True West Magazine

True West Magazine

Cover of True West, July 2005
Categories	American Old West
Frequency	12/year
First issue	1953
Country	United States
Based in	Cave Creek, Arizona
Website	truewestmagazine.com

True West Magazine (alternate title: True West) is an American magazine that covers the icons like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and Jesse James and relates American Old West history back to the present day to show the role contemporary Western heritage plays in keeping the spirit of the Old West alive today.

Started in 1953, True West is headquartered in Cave Creek, Arizona, and publishes monthly. It is the world's oldest, continuously-published Western American magazine.

True West observed its 60th anniversary in 2013, having offered past coverage in Blasts from the Past, beginning in its January 2013 issue.

True West began publication in 1953 under founder Joe Small of Austin, Texas. The idea for True West originated from a monthly feature in Small's first publication, Sporting Magazine. The magazine's recurring "Bad Man" article, about outlaws of the West, was the feature that generated the most reader mail and interest.True West was born to satisfy the readers' hunger for Old West history.

True West was the largest Western magazine on the market in the 1960s, selling hundreds of thousands of copies monthly at newsstands. The magazine benefited from an era featuring popular television western series such as Bonanza, The Lone Ranger, and Gunsmoke. At least one episode, "The Hunted" (1958), of the ABC/Warner Brothers series Sugarfoot is based on a True West article. Fans interested in the lives of real cowboys and cowgirls found those stories in True West.

After that, the early era of television westerns faded during the time of the Vietnam War and disco music. In 1979, Small sold the magazine to Chet Krause of Iola, Wisconsin. Small stayed on as publisher, with Krause as assistant publisher. The magazine saw a few moves — to Perkins, Oklahoma, then Stillwater — before the 1999 move to Cave Creek, Arizona. Among its new owners was Bob Boze Bell, who first discovered the magazine as a nine-year-old at Desert Drugs in Kingman, Arizona. The publication sparked a lifelong interest in the Old West. As the January 2000 issue was being edited, Bell flew to Stillwater to design the cover because he, "wanted to own the millennium."