William Henry Jackson, a member of the Hayden Survey, photographed the miners working the North Star and Mountaineer lodes at their camp on King...
The Edge of the West
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Features & Gunfights
The Roads Less Traveled
Adventures await along the West’s byways and highways to history. As the first rays of the morning sun greet us just over the horizon as we...
City of Dreams
The odds are good that a visitor to Nome, Alaska—landed as a cruise ship passenger or spectator of the Iditarod race finish—will pause before an...
David Wright: A Search for Historical Truth
Validity, integrity and authenticity remain the watchwords of David Wright’s heroic renderings of the frontier. Born in 1942 in the hills of Rosine,...
Chaos of a Boomtown
A Yankee prospector’s scrapbook of his summer in Nome reveals the hardships of the Arctic gold rush. On a stormy May 23, 1900, Connecticut native...
The Last of the Old Time Prospectors
Shorty Harris’s bonanzas and burros were almost as legendary as he was. He may be the last person to have been buried on public property after it...
Will Comstock
Will “Medicine Bill” Comstock was an enigma to many of his contemporaries. Some claimed he was a half-breed Cheyenne, and others that he had been...
Double-Barreled Justice
October 27, 1873 Rowdy Joe Lowe vs. Big Red Beard “Mollie” Takes One in the Stomach In His Cups & Blue Whistlers Big Red Beard is deep in his...
Knight of the Rockies
Jim Bridger, once a teenaged mountain man, became the most dependable and renowned trailblazer of the vast lands of the American West. For more than...
Shooting Back
The Many Faces of the Mountain Man A year ago, True West’s cover featured the fine art painting by ZS Liang titled Mountain Man. Liang’s masterpiece...
Truth Be Known
Old Vaquero Saying “The most complicated thing in the world is to be able to keep things simple. The simplest thing in the world is to make things...
Stand to Be Counted
Dakota Territory photographer David Francis Barry, well known for his portraits of Chief Joseph and Sitting Bull, recorded census day at the Sioux...