In 1868, America was anticipating the completion of the first transcontinental railroad within the next year. The Central Pacific from Sacramento...
Ride That Train!
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Features & Gunfights
The Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Billy the Kid
On February 29, 1908, Jesse Wayne Brazel walked into the Doña Ana County sheriff’s office and announced, “Lock me up. . . . I’ve just killed Pat...
Shoot-Out in El Paso
April 14, 1881 Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, ex-Marshal George Campbell is flat-out looking for trouble. “Any American that is a friend of...
Bizarro’s Take on American Indians
When I was a boy growing up in a very small town in Oklahoma in the early 1960s, I sometimes saw Indian kids around town wearing mohawk haircuts. As...
The Long and Rich History of In-din Humor
One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is...
The Power of Redemption
Jeff Power, like his ancestors, had clawed out a living in unforgiving terrain, continually forced to defend what little he had from predators, both...
The Shadow Catcher Endures
Everyone loves the Edward Curtis Indians,” Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. famously declared in the introduction for Christopher M. Lyman’s The...
A Cold Ride into Hell
February 10, 1918 In the bitter cold, a four-man posse riding in from Klondyke, Arizona, surrounds a lone cabin in Kielberg Canyon. The posse—a...
Lost Photo of Crook’s Scout Discovered?
John Campbell Burge is one of my favorite Territorial Arizona photographers. Though his work is less common than other early Arizona photographers,...
Where Cowboy Hats Rule!
“Howdy, Tex!” True West’s Bob Boze Bell has traveled the world wearing his signature cowboy hat. From France to Thailand, Bob has sported his...
A Watch to Die For
Dave Tutt walked onto the town square in Springfield, Missouri, at 6 p.m. on a Friday. He was about to face off with a known adversary, “Wild Bill”...
The Truth about Wild Bill
Like most Old West icons, gunfighter “Wild Bill” Hickok is shrouded in myths. He likely started many of them. A teller of tall windies, he was...