Pioneer Lineage In The Bootheel of New Mexico

 September 10, 2026

My mother came from a ranching family of five sisters and they all hailed from the Bootheel of New Mexico. Like their mother, they were funny and generous, but the Guess Girls were not to be trifled with.

Daily Whip Out: "Fierce and Determined"

This is my grandfather Bob Guess, below, who I am named for, and his wife, Lue, and their newborn daughter, deep in the bootheel.

Bob and Lue Guess with their first daughter

Sadie Pearl
.

  And, here is their third daughter, born in Lordsburg, Lillie Louise, who everyone called Bobbi.

Bobbi Guess who caught the eye

of a buck private from Thompson, Iowa

Army Air Corp Private 

Allen P. Bell

And, the rest is back story to this story.

Peach Springs, or Bust, Baby!

"We all grew up a little bent."

—Trudy Peart

Glitches In The Hardware, Cobwebs In The Wheelhouse

 September 9, 2026

   Signs fade and fall into the road. Only the memories remain. Technology keeps moving and an old man gets left behind. For some reason my capacity to load images on this blog hit a snag, so here I sit with zero images at my disposal and only a keyboard to type words. Well, isn't that just ducky.

"There is more power in telling little than in telling all."

—Mark Rothko

Mucho Mas Dust Meets The Druther Brothers

 September 8, 2026

   Twin brothers, born to a migrant mother, grow up in the high mountain town of Opodepe. From this common experience they take two very different paths. One of them becomes an outlaw and the other settles in the village where they were born and starts a family.

Daily Whip Out: "The Druther Brothers"

   They may look exactly the same but there's where the differences begin.

Daily Whip Out: "Sunset Rider #27"

   Yes, I have a thing about epic storm rides. . .

Daily Whip Out: "Big Storm & Rider"

   And, when it comes to random dust, nobody tops Granthum P. Hooker's oft heard exclamation:

"When small men cast long shadows the sun is about to set."

—Old Vaquero Saying

When History Gets Messy Go With Jesse

 September 7, 2026

   Is it just me, or has the world taken a hard right?

Daily Whip Out: "The Rise of The Regulators"

   Still love whipping out the big ol' sugarloafs and the dudes who wear them.

Daily Whip Out: "Sonoran Bad Boy"

Also, found this old photo and added my two cents.

Daily Whip Out: "Soldados On The Border"

   Man, I dig that cat, third from the right. So badass.

When History Gets Messy Go With The Flow

"We all should embrace and even celebrate history’s messy nature: Question it, debate it, get down in the dirt and wrestle with it. . . History is a conversation, and I never intended to do all the talking. History is also an exercise in failure; the goal is to fail as little as possible, but those of us who write history will always get things wrong and leave things out."

—Jonathan Eig

Daily Whip Out: "Jesse the Bushwhacker"

(It was on this date, September 7, 1876, that the James-Younger gang totally underestimated the resistance of a certain, small Minnesota town.)

"The older I get, the less I seem to know."

—Jonathan Eig

Mazatal Riders, El Encanto Ducks & Mas Bastardos Por Favor

 September 6, 2026

   Revising revisions seems to be a recurring exercise in my current routine.

Daily Revised Whip Out: "Mazatal Rider" 

(first pass 08/10/2020, second pass 08/17/2022)

Second Pass: "Mazatal Rider"

Mas Bastardos Por Favor

  I must have a hundred stories saved up that I want to do in some form or another. Maybe when someone takes over the editorial reins at a certain magazine I can finally get them out and about.

Daily Whip Out: "The Baja Jinny"

In The Land of Ten Thousand Bastardos

El Encanto Anyone?

Kathy and I had lunch at El Encanto in Cave Creek yesterday. Had a window seat that looks out on the pond and we had two visitors check us out. A tortoise and a duck. Neither really looked at us, but I knew what they wanted.

