The West has always been a place for Americans who dream. About a second chance, about riches, about a free and productive life on fertile land with...
Top 10 True Western Towns of 2017
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True West Feature
True West’s Best of the West 2017: Heritage Travel
Millions of miles of interstates, highways, roads and dirt tracks crisscross the mountains, valleys, deserts and plains of the Western United...
A Colonel’s Secret Weapon
As the small train of wagons drew within sight of Fort Phil Kearny, the weary travelers rejoiced. “I could have clapped my hands for joy,” one wrote...
Hollywood’s Texas Ranger
Hell or High Water is the sleeper movie hit of the summer; Jeff Bridges’ portrayal of Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton might nab him a second Oscar....
Daniel Boone: Passing the Torch
Neither Meriwether Lewis nor William Clark ever mentioned meeting Daniel Boone on May 24, 1804, when they stopped at the village nicknamed Boone’s...
The Doomed Prince of the Pistoleers
James Butler Hickok, born on a farm in northern Illinois in 1837, leaves home at age 18, gravitating to Kansas Territory, with his brother Lorenzo,...
Burning Through Texas
To burn through Texas to the Gulf of Mexico was a vision that came to Chief Buffalo Hump that captured the imagination of his people. During the...
The Killing that Put Hardin on the Run
Charlie M. Webb’s claim to fame came when his plan to kill notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin backfired. Webb first appeared on the Texas scene...
The Unbroken Peace Treaty
The young warriors of the Penateka Comanche tribe, several hundreds of them, lined up on one side of their camping ground along the San Saba River...
The Deadliest Enemy
To the uninitiated in the Old West, the ranching business centered on cattle, but in reality, the livestock trade focused on grass and water, so...
An Outcast in Her Own Town
She had to be shocked from the top of her flowered hat to the hem of her velvet dress. This can’t be happening, she must have thought, not after all...
The Strangest Adoption in the History of the West
No more unusual story has emerged from Texas’s long and bitter struggle for independence than that of John Christopher Columbus Hill. The account of...