Frederick Nolan News Today

Southend and Leigh have had some very quirky clergymen over the decades, the good, the bad and the downright peculiar... here are just a few of them

Thriller writer and publisher who became an authority on the American old west and Billy the Kid

It was businessman Van C. Smith and his partner Aaron Wilburn who in 1869 helped stack the adobe bricks that would become the citys first two buildings.

It’s a Friday night, and young Henry Antrim is playing poker in George Atkins’s Cantina, just outside the military reservation of Fort Grant, Arizona. 

Our readers remind us of the variables and vagaries of historic truths, “well-established” facts, headlines and historical photographs.

Scholars uncover answers and create more questions on the outlaw’s life and family from New York to New Mexico.This past year has been a watershed in terms of new scholarship on Billy the Kid. Here, in a True West exclusive, are the new finds you need to know about.

When I was first diving deep into all the Billy the Kid scholarship back in the last century—doesn’t that sound ridiculous?—much heavy lifting had already been done by my go-to researchers, Philip J. Rasch, Nora True Henn, William A. Kelleher and Frederick Nolan. Even then folks thought there was little more to find out.

The audacious outlaw fought and raided his rival renegades without retribution.

True West Magazine “Doc Holliday is ten feet tall and weighs a ton.” — J.J. Webb at the Old Town Las Vegas Jail, 1880 This photo first came to our attention when it appeared in Frederick Nolan’s book The West of Billy the Kid. Nolan published it, in part, because the Kid spent time in this jail in December 1880, when Pat Garrett escorted him and members of his gang to Santa Fe. Recently some historians have speculated that Holliday is in the photograph, to the right of Webb (in shackles...

True West Magazine The Courageous Life and Death of Oliver Loving In 1867, beneath a bluff a few miles from Carlsbad, New Mexico, two Texas cattlemen—one of them a trail-hardened 52-year-old, the other a 23-year-old roughneck—were fighting for their lives, surrounded by a marauding party of Comanches. If recorded at all, such an event would have been no more than a blip on the historical calendar of the American West, but this one—and its aftermath—turned out to be one of the most amazi...