The Tale of The Tortoise And The Duck

Plato's Retreat

  It was some 2,415 years ago that Plato nailed the four stages of democracy. Guess which phase we are currently in:

• Freedom

• Excess

• Chaos

• Strongman

"The ancients have stolen all our best ideas."

—Old Vaquero Sying

History Lessons Learned, Teachers Dissed & Seventies Stoners Dismissed

 September 5, 2026

   Some of my old classmates have been dissing—online, of course—one of our English teachers at MCUHS in Kingman. I had my issues with her as well, but it didn't seem right to me.

    It's all part of a buildup to an all-60s-class reunion next month, called appropriately The Big Hair Reunion, after, well, our penchant in the 1960s for having big hair:

Beehive Waitress at

the Beehive Cafe

Big Hair in Kingman Town

History Lessons Learned

   As I approach the end of my editorial leadership role at True West magazine I have been reflecting on what I actually learned in the 27 year process. To be clear: I came for the Truth, with a capital T. I wanted to dig deep and find out, once and for all, what part of our Western history is true and what part is false. The short answer is, from where I sit now, there is no final answer on what is false and what is true. As the Old Vaqueros are fond of saying, "What's true in the morning is a lie by sundown." It's a moving target. And, at the end of the day, some stories are simply more believable than others.

End of Story?

   Actually, the end of the story is that there is no end to the story. The bigger truth is that time destroys everything.

   And, speaking of self-righteous pontificators who I can no longer stand, I'm so old. . .

I Remember The Stoner Age of Arizona Media

Seventies Stoners

(A Few of The Enlightened Journalists I Knew

Back In The Day)

A Flashback to The Eighties Media Landscape

BBB as publisher of the Arizona Republic dealing with the public relations representative Bill Shover

   I really dig that negative space on the chair I am sitting in. Also, this is a very decent caricature of Bill and the desk phone is rendered quite well. Simple, yet immediately identifiable.

"Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym."

—Dewey Finn (Jack Black), in "School of Rock"

"Everything started going wrong when we abandoned the cause of teaching civics."

—Bret Stephens

If Only Teddy Roosevelt Had Been at The O.K. Corral

 September 4, 2026

   A follow up on Theodore's Dakota adventures.

Daily Whip Out: "Teddy & The Boat Thieves"

Stranger Than Fiction

   Three fascinating details about Teddy Roosevelt's capture of the "Boat Thieves":

1. Teddy had the where-with-all to bring along a bulky camera so he could record the event. This is in 1886, a mere five years after the O.K. Corral fight (which ironically took place outside a photo gallery where no one took a picture!).

2. Teddy also brought along a book, Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," to read while in hot pursuit of the outlaws.

3. After Teddy delivered his prisoners to the sheriff in Dickerson, North Dakota, they were sent to prison and one of them, Mike Finnigan, wrote to Roosevelt and said, "Should you stop at Bismarck this fall make a call to the Prison. I should be glad to meet you."

   If I saw any of this in a Western, I wouldn't believe it.

"History is a cruel trick played on the dead by the living."

—Old Vaquero Saying

The Ha Ha Handbook Meets Mad Magazine

 September 3, 2026

   As promised, here is the back story on the incredible image of Teddy and the boat thieves:

A BBB enhanced illustration of the capture

   In the spring of 1886, rancher Theodore Roosevelt discovered that three thieves had stolen his only boat from his Elkhorn ranch and escaped downriver. Taking along two of his cowboys, Roosevelt tracked them for three days down an ice-clogged river and eventually captured them at gunpoint. “We took them absolutely by surprise,” Teddy remembered in his 1888 book, "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail".

   Roosevelt kept watch over the captives while his cowboys chopped firewood. At some point one of his cowboys took two pictures of Teddy guarding the thieves.

“I kept guard over the three prisoners, who were huddled into a sullen group some twenty yards off, just the right distance for the buckshot in the double-barrel.”

