Shipping Cattle to Market by Rail
Have you ever watched those trail driving movies and wondered what happened after the cattle were delivered to the railhead at Abilene, Dodge City or Wichita? These trains were heading some 500 miles to Chicago and would have been grueling on the cattle, train crews...
Cattle, Cowboys and Culture
If you’re a vegetarian, stop reading. Unless you like opera. We don’t think of cattle towns as cultural meccas, but many of them were. And still are. Take Kansas City, Missouri, for instance. By the mid-1880s, KC had a population of more than 500,000. Cattle, I mean....
The Texas Cattle Drives
Although there were cattle drives prior to the Civil War their heyday came in the years that followed. The war had pretty much depleted the beef supply in the East and when the Texans returned home in 1865 they found thousands of longhorns running free. A way needed...
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 most historically accurate Western film, and why? With nearly 1,000 responses, we mulled over plenty of nominations. If we...
True West March/April 2025
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Features
Western Books & Movies
