Celebrating our 51st continual year of publication, True West again brings you our hoarded nuggets, our favorite out-of-the-way secrets: the best...
True West’s Best of the West 2005 Winners
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Art, Guns and Culture
Paying the Rent
R549 is a country band that re-invented itself nearly three years ago by going back to its roots—those being Lower Broadway in Nashville, the...
Duct Taping the West
Richard Goff knows two things well: rawhide braiding and horses. Horses came first. “I grew up in the Southeast, the Carolinas, and got my first...
The Russians are Coming
“It’s strange that a little town like Taos, New Mexico, would get two artists from Russia,” said Frank Waters, an author who lived in Taos and knew...
Fighting the Elements
October 2001—Greg Polutanovich’s tent lies on the ground. As rain pounds down, Greg assesses the damage at the now-closed outdoor art show in...
An American Starlet
“Cowboys don’t cry, they’d rather drink the ocean dry, they let the lonesome pedal steel, tell the world the way they feel.”—Ian Parks from the...
Talking the Legs Off a Donkey
Of all the scams coming out of the Western mining era, the one perpetrated by George Babcock wins hands down. In 1894, Babcock, who was a jovial man...
1881 Marlin Rifle
While the 1873 Winchester is often called the “gun that won the West,” this rifle certainly didn’t win it by itself. There were plenty of other good...
Double E Guest Ranch
No Jacuzzi. No swimming pool. No special vegetarian diets. No “nose to tail” horseback riding ... say, what kind of dude ranch is this, anyway?...
Rex Allen Arizona Cowboy Museum
Mary Leighton is a scrapper when it comes to preserving our Western heritage. Let a developer threaten to bulldoze a historical building in order to...
A Pictorial Historian
George Catlin’s paintings were predicted to “grow in importance with advancing years, and when the race of which they are the representation will...
Nerves of Steel
While much has been written about Westerners’ “tricked-out” guns, a cursory review of the hardware documented to these Old West gunmen reveals that...