In 1868, America was anticipating the completion of the first transcontinental railroad within the next year. The Central Pacific from Sacramento...
Ride That Train!
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The Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Billy the Kid
On February 29, 1908, Jesse Wayne Brazel walked into the Doña Ana County sheriff’s office and announced, “Lock me up. . . . I’ve just killed Pat...
Bizarro’s Take on American Indians
When I was a boy growing up in a very small town in Oklahoma in the early 1960s, I sometimes saw Indian kids around town wearing mohawk haircuts. As...
The Long and Rich History of In-din Humor
One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is...
The Power of Redemption
Jeff Power, like his ancestors, had clawed out a living in unforgiving terrain, continually forced to defend what little he had from predators, both...
Lost Photo of Crook’s Scout Discovered?
John Campbell Burge is one of my favorite Territorial Arizona photographers. Though his work is less common than other early Arizona photographers,...
Where Cowboy Hats Rule!
“Howdy, Tex!” True West’s Bob Boze Bell has traveled the world wearing his signature cowboy hat. From France to Thailand, Bob has sported his...
The Truth about Wild Bill
Like most Old West icons, gunfighter “Wild Bill” Hickok is shrouded in myths. He likely started many of them. A teller of tall windies, he was...
Custer and Hostages
In December 1868, George Armstrong Custer peered down at a beautiful, freckle- faced white woman frozen in the snow. Clara Blinn had been shot in...
Sins of the Father
In 1864, an irascible 51-year-old Nicholas Earp proclaimed himself a wagonmaster and offered to lead a group of Iowa emigrants to California. Sarah...
A Plague of Flea Market Billys
The conversation all started with a letter from my hometown, Buffalo, New York. Rob McElroy had sent a note to the Yahoo group “Photo History” about...
Who Killed the Texas Terror?
Undeniably the darkest hour in Texas’s history, the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877, turned the Lone Star State into a bloody and...