This Week in the West

It’s lost to history when this dentist precisely decided his practice was too dull and that writing should be his life's pursuit. He may have been pulling a tooth or drilling a cavity, but as the 19th Century ended, Dr. Zane Grey knew he was bored and depressed with his current life. In the years that followed, despite publishers’ rejections and struggles with his mental health, Zane Grey became o...

George McJunkin stood at the summit of the Capulin Volcano in northern New Mexico and looked over the valley below. He had long since left his boyhood in slavery; he had made his own way. He was a Cowboy. To his west were the Sangre de Christo Mountains and spreading out in the valley below the volcano was the land that had become his home: The Dry Cimarron. He called it his “Promised Land.” What...

Freckles Brown had done a lot of living in his 46 years when he stepped into the arena in Oklahoma City in December of 1967. He was just a month shy of his birthday, which we remember this week. Brown was born January 18, 1921, so by the late 1960s he was a couple of decades older than some of his bullriding competitors.  We don’t know if Brown’s life flashed before his eyes that night in ‘67, whe...

In the summer of 1884, Theodore Roosevelt left New York and settled into a low-slung, log ranch house near the Little Missouri River, 35 miles north of Medora, North Dakota. Living on the ranch would transform Roosevelt, who had been known as an elite, Gilded Age intellectual, into a proponent of The Strenuous Life. He would challenge himself physically, embrace nature and do hard things.

Woodward Ritter had gone to the University of Texas to study the law. Yet here was, in his fourth year of college and his grades were a disaster. Ten law classes. Five F’s, three D’s and two C’s.  All his time, including when he should have been studying, had been taken up by his time singing, crisscrossing the country as a performer and the president of the UT glee club. But the law would never e...

On this week's episode of our podcast This Week in The West: He was born in New York and died in Connecticut, but perhaps no one defined America’s imagination about the West more than Frederic Remington.   Every day here at The Cowboy, we stroll past Remington’s remarkable works of art.   Along with Charles Russell and a handful of others, Remington helped create the archetypes of the West. It is...

We start with two men who were among the country’s most skilled explorers, personally hand-picked by Thomas Jefferson, to add an expansive new chapter to the story of the United States. With them was a pregnant 16-year-old (but she could have been younger), accompanying a man who had purchased her to become his “wife” a few years earlier. Ahead of them lay 5,000 miles of the unknown country. That...

Chester Reynolds was the visionary mind behind the creation of The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum almost 70 years ago, but tragically never stepped foot in the building. Find out more about his story in the latest episode of our podcast "This Week in The West." Each week we tell the stories of the people who shaped the American West - and are still shaping it today! Find us on your...

Today, we celebrate one of Oklahoma’s greatest artists, Harold Holden, who died this week a year ago, on December 6, 2023.   He was called just “H” by his friends. A self-taught sculptor, he became the icon who created icons all across our fine state.   A Will Rogers sculpture at Will Rogers International Airport? It’s a Harold Holden. A Cowboy in Oklahoma City’s Stockyards City? Yes, that, too. T...

He’d been in Hollywood since the silent pictures. He’d taken punches, fallen off horses, rolled down hills and gotten up each time. And in the summer of 1958, he was in Rome, standing behind a Roman chariot, preparing to shoot one of the greatest action sequences in movie history. Yakima Canutt had come a long way from Colfax, Washington, where he was born this week November 29, 1895. Follow us an...

He was called "The Elvis of Rodeo." He was Larry Mahan.  We’ve got to admit something right off the bat here, folks. When we first looked at the biography of Larry Mahan, we thought, “Can we fit all of that into a podcast that we, believe it or not, try to keep to only seven to eight minutes ?” But we’re sure Larry, one of the grittiest and greatest rodeo cowboys in history, wouldn’t want us just...

Why do we get a spike in visitors from Europe every summer at The Cowboy? And what does that have to do with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath? It all comes from Route 66, the legendary highway, born this week in 1926.  This Week in The West is produced at The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.  You can read scripts of past episodes on our blog: https://nationalcowb...

We begin this week as any Oklahoman should, with one of the West’s greatest storytellers: William Penn Adair Rogers, known to the world as Will Rogers, born on this week, Nov. 4, 1879 in Oologah, Indian Territory.

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma is launching a new podcast. "This Week in West" will begin November 4, so subscribe today.  Our Museum, known as The Cowboy, helps people become more interested in and better understand the enduring legacy of our American West. Each week on this podcast, look back and share some of the most compelling stories of the people and events th...