Most are familiar with Buffalo Hump in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. He was a fictional character but there really was a Buffalo Hump. His name...
The Real Buffalo Hump
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True West Blog
A Short and Not-So-Sweet Career
Oliver Yantis was not the most successful outlaw. He was one of the first members of the Bill Doolin Gang. Just a week after Doolin’s former...
A Laughing Matter?
Being captured didn’t faze train robber Rube Burrow. On October 9, 1890 he was grabbed by two black men, Jesse Hildreth and Frank Marshall, when...
Six Guns Along the Mexican Border
Curly Bill Brocius figured prominently in the outlawry along the Mexican border in the early 1880s. He was personally responsible for rustling...
Death by Association
For Charles Cooper, being a friend of Chunk Colbert didn’t turn out well. The two were eating with Clay Allison at Cimarron, New Mexico Territory’s...
Maurice Kildare and the 1883 Bisbee Massacre
Several years ago, I read an article written by Maurice Kildare about the Bisbee Massacre in which he stated that the men hanged for it were not the...
Friends unto Death
William Collins was an associate of Sam Bass, and a member of the Joel Collins (his brother) Gang (photo) that held up a Nebraska train of $60,000...
A Gunfight between Lawmen
Bud Ballew (left in photo) was an Oklahoma lawman and gunfighter with numerous notches in his gun. He was known as a tough customer—something...
An Engraved Invitation
The first hanging in Arizona’s Navajo County was going to be stylish. Sheriff F.J. Waltron (who doubled as a teacher and editor) sent out bordered...
A Lawman pays the Price
Early in 1901, Yuma (AZ) Constable H.H. Alexander was sent to serve papers on local farmer J.J. Burns. Instead, the lawman shot and killed Burns’...
The Massacres at Skeleton and Guadalupe Canyons
After Mexico increased taxes on alcohol and tobacco in the late 1870s, smuggling became big business. Mexican smugglers exchanged silver and gold...
The Rangers Ride In
In the 1880s, a vigilante group organized in San Saba, TX, to take on criminal elements. The so-called “Buzzard’s Water Hole” assembly soon got out...