“It is done!” These three words shot out across the Western telegraph to the world on May 10, 1869, at the moment Central Pacific Railroad owner...
Rails West … And East!
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Features & Gunfights
Women of the Alamo
We remember the Alamo siege and battle for the men who died there. Not as well remembered are their families who endured the thirteen-day siege and...
The Final Nail in the Apache Kid’s Coffin
Everyone in the posse took notice of a pair of binoculars taken from the Apache’s body. The Apache Kid always carried them from the time he was a...
No Bull
In the early 1970s, Hollywood filmmakers were leaving the studio back lots of Los Angeles with fresh screenplays in hand, actors under contract and...
Cowboy Pens Best Rodeo Movie Ever Made
Prescott, Arizona, has been a center of Cowboy Culture since 1888, when civic-minded merchants first posted cash prizes for a cowboy tournament,...
Erroneous Ellsworth Showdown
Among the many questionable incidents people often repeat about Wyatt Earp’s life story, few reveal the duplicity of his biographer as much as the...
Battle of the Plaza
April 16, 1881 Bat Masterson has just covered 1,100 miles, mostly by rail, to come to the aid of his estranged brother Jim. As the Dodge City-bound...
Remembering Jeb Rosebrook
On August 31, 2018, my father Jeb Rosebrook—author, screenwriter and long-time contributor and friend to True West—died at home in Scottsdale with...
Too Tough to Die!
We get a kick out of those who talk about the Western myth. What myth? The frontier was as real as a sawed-off shotgun and wilder than anyone could...
Overkill!
It is a warm, muggy morning, as Clyde Barrow drives his stolen V-8 Ford towards Methvin’s place, which is a twenty-minute drive from Gibsland,...
Best of the West 2019: Western Movies
Ever since The Virginian, Owen Wister’s genre-defining Western novel, female characters have traditionally been portrayed as the civilizers. Even...
The Best of the Texas Rangers in Fiction
Martin Scorsese once said, “More than 90 percent of directing is the right casting.” Lonesome Dove is the greatest Western miniseries—no, to hell...