William "Buffalo Bill" Cody had been planning his next feat as a showman when, in 1882, he was asked to stage an “Old Glory Blowout” in North...
Sioux on the Beach
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Articles
High Noon
Many regard High Noon as one of the supremely significant moments in American film, especially as it relates to the players, and the politics, of...
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Vol. III
Indiana Jones may have been a professor and an archaeologist, but he always had the DNA of Western heroes. Guns, whips, horses, hats and the Yakima...
The Phantom Empire
Gene Autry wasn’t completely green when he starred in the 12-chapter serial The Phantom Empire in 1935. He’d made a musical appearance in 1934’s In...
Runaway Horse Reined in
When New Line pictures was folded into Warner Brothers recently, the fate of several films was left uncertain, including Appaloosa, which is based...
Fred Labour
The trick to doing live shows at the Grand Ole Opry is the same as anywhere: go in with guns blazing, communicate with the folks, keep it loose and...
The West’s Best Saloons
I’m sitting in some waterin’ hole with Sherry Monahan. She’s the popular historian, author of Tombstone’s Treasure and The Wicked West, a woman with...
Whiskey Rows
At 47, merchant Philip Drachman teamed his freight overland from Yuma, Arizona, by mule train before the Southern Pacific reached his home base in...
Rocking Coach Adventures
A quintessential “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” innovator who had little formal education and was himself a mere stagecoach driver would go...
The Deadwood Stage
“Rumbling noisily through the black canyon road to Deadwood, at an hour long past midnight, came the stage from Cheyenne, loaded down with...
Denver or Die!
David A. Butterfield was the right man, with the right idea, for the right place. A passenger and freight stage run from Atchison, Kansas, to...
The Frontiersman’s Mexican Loop Holster
"Before leaving the train, I had prudently strapped to my waist a new (how distressingly new) Colt’s six-shooter, that looked and felt a yard long...