In 1874 a young New Yorker, John P. Clum, 22, accepted a difficult assignment, to be the Indian Agent for the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation...
The Boss With The High Forehead
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true west blog
Gold Rush Days in the Mother Lode
California's Mother Lode was a magic rectangle on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. It was only 60 miles long and 40 miles wide but yielded a...
Santa Claus, Arizona
On a stretch of arid desert northwest of Kingman arises what was perhaps the most unusual roadside attraction ever to grace the highways of...
Two Guns Ghost Town
They called the Arizona town Two Guns—supposedly after one of the early settlers, a crotchety old guy who called himself Two Gun Miller. There’d...
A Merry Christmas at Ft. Yuma
A little-known Christmas story is that of the time when the generous folks at Nogales, Arizona “adjusted” the Mexican border to accommodate some...
Clayton Moore
At one point in the classic movie Shane, the hero (played by Alan Ladd) wins a brutal fistfight with several of the bad guys. One of the baddies is...
Tuffy and Jake Meet Santa Claus
Adapted from a story told by Charles Russell in Trails Plowed Under. Everybody knows Charles M. Russell was one of America’s greatest cowboy artists...
Hayden’s Hallowed Expedition
Tracking back 150 years ago, the Hayden Survey had humble beginnings, starting with the unpromising early life of its leader. Ferdinand Vandeveer...
A Sticky Wicket
Ever since the only known photo of Billy the Kid sold for $2.3 million back in 2011, new purported photos of the Kid have been surfacing almost...
Mack Hughes’ Cowboy Christmas
A few years ago an old friend, the late Stella Hughes, wrote a book, Hashknife Cowboy, about her husband Mack’s days working for the historic...
The Man Who Killed Santa Claus
The Great Depression was in full bloom and hard times had fallen on the rural communities of Tempe and Mesa, Arizona that Christmas of 1932. It was...
Fleming Parker’s Last Request
George Ruffner and Fleming Parker had cowboyed together over on the Agua Fria River in their younger days. As time went by they went their separate...