Sure Cure for Flinchlock Fever
When Western traveler George Rutledge Gibson wrote how he and his companions prepared for a possible Indian attack in May 1848, he recalled that “flints were screwed in, pans primed and all things made ready for a fight.” Frontiersmen took such knowledge for...
The Human Custer
Allen Barra: You wrote in your preface, “Custer battled American Indians ruthlessly, yet wrote that he would resist too were he one of them.” His attitude reflects empathy toward Plains Indians, yet he has been reviled unmercifully by a modern generation of Indian...
The First Mountain Man
John Colter was a good hunter, a skilled woodsman, got along well with Indians and had a knack for surviving hazards and hardships that put other men under the ground. There, in the villages of the Mandan Indians on the Missouri River, in 1806, he was headed back to...
Ghost Dance Tragedy
Coming at the conclusion of what white Americans call the frontier period in their history, Wounded Knee climaxed an era of intermittent warfare. Troops and Indians clashed throughout the Trans-Mississippi West in a 30-year on-again, off-again conflict that witnessed...
True West January/February 2025
In This Issue:
Features
Western Books & Movies
To The Point
