Once again six-time Western Writers of America Spur award winner Richard S. Wheeler shows how smooth prose and careful historical accuracy, combined...
Olivia Wilde
Olivia Wilde is America’s newest outlaw lady as the mysterious Ella in the Sci-Fi Western Cowboys & Aliens. Wilde’s Ella is a throwback Western...
The Sierra Packers
Jedediah Smith made the first reported crossing of California’s unpredictable and treacherous Sierra Nevada Mountains. Deep snows had forced him and...
A Screaming Session at Cowboys & Aliens
I was in Taos, New Mexico, in May 2010 lecturing on Davy Crockett when executive producer Denis Stewart tracked me down. Stewart, an old pro who had...
Conflict on the Range
You wouldn’t know it today when you drive across Colorado and Wyoming, seeing cattle grazing with sheep herds nearby, that a century ago such...
Galveston’s Guardian Angel
Considering all the guardian angels who have looked over the Galveston Railroad Museum for more than a quarter century, where were they in the early...
Survivors of an Old West Shoot-Out
The Westerns often had it wrong. They made gunfights so neat and clean, even with all the blood and bullet holes. Most cinematic gunfights went like...
Shot for Snoring?
August 7, 1871 Charles Couger is sitting on a bed reading a newspaper in the American House in Abilene, Kansas. Four shots are fired from outside...
Eating Along the Oregon Trail
“Should any of my readers ever be impelled to visit the prairies…I can assure him that he need not think to enter at once upon the paradise of his...
TB Havens in the Old West
Recall that powerful scene in the 1993 movie Tombstone in which Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) sat by the bedside of his dying friend Doc Holliday (Val...
Face-Off on Facebook
Readers sounded off on their favorite museums on our Facebook page-—that’s right, we may be Old West maniacs, but we’re at least social-media-savvy...
Boot Scoot & Boogie
Long Ike and Sweet Betsey attended a dance. Ike wore a pair of his Pike County pants. Sweet Betsey was covered with ribbons and rings. Says Ike,...