Way Out West

09/02/2026

Hazen, Nevada, 1905. The photograph was labeled “Saloons and disreputable places.”

That description probably tells us as much about the person cataloging the photograph as it does about the places themselves.

Across the isolated American West, saloons and dance halls certainly had their rough edges. But they also filled an important need. In mining camps, railroad towns, and ranching country where people might spend long stretches working alone, these were places to hear music, dance, share news, see familiar faces, and simply be around other people.

Our Way Out West Journal story, “When the West Needed Saturday Night: How Dance Halls Built Community in the Isolated American West,” looks beyond their sometimes disreputable reputation to explore the role these gathering places actually played.

Because sometimes Saturday night wasn’t about raising hell. It was about not being alone.

08/29/2026

There was never just one West.

Fort Worth tells one story. Deadwood tells another. So do Pendleton, Tombstone, Santa Fe, Cody, Virginia City, Bandera, Dodge City, and Taos.

Some were built around cattle. Others around silver, gold, irrigation, or rodeo. And some were already old before the cattle drives and mining camps of the American frontier ever existed.

For this Journal article, we chose ten Western towns not because they’re necessarily the “best,” but because each offers a different window into the people, cultures, ambitions, conflicts, and mythology that shaped the American West.

📚 Ten Historic Western Towns That Still Have Something to Say.

Read the full story at Way Out West.

Explore ten historic Western towns that reveal the real American West, from cattle drives and mining booms to Pueblo communities, rodeo traditions, outlaws, artists, and enduring cowboy culture.

08/28/2026

“Fun was at least half of it.”

Teddy Blue Abbott had little patience for remembering the old cowboy days as nothing but hardship.

Abbott went up the cattle trails as a young man and later told his story in We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher. He remembered the long hours, dangerous river crossings, stampedes, bad weather, and exhausting work.

But he also remembered the fun.

That matters, because the cowboys of the open-range era weren’t characters in a Western. Many were young men in their teens and twenties, working hard, testing themselves, playing jokes, getting into trouble, and forming friendships they would remember for the rest of their lives.

Look at an old photograph like this one, and it’s easy to see only stern faces from another century.

Teddy Blue reminds us there was a lot more life behind them.

08/23/2026

“The first few jumps was mighty wicked.”

Will James could write a line like that because he knew the life. Born Joseph-Ernest-Nephtali Dufault in Quebec, he came West as a young man, worked as a cowboy, and eventually became one of the best-known writers and artists of the American West.

The horseman in this photograph has quite a story of his own.

Jackson Sundown was a Nez Perce horseman and one of the great early competitors at the Pendleton Round-Up. In 1916, at roughly 53 years old, he won the bronc riding championship there. An extraordinary achievement that helped make him a legend of the early rodeo West.

There’s something fitting about bringing the two together: words from a man who knew horses, over an image of a man who knew how to ride them.

08/20/2026

“And my day’s work commenced anew.”

Andy Adams wrote The Log of a Cowboy in 1903, drawing on his own experience working cattle in the West.

That experience mattered. His cowboys weren’t simply gunfighters riding from one adventure to another. They were working men, and much of their lives revolved around cattle, horses, weather, dust, long days, and getting up the next morning to do whatever the job required.

Sometimes the most authentic picture of the cowboy isn’t found in the legend. It’s found in the work.

08/17/2026

The great cattle drives of the American West depended on good horses, skilled cowboys, and thousands of head of cattle.

But they also depended on something far less glamorous: dinner.

Feeding a trail crew for three or four months across hundreds of miles of open country was a serious logistical problem. In 1866, Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight helped solve it with a purpose-built wagon that would become one of the enduring symbols of the cowboy era.

The chuckwagon was far more than a kitchen on wheels. It was the outfit’s pantry, supply depot, infirmary, gathering place and, in many ways, the heart of camp.

And the man who ran it, known simply as Cookie, was one of the most important members of the crew.

In the Journal at Way Out West, we look at why cowboys needed the chuckwagon, what it carried, what the crew actually ate, and how one practical solution helped make the great cattle drives possible.

Read “The Chuckwagon: The Heart of Every Cattle Drive” at Way Out West.

Discover why the cowboy chuckwagon became the heart of every cattle drive. Learn how Charles Goodnight's invention kept trail crews fed, supplied, and working.

08/16/2026

There’s something wonderfully appropriate about a 1932 Western being called The Western Code.

In our latest Way Out West podcast episode, we went looking for the origins of the “Code of the West.” What we found was more interesting than a tidy list of cowboy commandments.

The working cowboys of the nineteenth century certainly had expectations about keeping your word, doing your share, loyalty, courage, and how a man conducted himself. But they don’t appear to have carried around a formal set of rules they called the “Code of the West.”

That came later.

Western novels, dime novels, movies, and eventually television took an older, largely unwritten ethos and began turning it into something more explicit. By the time The Western Code reached theaters in 1932, even the phrase itself had become part of the mythology Hollywood was building around the West.

The movies didn’t invent those values. But they helped package them, name them, and pass them along.

That distinction — between the historical ethos and the code we remember today — is at the heart of our latest episode, Who Actually Wrote the Code of the West? Available on your favorite podcast platform.

08/14/2026

“We come and go, but the land is always here.”

Few writers understood the relationship between people and the Western landscape quite like Willa Cather.

Generations have crossed these plains. They built homes, raised families, worked cattle, endured droughts and hard winters, and eventually passed the country on to those who came after them.

The people change. The West changes.

But the land has a way of reminding us that our time upon it is only borrowed.

08/13/2026

We talk about the Code of the West as though someone had once sat down beside a campfire and written the rules. But who?

There was no cowboy legislature. No trail-drive employee handbook. And surprisingly little evidence that nineteenth-century working cowboys commonly referred to their customs as “The Code of the West.”

But that doesn’t mean the whole thing was invented.

In the latest episode of Way Out West, we trace the idea from the working cattle culture of the nineteenth century through Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the modern cowboy codes we know today.

What we found is somewhere between history and mythology. The West lived some of it. Storytellers shaped some of it. And later generations finally gave it a name and numbered the rules.

🎙️ Episode 105: Who Actually Wrote the Code of the West?

Who wrote the Code of the West? Trace its roots from working cowboys and unwritten customs to Western fiction, Hollywood and the cowboy codes we know today.

08/11/2026

John Wayne didn't invent the cowboy hero, but it's hard to argue that anyone did more to define him on screen.

Over a decades-long career, Wayne developed a particular kind of Western character: independent, capable, stubborn, loyal, and usually guided by a personal code that mattered more than what anyone else thought of him. The films weren't documentaries, and the cowboys he portrayed weren't always historically accurate. But at his best, Wayne captured something recognizable about the values Americans came to associate with the West.

That's why we selected him as one of Way Out West's 7 Greatest Cowboy Actors of All Time.

There are plenty of worthy names on that list, and ranking Western actors is almost guaranteed to start an argument, which is half the fun. So where does John Wayne rank on yours?