November 13, 2025
Like most Old West aficianados who read True West magazine I love the classic American frontier era we cover which has been defined as post-Civil War to the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1899.
(1953)
Of course, there are exceptions, with the mountain man era being earlier and some Old West stories pushing into the Twentieth Century, but the 1880s has definitely been the sweet spot for the past 73 years. And, what was true for the history we cover has also been true of popular Old West history in books, movies and TV shows.
Has The Sweet Spot Moved?
But now, according to our editor at large, Stuart Rosebrook, "The new sweet spot for a period Western has moved from the 1880s to somewhere between 1926 and 1976." Wow! When did this happen? Stuart goes on to explain, "Since 2013 a major shift has occurred in non-fiction, fiction, film, television, and streaming production, with the traditional mass market paperback Western dying a silent death last year, and only two major, national publishers still selling 19th-century traditional Western novels, Pinnacle and Wolfpack. In 2025, we have had a nice resurgence of New York imprints publishing big Western histories (Paul Andrew Hutton's 'The Undiscovered Country' leads the way), but it is nowhere near where it was a decade ago, and does not change the fact that every university press has deemphasized their new 19th-century monographs and shifted their emphasis to the 20th- and 21st-centuries. What about film, television and streaming? The answer is as straight up as a shot of whiskey: Old West Westerns have been replaced by modern Westerns and 1970s period pieces such as 'Dark Winds' and 'Americana,' 'Longmire' and anything that Taylor Sheridan writes and produces."
