The best thing about being a Distinguished Professor is the freedom one enjoys from the demands of others and the unfailing inspiration provided by...
Paul Andrew Hutton
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True Westerners
Buckeye Blake
My favorite place in the West is northern Nevada. The Owyhee Range. It’s the distance. There’s nothing out there. At least, people say there’s...
America’s Favorite Bone Detective
Alferd Packer has been called “America’s Favorite Cannibal.” Students at the University of Colorado at Boulder memorialized him by naming their...
Fred Labour
The trick to doing live shows at the Grand Ole Opry is the same as anywhere: go in with guns blazing, communicate with the folks, keep it loose and...
Fred King
The most expensive boots ever were a pair we made out of American Alligator, sporting gold leaf inlays with diamonds and rubies and going for $45K....
Roger Clyne
Our heroes and villains roam the borderlands, and tequila and gunpowder figure prominently in our lyrical tales. When we employ horns, they’re...
New Kid on the Block
El Paso, Texas, is a city with a past—far more of a past than most communities in the West can claim. It’s belonged to three countries and has a...
Remember the Baca-Cowboy War?
For most of his life, Henry Martinez had no idea he was part of history. He grew up in the western New Mexico town of Reserve, population 336 today,...
The Kings of the Beaumont
If walls could talk, one of the most interesting stories any walls in the West could tell would come from the Beaumont Hotel in Ouray, Colorado....
Horse Trading for a Better Guthrie
Many nights, during the late 1970s, Ralph McCalmont had to remind himself he was trying to save Oklahoma's "magic city." Opposition was so loud and...
Mike Blakely
I grew up in the country. We ranched, worked hard and did virtually everything ourselves. That kind of upbringing instills resourcefulness,...
The Mona Lisa of the Range
I was teaching photography at Prescott College in Arizona when I met 19-year-old Julie, the daughter of renowned wildlife artist Grant Hagen. She...