Shares ten stories featuring legendary places, events, and characters from the era of westward expansion.

A collection of funny tall tales featuring cowboys, cowgirls, and other characters from the Wild West.

A photo-journalist called Peppercorn, sets off to South Dakota, to find his inner cowboy (and, more prosaically, to write an article on the Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park for travel magazine Terra Incognita). With a cast of larger-than-life charactersincluding Peppercorns cousin, Saltzman, lecturer in (and soon-to-be saviour of) the University of St. Albans School of American Studies; Mercy Sweetbriar, Rapid Citys representative from the Department of Tourism, and runner-up in the Appearance, Personality, and Photogenics category in South Dakotas Miss Rodeo contest; and tarted-up trailer trash Miami Bitch, sporting denim hotpants and deep-pan cleavageand combining fact, fantasy, and fiction, Clive Sinclairs True Tales of the Wilde West is a glorious romp through the legends and landscapes of the American West.

The 'Wild West' stories of Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone pale in comparison to the incredible story of Las Vegas, New Mexico, for decades considered the most violent community on America's western frontier. In Wildest of the Wild West, popular Western historian Howard Bryan provides a spirited account of the violent, melodramatic, and often bizarre events that centred in and around this small Hispanic farm and ranching community from 1835 to 1915.

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.”

Jesse James. Billy the Kid. Butch Cassidy. When these bold men walked into town with six-shooters in their holsters, most people fled quickly. That is, except for the lawmen willing to take them on. Although lawmen and outlaws stood for very different ideals, they did share one thing in common, gunfighting. To live in the Wild West, especially as a bank robber or sheriff, handling a gun was necessary. Author Jeff Savage discusses the dangerous world of the gunfighter.

Find out quirky facts and wacky trivia about Colorado.