Stories & Articles

The number tattooed onto his legend doesn't survive contact with the historical record.

The most repeated fact about Billy the Kid is also the least supported one. Here's what the record actually shows.

Hollywood's high-noon walkdown is a twentieth-century invention layered onto a nineteenth-century world.

Two men, facing off in an empty street, drawing on a signal. It's the defining image of the Wild West — and it was vanishingly rare.

An illustrated guide to the revolvers, rifles, and shotguns of the American West.

From the Colt Peacemaker to the Winchester repeater, the tools of frontier violence shaped how the West was won, policed, and mythologized.

More than a drinking hall, the frontier saloon was the social and economic center of the boomtown.

In towns with no bank, no church, and no courthouse yet built, the saloon did the job of all three.

The transcontinental railroad connected a nation — and accelerated the dispossession of everyone already living on the land it crossed.

No single technology changed the frontier faster, or more violently, than the railroad.