Our third annual awards honoring this year's top museums based on their grand showcases of the American West in the previous year. 1- Great Platte...
Top 10 Western Museums of 2009
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Johnny D. Boggs
Journey Through Spanish Missions Country
Tourists—tons of them—walk inside these walls with a quiet reverence. It’s not because the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) remind them of...
Batter Up in Tombstone
Everybody this side of Fenway Park knows that Tombstone, Arizona, is about keeping the past alive. Yet the Town Too Tough To Die’s Nancy...
50th Anniversary of Rio Bravo
Fifty years ago this month, Rio Bravo premiered as director Howard Hawks’s answer to director Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. Not buying into the theme...
Pikes Peak or Bust Trail
Sitting in historic Lawrence, I don’t know why those fortune seekers of 1859 ever left Kansas. There’s gold right here, and it’s delicious, as I...
Election Report
America swears in her 44th president on January 20. In the spirit of change, scandal, reconciliation, hope, pork-barrel spending, phone solicitors,...
Worst Turkeys of the West
Writing about Western history as a not-by-a-damn-sight Robert Utley, traveling across the West as a not-by-a-damn-sight Candy Moulton, absorbing...
Stutterin’ Across Jimmy Stewart Country
Crawling along the freeway in Los Angeles, I’m moving about as fast as Jimmy Stewart talked. James Maitland Stewart would have celebrated his 100th...
Wyatt & Witches & Pixies, Oh My!
Wyatt Earp was a fairy. Don’t aim your pistols at me. I’m not outing anybody. Neither is Emma Bull. Okay, Wyatt’s not really a fairy. A fairy, in...
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...
Tramping Through Our National Parks With John Muir
Tourists that spend their money to see rocks and falls are fools,” a shepherd told John Muir in 1869 during Muir’s fabled First Summer in the...
Monument Valley’s 50th
It’s quiet. Too quiet. At any moment, I know—I can feel it—that I’m about to be attacked by a tribe of plein air painters! Oops. There goes that...