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Cottonwood Canyon Ranch

Cottonwood Canyon Ranch

by | Apr 1, 2003 | Art, Guns and Culture

The original pioneers came to the land as explorers, as dreamers—claiming a hunk of dirt to make a life. They came, as historians remind us, “not to paradise where ease awaited them, but to the most demanding of areas.” They dug for water and built corrals; they...
James Drury, Alias The Virginian

James Drury, Alias The Virginian

by | Feb 1, 2003 | Western Movies

When Owen Wister published The Virginian in 1902, he created the  quintessential fictional Western hero (more than 60 years before Clint Eastwood made The Man With No Name popular) and gave birth to an American literary genre. Gary Cooper once played Wister’s hero on...
Rendezvous

Rendezvous

by | Feb 1, 2003 | Features & Gunfights

Before the Oregon Trail, before the cattle drives, before Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp, fur trappers—mountain men—opened the West. In their heyday they numbered but a few hundred, yet these intrepid frontiersmen penetrated a land known only to the Indians and...
Arizona’s Cowboy and Indian Trail

Arizona’s Cowboy and Indian Trail

by | Jan 1, 2003 | Travel & Preservation

If you had journeyed through Southern Arizona back in the 1880s, you wouldn’t have found the place nearly as hospitable as it is today. Restless Apaches, armed incursions from Mexico, the rough landscape and summer temperatures that exceeded 115 degrees made life...