True West’s Ultimate Historic Travel Guide: The Pacific Coast
“Ocian in view! Oh! The Joy!” William Clark wrote in his journal on November 7, 1805, viewing what he believed was the Pacific Ocean as the Corps of Discovery reached the broad estuary of the Columbia River, 20 miles from the coast. Clark’s exhilaration at reaching...
10 Treasured Firearms
I was recently asked which of my personal guns are my favorites. Of course there are many that I enjoy having for different reasons. Some I admire because of their historical association or intrinsic beauty. Then there are those I’m attached to for sentimental...
The Life of a Fur Trapper
There was no shortage of ways to go to the “go under” in the Far West during the heyday of the Mountain Men. In 1856 Antoine Robidoux could account for only three out of three hundred who went into the Rockies some thirty years earlier. James Ohio Pattie recalled only...
The Encounter that Dooms Wild Bill
September 1865 George Ward Nichols and Gen. Thomas Church Haskell Smith, the inspector general of the District of Southwest Missouri, arrive in Springfield, Missouri. In this war-torn area, Smith confides to Nichols that in the “six months preceding not less than...
True West March/April 2025
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