Actors, writers, directors and producers who helped define the genre offer unique insight about western movies from the early talkies to the present. Interviewed here are Glenn Ford, Warren Oates, Virginia Mayo, Andrew V. McLaglen, Harry Carey, Jr., Julie Adams, A.C. Lyles, Burt Kennedy, Edward Faulkner, Aldo Sambrell, Jack Elam, Andrew J. Fenady, and Elmore Leonard. Movies they discuss include Red River, The Searchers, 3:10 to Yuma, High Noon, Bend of the River, Rio Bravo, The Wild Bunch, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, among many others.

Two dozen pioneering men and women talk about life out west on the downward slope of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth. It was still rough and raw. Paul Gray rode the cattle trails of the Staked Plain, where ?nobody asked anybody?s name? because ?it wasn?t courtesy.? Jake Goss recalls the fuss when chickens raised on Salt Creek in western Colorado were found to have gold in their craws. J. Selby Batt?s father owned a general store in Wells, Nevada, where a lady could buy yards of ribbon and a gallon of whiskey. ø Other old-timers reminisce about characters like Bat Masterson and the Tabors, range wars, unpopular government representatives, wild longhorns and marauding wolves, boom towns turned ghostly, and unsolved mysteries. Here, too, are the voices of miners, schoolteachers, dentists, businessmen, traveling salesmen, journalists, and writers from frontier Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond. In an arena like this, ?You could do anything you was big enough to do.?

Includes material on George Catlin, Francis Parkman, Josiah Gregg, John Butterfield, Theodore Roosevelt, among others.

As with all crafts, they had their big men—the masters, as it were—whose deeds they emulated, whose feats of skill and divination they spoke of with awe, whose names they worshipped. Of such were Kit Carson, Wild Bill, Jim Clarke, Buffalo Bill, Slade, and the three men with whom we have to deal—Jim Buckley, Alfred, and Billy Knapp. Billy Knapp was dark, tall, broad-shouldered, long-haired, wearing a bristly mustache and goatee. A stranger might have remarked his frowning, beetling brow with a little uneasiness, but would have taken heart from the energetic kindliness of the eyes beneath. In fact, eager, autocratic energy was the dominant note in Billy's character. He succeeded because this energy carried him through—with some to spare. Jim Buckley was also tall and large, but he gave one less the idea of nervous force than of a certain static power. He was a mass which moved slowly but irresistibly. His seal-brown beard, his broad forehead, the distance between his wide, steady eyes strengthened this impression. One felt that his decisions would be hardly come at, but stubbornly held. Success was inevitable, but it would be the result of slow thinking, deep purpose, and a quiet tenacity of grip that never let go. As for Alfred—everybody has heard of him. His place in the annals of the West is assured, and his peculiarities of person and character have been many times described. Surely no one is unfamiliar with his short, bandy legs, his narrow, sloping little shoulders, his contracted chest, his queer pink and white face, with its bashful smile, his high bald head. Everybody knows his fear of women. Everybody knows, too, that he never had an opinion of his own on any subject. His speciality was making the best of other people's, no matter how bad they were; and competent judges say he could accomplish a more gloriously perfect best out of some tenderfoot's fool notion than another man with the advice of experts. Some people even maintain that Alfred was the best scout the plains ever produced, only he was so bashful that it took an expert to appreciate the fact.

The Westerners is the comical saga of Sterling Silver. He is a hero-wannabe type of character who is a legend in his own mind. His wife is an ex-DEA agent who has been converted to Christianity and now is the music director in the local Baptist church. He is a hunter safety instructor, hunter and fisherman, and a Sunday school teacher. One day, a couple of his friends who are Cub Scout leaders call on him to lead their troops on a real, wild campout so they can earn their camping badges. That is when the attacks and Western mayhem begins. So come along with Sterling, share the experience, and face a crowd of parents whose excitement instantly changes. This modern-day Western romantic adventure is sure to entertain.