September 1865 George Ward Nichols and Gen. Thomas Church Haskell Smith, the inspector general of the District of Southwest Missouri, arrive in...
The Encounter that Dooms Wild Bill
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Features & Gunfights
Locked And Loaded
Western history and fiction publishers have had an outstanding year across all genres and categories. With the growth in electronic and audio books,...
Vaqueros, Buckaroos & Cowboys
Blame it on Joseph McCoy. The entrepreneur turned Abilene, Kansas, into a cowtown, which made the Chisholm Trail synonymous with cowboys and the...
Death-Defying Riders of the Pony Express
When America’s first Pony Express rider set off on April 3, 1860, from St. Joseph, Missouri, launching a coast-to-coast transfer of news and...
“¡No Tire en la Casa!”
May 10, 1871 Tracking a party of rough hombres, Alameda County Sheriff Harry Morse and San Jose Deputy Theodore “Sam” Winchell approach a ranch...
The Man Who Invented Billy the Kid
Long before Walter Noble Burns arrived on the scene with his Saga of Billy the Kid in the 1920s, the largely fictitious events presented in Pat...
Big Iron On His Hip
I met Marty Robbins in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, at a National Cowboy Hall of Fame event in 1979. He was there to receive the Golden Trustee Award...
The West’s Best Art Museums 2017
The best art museums don’t just show you art. They show you history. They show you personalities. They move you. Our top museums certainly did that...
In Search of the Real Curly Bill
Amazingly, historians know so little about the most famous cow-boy in Cochise County history—“Curly Bill” Brocius. In a journal entry written in...
The Rise of the Cow-Boys
The cowboys’ genesis lay in the savvy and the six-shooters of John Kinney, one of the most notorious outlaws of the Southwest. Kinney was a New...
Top 10 Museums of The West 2017
Museums across the West are embracing an ever-widening range of stories to interpret—from the geology and paleontology of the landscape to the...
Buffalo Bill: Why He Still Matters
William F. Cody was a man seemingly trapped in the distant past, yet one who cared desperately about the onrushing future…