While the Texians winning their independence and while the Santa Fe Traders were opening commerce between the U.S. and Mexico, a reckless breed...
Mountain Men
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Cowboy
Frontier Privies and Cowboy Cooks
Marshall Trimble is Arizona’s official historian and vice president of the Wild West History Association. His latest book is Arizona Oddities: Land...
Western Roundup: September 2021
32nd Annual Fiesta de Septiembre Wickenburg, AZ, September 4, 2021: Celebrate Wickenburg’s Hispanic pioneer heritage at this event. Activities...
Billy the Kid and the Apaches
The audacious outlaw fought and raided his rival renegades without retribution. All images courtesy True West Archives unless otherwise noted ...
Ambushed on the Pecos
The Courageous Life and Death of Oliver Loving In 1867, beneath a bluff a few miles from Carlsbad, New Mexico, two Texas cattlemen—one of them a...
Revenge Got Out of Hand An eye for an eye blew up into a massacre.
August 19, 1871. Several Texas cowboys were seeking revenge for the death of a friend eight days before. They tracked the killer, Mike McCluskie,...
John B. Stetson
When Doubleday & Co. published my first book back in 1977, they sent me an advance that was more than I was making annually as a high school...
A Cowboy Archaeologist? George McJunkin made a huge discovery.
George McJunkin was a top hand, running some of the largest cattle outfits in New Mexico and Texas during the post-Civil War years. He had a run-in...
Could the Rancher and the Farmer be Friends?
Many westerns movies base their story line on ranch wars or ranchers wanting to get rid of nesters squatting on their grazing lands. Did these...
The Cross Draw
The cross draw, worn on the left or “weak side” was popular with men who spent a lot of time sitting at a poker table or on horseback because for...
A Preacher Arrives In Helldorado Endicott Peadbody
Endicott Peadbody A Preacher Arrives In Helldorado In Tombstone in early 1882, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, a recent arrival from Boston preached...
Branding The history of one of the West's most iconic symbols!
Branding of livestock dates all the way back to the Egyptians to around 2,700B.C. It spread to Europe in the Middle Ages and was introduced in...