Bah, humbug. The high sheriffs of this rag twisted my arm to write about Victorian Christmas celebrations out West. I’m no Scrooge, but I live in...
A Dickens Christmas
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Boggs Unleashed
Tailor-Made Re-enactor
As I walk across the grounds of the John Brown Museum in Osawatomie, Kansas, during the annual Freedom Festival, I am surrounded by re-enactors. By...
Paramount’s Golden Boy
A.C. Lyles, 93 years young, vividly recalls the Western movies he grew up watching. But Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson or Fred Thomson didn’t bring him to...
PC Trumps PRCA
At first glance, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo looks like any other rodeo. Well, that wine tent seems out of place, as do the pig races on...
Learning Their Trade…In Stir
Arnold Darby is in a great mood the day I arrive in Huntsville, Texas, to talk about his custom bootmaking business...with good reason. After...
Friends of the James Farm Bash
The family’s all here. I’m surrounded by historians and wannabe historians, fiction writers and wannabe fiction writers, journalists, blackpowder...
The Truth to Chaco Canyon
Scholars and archaeologists may debate why the great Pueblo Indian society existed in Chaco Canyon, but everybody agrees on one thing: It’s in the...
Forget The Alamo
Everybody has been talking about Alamo movies this year, but they keep forgetting the best of the bunch. Actor Fess Parker’s death led every Baby...
Lone Star Vodka
“Texas vodka? Man, that doesn’t even go together.” That was the reaction Tito Beveridge—yes, that’s his name—got when he started trying to peddle...
Lone Star Vodka
“Texas vodka? Man, that doesn’t even go together.” That was the reaction Tito Beveridge—yes, that’s his name—got when he started trying to peddle...
The Best BBQ Joints in Texas
Coming from South Carolina, I arrived in Dallas in 1984 and was shocked at what they called barbecue in Texas. It wasn’t pig meat. It was beef. And...
Meet Robert J. Conley
I knew Robert J. Conley was not your typical Western writer when he came up to me and fellow author John D. Nesbitt at an Albuquerque bar and...