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Much has been written about the west—most of it clouded by exaggeration and fabrication. Since 1953, True West magazine has been devoted to celebrating the West’s true colors, giving the men and women who settled there accurate voices, exploring every triumph and tragedy of their time—and exposing every vice and virtue. True Tales and Amazing Legends of the Old West commemorates these unforgettable cowboys, Indians, and city slickers through a mix of classic histories and brand-new narratives, all illustrated with photographs—many reproduced here for the first time—of the people and places that gave rise to America’s Western mythology. With twenty-six stories that blend fact with folklore, this collection abounds with accounts of the famous and the infamous, including Sacagawea, Wild Bill Hickok, Pancho Villa, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Davy Crockett, and Wyatt Earp. Also here are lesser-known figures whose stories were pivotal to shaping the culture of the era, such as European conquistador Francisco Coronado, rancher “Black Billy” Hill, and fearless lawman Orlando “Rube” Robbins. Other tales recount the wide open plains, lawlessness, drama, mayhem, and promise embodied in the Old West. Whether you’re a history buff, an Old West devotee, or simply someone who is fascinated by the characters of America’s early years, these timeless tales and photographs epitomize the legendary spirit of what it meant to settle the West.
For several hundred years, the West had been the land of dreams, an extraordinary region of hope, expansion and opportunity where European countries—and then the young USA itself—sent their finest explorers to plant seeds in a seemingly untapped, open landscape. This spirit captured the popular imagination in the Wild West, those raucous 30 years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of a new century. Within these pages, readers will explore true tales of rebels and heroes such as General George Custer, Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Annie Oakley, and Sitting Bull, among others. The Wild West was the American Dream on steroids. It was an age of gunfights and gold rushes, cowboys and Comanches, with the likes of Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and Billy the Kid making their names. It forged extraordinary legends and even bigger lies, with everything fueled by dime novels written back East that encouraged folks to grab their share of a promise that was difficult for this hard land to keep. This book looks at all these mythical characters, the start of the railroad across the nation, the cost it all dealt to the Native Americans whose land was lost, and the way Hollywood still keeps the dream alive. As historian Richard White says, “People could go west and no matter their failures elsewhere, they had an opportunity to remake themselves. It’s a symbol for a kind of individualism that actually doesn’t exist in the West, but mythically it does.”
The settling of the West in the 19th century is the essential American story, rich in symbolism and full of inspiration. This narrative of intrepid explorers, hardy pioneers seeking a better life, and daring outlaws who flouted authority, defintes the American spirit even today.
A collection of stories of the bank and train robbers of the Old West and how the local citizens fought to defend their homes and lives.
This rare collection of wanted posters from the American West is a historical treasure. The book's nearly 150 original wanted posters, fugitive notices, and Pinkerton Agency circulars are supplemented by fascinated details about the technology of identification, the history of wanted posters, and the stories behind the crimes, which ranged from horse theft, safe blowing, train robbery, seduction, ''white slavery,'' and murder. Posters for notorious bandits such as Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid are also featured.
"From Lewis and Clark's epic 1803 expedition to the showmanship of Buffalo Bill, the story of the American West is epic in scope, full of amazing tales of tragedy and triumph ... Illustrated with ... photographs and ... maps, [this book] is [a] ... history of a time and place that forever lives in legend"--
Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood’s saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn’t get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain’s account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity’s several “husbands” (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane’s reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004–2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on—raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.
An essential addition to the shelves of all true aficionados of the Old West. Catch the light glinting on the barrels of the Spencer rifles of the United States 7th Cavalry in 1868, as they ride out of Fort Riley on patrol in Kansas. Smell the intoxicating aroma of Chuck Wagon Stew, amidst the trail dust on the Chisholm Trail in 1870. Hear the sound of gunfire on the lawless streets of Tombstone, Arizona, 1881. The Wild West Catalog captures the essence of the greatest period of expansion within the United States, between 1866 and 1900, when the West was well and truly tamed. Fighting and riding skills gained in the Civil War were put to good use in opening up and populating the West, while more sophisticated weapons developed during the Civil War were put to both good and bad use in the sometimes-volatile environment. Illustrated with more than 250 illustrations, including archival photographs, artworks, color photography of artifacts, weapons, recipes, and historic places then and now, The Wild West Catalog portrays all the great characters of the West, including cowboys (and their favorite foodstuffs), Native Americans, the US Cavalry, outlaws, lawmen, homesteaders, and saloon girls. Western artifacts and locations are also described, including frontier weapons and towns, and the burgeoning railroads. The book also discusses the West as it was depicted in movies, television, and literature, and catalogs the many classic toys inspired by the West, which have entertained generations of imaginations worldwide. Comprehensive and fascinating, the book brings the complete Old West alive for the reader.
bibliography, index, eight-page photo essay
The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.