,” came to Tatanka Iyotake not by human voice, but by the song of his beloved meadowlark. Standing Rock Agent James McLaughlin...
John James Audubon
Two salient facts about the famed naturalist and artist John James Audubon come out in Nancy Plain’s vigorous This Strange Wilderness: The Life and...
Manifest Destiny on the Rio Grande
Douglas A. Murphy’s Two Armies on the Rio Grande (Texas A&M Press, $45) is the most complete documentation of what is still, to this day, a bone...
The “Apocryphal Cantos” of Walter Noble Burns
Eighty-three years after Walter Noble Burns’ death comes Mark J. Dworkin’s American Mythmaker, the first literary biography of the Chicago...
Trail’s End for a Southern Son
John Henry “Doc” Holliday is one of the most mythic well-imagined characters in the annals of Old West popular culture. Victoria Wilcox’s challenge...
The Cowboys Lament: The Kansas Origin of a Western Classic
Did you know that an Iowa born cowboy Frank Maynard, who moved to Kansas when he was just 16, is the author of the famed Western song, “The Cowboy’s...
Lawman Tom Carson
The stories say various things about lawman Tom Carson—mostly wrong stuff. Like that he was Kit Carson’s nephew. Wrong. That he put several...
Bat Masterson
Bat Masterson was the real deal. He came west in the 1870s and was at the Battle of Adobe Walls where the buffalo hunters held off the Comanche. He...
Steinbeck’s Trail
At a book signing a while back, legendary Western writer Max Evans (The Rounders, The Hi Lo Country, Goin’ Crazy With Sam Peckinpah and All Our...
Temple Houston
Temple Houston, lawyer son of Sam Houston, insulted opposing counsel Ed Jennings during an 1895 trial in Woodward, OK. Jennings responded in kind. ...