True West Blog
The Railroad Comes to Holbrook

The Railroad Comes to Holbrook

Holbrook, Arizona, located at the junction of the Rio Puerco and Little Colorado rivers and straddling the new Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, was...

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Tuffy and Jake Meet Santa Claus

Tuffy and Jake Meet Santa Claus

Once upon a time there was two cowboys named Jake and Tuffy.  It was December and there wasn’t much cowboy work so they were spending the winter in...

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Close, But No Cigar

Close, But No Cigar

The story goes that John Wayne was a judge on a talent show for college students in the late ‘60s, and he was very impressed with the girl...

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A Young Cowboy’s Christmas

A Young Cowboy’s Christmas

Mack Hughes was one of the last of the Hashknife Cowboys. When he hired out for the outfit in the 1920s he didn’t even own a pair of boots. He...

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Christmas in the Pines

Christmas in the Pines

The first recorded Christmas in Northern Arizona north of the Gila River took place in 1853 at the foot of the snowy San Francisco Peaks where the...

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Swindlers & Bamboozlers

Swindlers & Bamboozlers

The wild, untamed mountains and barren deserts turned out to contain a bonanza in gold and silver. Wherever there was a rumor and a hole in the...

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Training for a Killer

Training for a Killer

John Heath is best known as the mastermind of the 1883 Bisbee Massacre, an attempted robbery gone bad that resulted in four deaths.  He was lynched...

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Judge Roy Bean

Judge Roy Bean

My father spent part of his youth living in Langtry, Texas. His first wife, Leta, was the daughter of the town constable, Bart Gobble. My grandpa,...

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