Wild West

Billy the Kid, based on his one accepted surviving photograph, didn’t look much like Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Emilio Estevez or any of the other actors who portrayed him in film. For one thing he had those imperfect choppers. “The Kid used to

Although I am 90 and retired from writing many years ago, I have maintained interest in your excellent coverage of America’s Wild West. Your August 2018 issue aroused my interest as no other issue has, because my father’s family lived through those r

Ed Sweeney, 67, a leading authority on Chiricahua Apaches, died on Sept. 6, 2018, in St. Charles, Mo. Born in Stoughton, Mass., on Oct. 16, 1950, Sweeney moved as an adult to St. Charles, where he worked as an accountant and researched Apaches as an

The Masters of the American West Art Exhibition and Sale, featuring paintings and sculptures by 70 artists, takes place Feb. 9–March 24 at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. The exhibition “Rick Bartow: Things You Kn

In 2017 Steve Friesen retired after 22 years as director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave [buffalobill.org] in Golden, Colo. A native Kansan, Friesen was born in Lawrence, grew up in Buhler and studied at Bethel College in North Newton before ear

The woman Levanch [sic] L. Swart, who claimed to have been married to my late husband Edward Z.C. Carroll Judson, he always said was not his legal wife. She blackmailed him and did a great many things to annoy him and came here to Stamford after we w

Ned Buntline was probably the best-paid writer in America by the mid-1800s, surpassing even the income of the celebrated Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. He boasted an annual income of $20,000 at a time in which a skilled laborer or white-collar worker m

Massacres on the American frontier were disgracefully commonplace. In the perhaps inevitable clash over land, whites and Indians slaughtered one another from the nation’s earliest days. Whites were the aggressors in several notable instances, from th

When Nate Vestal reached Montana Territory in 1867, gold mining was already at a fever pitch. In 1852 François Finlay (aka “Benetsee”), a French half-breed from somewhere along the Red River of the North, made the first strike in what would become Mo

Little is known about the early life of Charles Henry Ballard. Born in 1822 near Sterling, Massachusetts, he moved to the New England gunmaking hub of Worcester as a young man to apply his talents as a machinist and inventor. Ballard ultimately becam

(1992, by Frederick Nolan): No book surpasses Nolan’s as a comprehensive narrative of the complex history of Lincoln County in territorial New Mexico. Thorough in coverage, balanced in interpretation, well written and overflowing with appealing photo

The Sisters Brothers, Annapurna Pictures, 121 minutes, 2018, R The Sisters brothers, the pair of antiheroes at the center of this film, couldn’t be more different. The elder, Eli (John C. Reilly), is thoughtful, kind and vulnerable, while the younger