In the annals of North American history, the fabled lore of the horse and the mountain man are two of the most chronicled and beloved. From...
Legends of the West
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Johnny D. Boggs
What History Has Taught Me: Johnny D. Boggs
My mother and father... Songwriter Rodney Crowell wrote my life story in “Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream)”: “But Mama kept the...
Western Art in Pandemics, Then and Now
Museum curators, gallery owners, and artists remain optimistic about the future.
Art During Pandemics: Then and Now COVID-19 has put the American West art world in a new nightmare.
The time: November 1918 to January 1919 during the Spanish influenza pandemic. The place: Great Falls, Montana. The artist: Charles M. Russell. The...
Pursuing Outlaw Sam Bass
There wasn’t much to Big Springs, Nebraska, in 1877. As Al Sorenson noted in his 1877 book, Hands Up! The History of a Crime, Big Springs was “a...
Beyond Awesome
Grandeur is often associated with the paintings of early artists of the American West: George Caleb Bingham, Karl Bodmer, William Jacob Hays, Thomas...
Blood on the Earth
Two months separated the 1868 clashes between the U.S. military and the Indians at Beecher Island and the Washita River. One is known for heroism on...
Hancock’s War
Second Lieutenant Lyman S. Kidder, 7th Cavalry, was unlucky. I knew that before beginning this road trip, but as I step out of my Jeep in a remote...
Twain Redux
Robert Coover tackles the impossible in Huck Out West (W.W. Norton, $26.95), a sequel to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that puts...
Vaqueros, Buckaroos & Cowboys
Blame it on Joseph McCoy. The entrepreneur turned Abilene, Kansas, into a cowtown, which made the Chisholm Trail synonymous with cowboys and the...
The West’s Best Art Museums 2017
The best art museums don’t just show you art. They show you history. They show you personalities. They move you. Our top museums certainly did that...
When the Hills Bled Blue in the Boom of ’92
Douglas Magnus, the iconic silversmith in Santa Fe, New Mexico, shows me around the historic turquoise mines he owns in the nearby Cerrillos Hills....