It’s been said the Lone Wolf Bandit stole more than $350,000 but perhaps he should be better-remembered as the “Houdini of Escape Artists.”...
Roy Gardner, Last of the Lone Wolf Bandits
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True West Blog
The Hairy One Hangs
Sonoran bandito, Augustine Chacon, alias Peluda (“The Hairy One”), robbed and killed in Arizona, and then hid out in the Sierra Madres until his...
The Amazing Air Rifle of Meriwether Lewis
The “Corps of Discovery,” led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark was one of the most incredible journeys in history. It numbered less than forty...
Vaquero: Master Horsemen of the Southwest
The American cowboy owes so much to the master horsemen—Mexican vaqueros—who were rounding up cattle on horseback several hundreds of years before...
Tombstone’s Schieffelin Hall
It was June 1881 when Al Schieffelin—brother of Tombstone founder Ed Schieffelin—opened the theater and opera house that carried their last name....
Kit Carson Dime Novel Hero
It was a fortuitous chance meeting for Kit Carson and John C. Fremont. Had there been no John C. Fremont there might never have been a Kit Carson...
Named By Their Enemies
The Spanish asked the Zunis who those renegades were who were running off with all their horses and a Zuni said, “Enemies,” which sounded to the...
Card Player No. 2
Sam Elliott has become one of the most iconic Westerns actor of the last half-century, with his wiry frame, bushy mustache and rumbling drawl. None...
Wyatt on the Phone: “Can You Hear Me Now?”
In 1926, Wyatt Earp wrote his autobiography with a friend, John Flood. In it Earp recalled using a telephone in Tombstone (taking a call from...
A Western Movie Morph
The 1965 John Wayne Western The Sons of Katie Elder went through a bunch of changes before it was produced. Originally, it was to be a historical...
First in War, First in Peace
Perhaps the greatest chief of the Chiricahua Apaches who ever lived, Cochise fought his way through southeastern Arizona and into Mexico in the...
The Civil War in Utah
Books chronicling 19th-century Mormon history tend to fall into two camps: apologetic or polemic. John Gary Maxwell’s The Civil War Years in Utah:...