William M. “Bill” Pickett, was born on Dec. 5, 1870, in Jenks Branch, a freedmen’s town in Williamson County, Texas. He was the second of 13 children born to former slaves Thomas Jefferson Pickett and Mary “Janie” Gilbert. The family heritage include

It’s said you can judge a person’s character by the company he keeps. Wyatt Earp’s pallbearers [at his Jan. 16, 1929, funeral in Los Angeles, mentioned in “Earp Fellow Sophisticates,” by Don Chaput and David D. de Haas, online at HistoryNet.com] incl

To this day virtually everyone in the United States has heard of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Even those not expert or passionate about the Western frontier era recognize him as one of the most iconic figures of American history. Buffalo Bi

Tombstone, Ariz., has never looked so good. Or is this Cheyenne, Wyo., or Langtry, Texas? In fact, the movie set of Mescal, 45 miles southeast of Tucson, has doubled for all three real-life towns and played wild and woolly fictional ones in such West

The horse was once as essential to Western life as the six-gun, and breaking horses was once a necessary skill, even a business for a few tough, enterprising souls. Eventually it became a competitive rodeo event in which working cowboys pitted their

In the wake of Buffalo Bill Cody’s death on Jan. 10, 1917, his enduring popularity in Italy spawned a bizarre epilogue with diplomatic ramifications. In 1920 Florence-based publisher Casa Editrice Nerbini (present-day Edizioni Nerbini) launched a chi

Who was Etta Place? She was the lover and perhaps wife of Pennsylvania-born Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid,” and a peripheral associate of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang headed up by Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy.” But litt

Are you a fan of Western films but don’t recognize the name John R. Hamilton? You’re not alone, though you’ve likely seen celebrity portraits the photographer snapped at more than 70 Western movie locations from the 1940s through the ’90s. A sergeant

Well now, buckaroo, that’s some attitude! Perhaps 2 ½-year-old John Clancy is miffed that his shirt is too big or chaps too small. Or maybe he’s not thrilled at having been dragged east to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1923. But we wager he’s a

Center stage in a northern Colorado museum is an unmistakable symbol of the West. Faint lettering on the driver’s box of the historic stagecoach reads U.S. Mail, attesting to its original purpose, while covering nearly every square inch of its woodwo

Of all the city slickers ever to venture into the 19th century American West, Oscar Wilde towered above the rest, preening like a peacock with his ostentatious wardrobe, his philosophy of art and his knack for spilling printer’s ink across the pages

Reports of the death of the Western, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are an exaggeration. Consider two recent series from the highly rated INSP cable network, whose programming is primarily Western, whose logo is a cowboy hat and whose tagline swaggeringly

To the disbelief of gaping onlookers in the packed stands at El Toreo, Mexico City’s largest bullring, American rodeo performer Bill Pickett clung to the horns of a massive Mexican bull ironically named Frijoles Chiquitos (“Little Beans”). Watching f

When the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Co. launched the Pony Express on April 3, 1860, fanfare for the new express mail service made newspaper headlines from New York to San Francisco. The cheers came loudest from California wher

The southeast Alaska port of Wrangell—a stepping-off point for prospectors bound north to Canada’s Yukon Territory during the 1896–99 Klondike Gold Rush—has seen its share of troubles. During the gold rush notorious con man Jefferson “Soapy” Smith an

Fresh from robbing the Deadwood Stagecoach, the Sioux performers of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West changed into loose-fitting Chinese garb and attached long single braids to the backs of their heads, mimicking the clothing and hairstyle of the Boxers then

Italy’s answer to the American cowboy, the buttero is the traditional horseback wrangler of horses or cattle from the west-central coast, stretching from Rome and the surrounding Lazio region north into Tuscany. The buttero sits a broad wooden saddle

Picture the colorfully costumed members of the Western quartet Riders in the Sky, and you may catch yourself humming the melody of “Woody’s Roundup,” from the 1999 Disney/Pixar film Toy Story 2. But there’s far more to the Grammy-winning band and its

The Winter 2024 Wild West features “Hats Off!” a portfolio history of the cowboy hat, by Wild West editor Dave Lauterborn. For a century and a half the name synonymous with that iconic symbol of the American West has been Stetson. Stetson owners will

A historian with a brush and a palette, David Wright considers it his mission to depict America’s frontier era with precision. “We historical artists march to a different drummer,” explains Wright [davidwrightart.com] from his home studio in Gallatin

By the early 1850s gold fever had spread across the American West. Southwestern Oregon Territory was no exception, as placer miners had descended on Coyote Creek in what today is Josephine County. Camps sprang up, and the goldfields remained a beehiv

Times change, and anything failing to roll with them fades into obsolescence. That truism was borne out in the 19th and early 20th century by such passing innovations as the icebox, the telegraph, tintype photography, public gas lighting, the penny-f

There’s an undeniable relationship between the real West and the “reel” West that fascinates us, the staff, and you, the reader, of Wild West. We’re especially alert to any mistakes Hollywood makes in narrative, costuming or firearms. Though collecto