Female performers who played in the rough-hewn mining camp theaters had an edge on their male counterparts simply because they were women. That...
Belles of Boomtown
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True West Blog
Demise of the Wild Bunch
By the early 1900s, the law was closing in and Butch Cassidy was beginning to feel the pressure. The cattle industry was big in Argentina and with...
Lost Pick Mine
Arizona’s rugged central mountains, with their brawny mountains and twisting, boulder-choked canyons were a perfect place to lose a mine. Coronado’s...
Steal from the Rich…
Charles Waggoner was a bank president in Telluride, Colorado in 1929 (photo). He’d worked there for more than 30 years. The bank was about to go...
The Betrayals of Tiburcio Vasquez
One might say that love brought down California bandit Tiburcio Vasquez. In 1873, while hiding out at his brother’s home, Vasquez seduced and...
Taking the Town
December 26, 1873--around 7pm. Tiburcio Vasquez and about 11 of his men raid the central California town of Kingston (photo). They tie up (and rough...
Kit Carson: History and the Myth
In October 1849, a trader named James White, his wife Ann and their infant daughter were traveling on the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico when they...
They Went Thataway
One of the Old West’s zaniest train robberies occurred near the Arizona town Willcox on the evening of September 9th, 1899 when constable Burt...
Running into the Law
Outlaw Tom Folliard had an accidental—and fatal—encounter with a posse. Billy the Kid pal Tom Folliard had some bad luck. He and another outlaw were...
The Wrong Hat
Charlie Bowdre wore the Kid’s sombrero…and paid for it. On December 23, 1880, Billy the Kid pal Charlie Bowdre bit the dust. And it happened, in...
Taking His Time
Billy the Kid was in no hurry to leave after breaking jail. Billy the Kid became famous after he escaped from the Lincoln County Jail on April 28,...
Billy the Kid
There are more myths about Billy than you can shake a stick at and the biggest one is he killed twenty-one men. In reality, Billy killed Frank...