A question came in recently from a True West reader about the premise of Alan Le May’s great novel, The Searchers, the story of a middle-aged Civil...

Charlie Ford is the lesser known of the brothers who killed Jesse James—sibling Robert actually pulled the trigger. Charlie was the one with...

Robert Ford hoped that killing Jesse James would bring fame and fortune. But Ford and brother Charlie were convicted of murder; Missouri Governor...

Many frontier towns had no official judge and usually a man respected for his wisdom would be called upon arbitrate disputes between two parties. If...

St. Joseph, MO was in turmoil in the days after Jesse James was killed on April 3, 1882. Townspeople were shocked that the outlaw had been living...

Did you ever wonder what kind of traffic signals and traffic laws were in place in towns the early years of the horseless carriage? Traffic moved...

In 1864 and ’65, a Confederate-sympathizer group called Ingram’s Partisan Rangers pulled a series of stage robberies in northern California. The...

Doc Middleton (real name: James Riley) was one of the greatest horse thieves of the Old West era. Some estimates say he rustled 2,000 head over a...

Dave Cook was one of the top lawmen in the Rocky Mountains, breaking up several outlaw gangs from his Denver base during the 1870s and 1880s. But he...

The St. Patrick’s Battalion, or as the Mexicans called them San Patricios, were a battalion of mostly Irish Catholic immigrants who deserted the...

The other day a friend asked, “In Mark Twain’s book Roughing It he refers to the gunfighters as long-tailed heroes. What does that mean?" Mark Twain...