In 1857, Olive Oatman’s ghostwriter said this about her life story: “Much of that dreadful period is unwritten, and will remain forever unwritten.”...
Heart Gone Wild
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Features & Gunfights
A Plague of Flea Market Billys
The conversation all started with a letter from my hometown, Buffalo, New York. Rob McElroy had sent a note to the Yahoo group “Photo History” about...
The Oatman Massacre
Roys Oatman and his family have just finished hauling their belongings up a rocky grade to a bluff on the south side of the Gila River. At the end...
Stories of the Oregon Trail
When the travelers loaded their wooden wheeled wagons and hitched oxen or mules to begin a nearly 2,000-mile journey from the Missouri River to...
Who Killed the Texas Terror?
Undeniably the darkest hour in Texas’s history, the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877, turned the Lone Star State into a bloody and...
How Tombstone Got The Right Look
You can’t have an authentic set without authentic costumes. But even though Tombstone would begin filming more than two months before the start of...
The Absolute Best Historically Accurate Westerns
To put it mildly, we at True West have been overjoyed—nay, overwhelmed—by our readers’ responses to the deceptively simple question: Which is the...
An Enduring Everyman Hero
One of my favorite photographs of rock ’n’ roll frontman Tom Petty was taken on March 10, 1977, by Michael Putland. The singer, clad in a striped...
A Fool’s Errand
The Western, be it a novel or a film, always carries with it the burden of history. For much of our nation’s existence, the West was the story of...
The Mysterious Death of John Ringo
July 2, 1882 John Ringo has decided to move to Tombstone, Arizona Territory (he has been living in San Simon and Galeyville). He arrives in town and...
Sitting Bull’s Dancing Horse
A strange and heartbreaking moment transpired outside Sitting Bull’s cabin in 1890, while he was being assassinated during an attempted arrest at Standing Rock Reservation…
Music to Our Eyes
Across the bottom of a half-plate tintype, in the emulsion, was scribed, “Camp Verde, Arizona.” The 1871 image, the earliest identified tintype...