Jeff Power, like his ancestors, had clawed out a living in unforgiving terrain, continually forced to defend what little he had from predators, both...
The Power of Redemption
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True West Feature
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...
A Bozeman Christmas
On Christmas Day in 1867, three years after the founding of this fair Montana Territory city, Bozeman was elected by citizens as the county seat....
Spirit of the West
Historian Dr. Larry Len Peterson’s tenth book, American Trinity: Jefferson, Custer, and the Spirit of the West (Sweetgrass Books, $34.95), is his...
The Other Bowie’s Epic Battle
December 1831, central Texas saw an epic gunfight—with more than 170 combatants! “Epic” and “Bowie” usually come together when describing the 13-day...
The Other Woman
Contemporaneous newspaper accounts of “Wild Bill” Hickok’s marriage to Agnes Lake in 1876 reported a favorable view of their relationship. Accounts...