A Kansas native, the WWA Spur award-winning novelist Max McCoy was raised on the edge of the American prairie between Baxter Springs, Kansas, and...
On the Edge of the West with Max McCoy
read more
Stuart Rosebrook
The Gold Rush That Changed the World
Before gold was discovered in January 1848 at Sutter’s Mill on the South Fork of the American River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas east of...
True West’s Best of the West 2015 Winners
Congratulations to our 2015 Best of the West winners! Along with this year’s pictorial voyage celebrating the American Indian, we bring you the...
True West’s Best Western Books of 2014
The year 2014 will be remembered as an annum of historical reflection as historians grappled with the relevance of 19th-century history for a...
Rough Drafts 12/14
A flurry of top-notch beautiful Western art and photography books published this fall are perfect for the gift-giving holiday season. I recommend...
1776: A Continental Revolution
As the American colonists made their Declaration of Independence from the British monarchy on July 4, 1776, a chain reaction of political events...
The Last Shootist: A Classic Tale of the Wild West
Author Miles Swarthout’s The Last Shootist (Forge Books, $24.99), a much-anticipated sequel to his father Glendon Swarthout’s best-selling novel The...
Rough Drafts 11/14
“Where does the West begin or end?” Dr. Albert L. Hurtado asked rhetorically in my graduate seminar on the West at Arizona State University. Is...
Masters of Western Art
Western historical art has two great masters to whom all later artists are compared: Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. The peers have their...
Rough Drafts 10/14
As summer turns to fall, my memories of the annual June gathering of Western Writers of America inspire me every day. A highlight of the conference...
The Sundance Kid Rides Again — in New York City!
If you were a boy growing up watching Westerns in the 1960s and 1970s, you either wanted to be Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid after Paul Newman...
The Gilded General’s Eternal March West
Robert O’Connell’s brilliant biography, Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (Random House, $28), is a well-researched...