A fitting wake for Billy the Kid Buckeye Blake Bounces Back He was angry and depressed when the town council in Fort Sumner turned him down for his...
Buckeye’s Dream
read more
To the Point
Legends of the Fall
We lost some heavyweights last year, and we loved them all. Looking back on 2024, it is no exaggeration to say our history world took some major...
Walk Where They Walked
In this issue of True West we are launching a new history campaign—actually more of a crusade—to Walk Where They Walked. We are going to encourage...
Our Big, Fat History Problem
Apparently, nobody wants to face the facts, but I do. Here’s a cold, hard fact: Interest in American history has never been lower. Schools are...
What’s Up, Doc?
A slew of new revelations about John Henry Holliday’s two sojourns in the Mile-High City In this issue you will discover, just like I did, how...
Brothers From Another Mother
The late, great Ed Mell shows up on almost every page of True West magazine because he was my muse and my friend. We shared studio space in the...
Secret Agent Man
A legendary screenwriter gets his final byline. In early 2003 my agent called me to tell me the Westerns Channel wanted to start running True West...
Dude Spotting
It’s harder to spot real cowboys than you might think. In my experience, nobody looks at a photograph of a welder and says, “That’s not a...
Finding Truth in All the Noise
Let’s celebrate seven decades of lively debate about our imperfect past. For the past seven decades we have been having a very lively...
A Moving Target
When I was a kid, the Old West was 50 years in the rearview, and today my youth is 50 years in the rearview—and—to be honest, more like 60! Yikes!...
O.K. Boomers
Wyatt Earp was a Boomer. As are most of the writers and historians arguing about him in this issue. Granted, the term Boomer has slightly different...
They Showed me a Good Time
Last May I had the privilege of visiting a whole slew of Jesse James history sites in the great state of Missouri. Thanks to the knowledge and...