Along with True West’s 65th birthday, this column celebrates a landmark too—my 10th anniversary of exploring the people and groups who are saving...
An Angel and the Train Man
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Art, Guns and Culture
Surviving a Meal in Dodge City
Once the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway reached the cowtown of Dodge City, Kansas, in 1872, restaurants and hotels sprang up, between 1872...
Red Ryder BB Gun
Years ago, at a friend’s 50th birthday party, I gave him a Red Ryder 50th Anniversary, special edition BB rifle. Despite his being showered with a...
An Unusual Scale
Edgar Alwin Payne’s language of the Southwestern landscape mainly spoke of brilliant cliffs and skies towering over a small group of figures on...
Lincoln County’s New History
"My Aunt Jenny had been taken by the Indians as she was four....” The family bought her back with 500 pounds of shelled corn a decade later, in the...
Black Bart’s Epicurean Escapades
Notorious for his 1880s stage-coach robberies, what did gentleman bandit and poet Black Bart eat and where? Everyone thought San Francisco resident...
Million-Dollar Cowboys
Thomas Moran was alive today, he would be surprised to hear that his former pupil reached the million dollar auction mark through an unusual subject...
Arizona’s Most Historic Place?
John Wayne had a favorite room. Margaret Mitchell and Zane Grey came to rejuvenate. President Lyndon Johnson loved the stables. The Marshall Plan...
Buffalo Bill’s Saddle Pals
Although Buffalo Bill Cody used a number of guns and horses throughout his colorful career, there was one special rifle and one amazing horse that...
Senior Citizens to the Rescue
Volunteer hours: 9,000. That’s 375 days—more than a year of nonstop labor. That’s what it took for 75 volunteers in Hankinson, North Dakota—an...
Suds for Crab Cowboys
Texas's oldest continuously operating tavern can be found in Austin. August Scholz opened his establishment after the Civil War, in 1866, and it...
Colt vs. Schofield
Arms enthusiasts often ask which government-issue .45 revolver was the best during the Indian campaigns of the late 19th century—the 1873 Colt or...