Hollywood movie sets were built pretty similar. They always had a window in back because the script called for a crony to slip them a pistol or...
Hollywood Jails and the Real Deal
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True West Blog
The Tale of Goldfield
Goldfield, NV was one of the great boomtowns of the early 1900s. Gold was discovered in 1902. Within four years, it had 30,000 residents—including...
Billy, Bat and Temple Houston
A tale is told that Billy the Kid along with a few of his Regulators raided a ranch near Lincoln and rustled some livestock. They drove them over to...
The Wrong Men
The posse rode out of Price, UT in May 1898. They had reports that Butch Cassidy and members of the Wild Bunch were camped nearby. Exact details...
The Lawman and the Attorney
Jack Watson was an undercover lawman and JW Warf the prosecutor in Carbon County, UT. In 1898, they even served on the same posse, hunting for...
Dear Lew
Writing in red ink on ruled paper, Billy the Kid writes a letter to Lew Wallace, the governor of New Mexico.Written from Fort Sumner, on December...
A Message from God
So what motivated Carrie Nation to attack saloons with an axe? A message from God, delivered on June 5, 1900, according to her autobiography. “The...
Underage Drinking in the Old West
What constituted a man being old enough to belly up to the bar? Usually it was up to the judgment of the proprietor or bartender. It looks like...
Trials Following the Gunfight near the OK Corral
The movies about Tombstone’s Gunfight Behind the OK Corral often end with the “street fight,” and most folks believe the feud, like the film, was...
The Heyday of Train Robberies
The 1890s saw an epidemic of train robberies with 261 in that decade alone. Eighty-eight people were killed and eighty-six wounded. According...
That’s Mr. Librarian to You!
Granville Stuart is known as “The Father of Montana.” And during his years there, he was a miner, built (and lost) a huge cattle operation, led...
A Fitting End for a Killer
Ed O’Kelley is known as the man who killed Robert Ford, who killed Jesse James in 1882. O’Kelley did nine years in the Colorado pen for that. But he...