Articles Archive

The Kid’s First Kill

by Bob Boze Bell | May 24, 2011

August 17, 1877 “I...called him a pimp.” It’s a Friday night, and young Henry Antrim is playing poker in George Atkins’s Cantina, just outside the...

The Battle of Battle Flat

by Bob Boze Bell | May 24, 2011

Five American prospectors set up camp near the junction of Turkey Creek and Tuscumbia Creek in the rough Bradshaw Mountains, about 30 miles...

Friends of the James Farm Bash

by Johnny D. Boggs | May 24, 2011

The family’s all here. I’m surrounded by historians and wannabe historians, fiction writers and wannabe fiction writers, journalists, blackpowder...

Hearts Aglow

by Phyllis Morreale-de la Garza | May 24, 2011

In Hearts Aglow, by Tracie Peterson, Deborah Vandermark lives in Texas after the Civil War. Interested in becoming a physician, she studies with the...

The Golden West: Fifty Years of Bison Books

by William Garwood | May 24, 2011

In 1961 Bison Books blazed a paperback trail to some of the best stories about Nebraska and the Great Plains. Mari Sandoz’s Old Jules led a prairie...

West of Here

by William Garwood | May 24, 2011

West of Here, by Jonathan Evison, is a five-generation saga that begins with the arrival of 1890s idea man Ethan Thornburgh at the fishing village...

Doc

by Mark Boardman | May 24, 2011

Fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, and history buffs will have to do a lot of suspending with Mary Doria Russell’s Doc. What is this need...

Child of the Fighting Tenth

by Richard H. Dillon | May 24, 2011

If one area of Western Americana comes up short, it is memoirs of “Army brats” in the Old West. Forrestine C. Hooker’s Child of the Fighting Tenth...

David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Richard H. Dillon | May 24, 2011

Davy Crockett became one of America’s first celebrities, as Michael Wallis impressively demonstrates in David Crockett: The Lion of the West. With a...