Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: True West

Al Sieber stands to the far right of this dress parade of Yavapai scouts at Camp Verde, Arizona, in this circa 1880 photograph by W.H. Williscraft. Nine years had passed since he began his role as the U.S. Army’s chief of scouts. When asked to explain the secret of his success in managing his Indian scouts, he replied: “I do not deceive them, but always tell them the truth. When I tell them I am going to kill them, I do it, and when I tell them I am their friend, they know it.”

– Courtesy Sharlot Hall Museum Library and Archives, Prescott, Arizona –

True West Magazine

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True West Magazine

This early 1873 photo of Main Street in Bozeman, Montana, shows a two-story white building in the center distance, Lester Willson’s store, where Peter Koch was working the night of the lynching. Shown in the inset, Koch bravely refused to sell rope to the vigilantes.

– Courtesy Montana State University Special Collections –

True West Magazine

3 hrs

Ken Western

After working 26 years as an editorial page editor and business reporter for The Arizona Republic, Ken Western helps True West commemorate the newspaper’s 125th anniversary.

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True West Magazine

5 hrs

The Hairy One Hangs

Sonoran bandito, Augustine Chacon, alias Peluda (“The Hairy One”), robbed and killed in Arizona, and then hid out in the Sierra Madres until his capture in 1896.

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True West Magazine

19 hrs

Plains Indians watched the wasteful killing of buffalo herds with dismay and desperation. The tribes that subsisted on buffalo meat, like this Arapaho camp in William Soule’s 1870 photograph, lashed out as the life-sustaining beasts became scarcer with each passing month.

– Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration –

True West Magazine

20 hrs

The First Mountain Man

John Colter was a good hunter, a skilled woodsman, got along well with Indians and had a knack for surviving hazards and hardships that put other men under the ground.

TRUEWESTMAGAZINE.COM

True West Magazine

22 hrs

Seven Still Magnificent

Scottish author and columnist for Cinema Retro magazine Brian Hannan has recently published an outstanding, well-illustrated book "The Making of the Magnificent Seven: Behind the Scenes of the Pivotal Western" (McFarland, $45).

TRUEWESTMAGAZINE.COM

True West Magazine

Yesterday at 12:30pm

When Comanche Chief Black Horse rode out onto the Staked Plains in West Texas for a buffalo hunt in 1876, he was horrified by the wanton slaughter of buffalo. He sits here with his wife and child Akhah, when they were confined at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, around that time.

– True West Archives –

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Marilyn Gilliam I'm questioning the date you mentioned...the buffalo extinction effectively ended the Comanche way of life as hunters. In 1875, the last free band of Comanches, led by the Quahada warrior & last chief, Quanah Parker, my cousin, surrendered and moved to Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma. The last independent Kiowa and Kiowa Apache had also surrendered.

LikeReply30Yesterday at 12:45pmEdited

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Coni Sutton That is a very sad photo. His face speaks to me of heartbrokeness. Life as they knew had been ripped and stolen away from them even down to heartless destruction of the beautiful buffalo. Until lately now, history has proven there is nothing more cruel on earth than the white man.

LikeReply27Yesterday at 1:21pm

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