The original photos are in the Harvard College Library Theodore Roosevelt Collection

More AI Angst

   Let me be clear about our AI usage: yes, David Wright used AI to insert the Hawken (correct rifle) into Mariano Medina's hands. Is it any different than tracing the photo of the gun on a tracing of the actual photo and then painting the whole thing together. It is not, but it sure is quicker. And, that is the name of the game we are currently playing. In True West magazine we play the newsstand game but we always tell you what is real and what isn't. It's that simple.

   But enough about AI manipulation. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of how cool it was in the au natural old days. . .

Guns Out Sedello!

   Yes, that would be Jeanne Sedello who once dated Ned Warren's son and who also had the best laugh on Morning Drive (KSLX).

   Found this in my rejection pile and gave it another go.

Daily Whip Out:

"We Rode Into The Land of The Chigones"

   And, here's another project I want to pursue.

The Ha Ha Handbook

   I have long wanted to gift my grandkids a playful guide to life. Something akin to the Boy Scouts Manual crossed with Mad magazine. Of course, the bottom line is that it needs to make them laugh, but perhaps it just might have a deeper meaning which might make a difference in their lives. Here is the demo I am aiming at.

Bunkhouse Cousins with Uno

Retiring Minds Want to Know

   Got this update from a fellow author who is retiring from his gig at the Arizona Republic:

"I do mean it when I say nothing will really change. I am retiring from writing and hiking only so I can spend more time writing and hiking."

—Roger Naylor 

   And, I have to say I agree with Jerry Olinski on what is happening with the current AI manipulation of old photos: "I hated when they came out with the enhancement programs but with AI we will never have a real picture. Historical pictures will really be a thing of the past."

—Jerry Olinski Sr.

   And, speaking of enhancement programs and machines. . .

“If we have built towering cities, we have raised even higher the cloud of megadeath. If people are as grass before God, they are as nothing before their machines.”

—Wendell Berry

Ay Yi AI!

 September 2, 3036

    Like everyone else on the planet we're wrestling with AI issues at True West. Here's the deal: Dan Harshberger and I have been producing photo-art covers for the past 27 years. In a nutshell, that would be artistic renderings based on authentic photos. The goal for our True West covers has always been to give readers a better look beyond most of the stodgy photographs of Old West characters. You know what I mean: the formal bust shot in banker-style-clothing. Often we will take a known photo and marry it to another image and then paint over it to give it a different look, trying to keep the integrity of the original photograph, but at the same time making it pop on the newsstand as something "new" but still authentic. This is a good example of that:

BBB version of Kit Carson in buckskin

And, here's a couple others.

BBB Crazy Horse

(There are no known photos of Crazy Horse

so we weren't really on shaky ground here)

BBB Bass Reeves cover

   So, in the next issue we ran up against a similar problem with a certain, crusty old Mountain Man named Mariana Medina. Thanks to artist David Wright, who sent us this excellent photo of Medina seated.

Mountain Man Mariano Medina

   Now, this photo will be great for the inside feature, but on the cover we want to illustrate him with his legendary Hawken rifle and we have a photo of his actual rifle! So, David Wright married the two on his computer and sent us this.

   But we were concerned it looks a tad mechanical—and too AI!—and it needs more of a softer, artistic touch, so I went here.

Medina by BBB

      And, the moral is: we will go to great lengths to avoid the AI tag. Perhaps we are splitting hairs here, but I believe we are doing an artistic take on a known photo of Medina and his famous rifle and we have packaged them together for a dynamic cover, and, we are being honest about how we got there. And speaking of being honest, here is another artistic take on a famous photo.

Teddy & The Captured Boat Bandits

(photo montage by Dan Harshberger and BBB)

   That story tomorrow.

"All roads eventually lead back to the interest you had as a child."

—Old Vaquero Saying

The Dusty Chaps, circa 1977

Makin' Plans at Contradiction Junction

 September 1, 2026

   Ever since I read that profound quote from Marcel Duchamp I have been so tuned into how contradition is in everything, including this blog. Crazy. Seems so obvious to me now but it sure took me long enough to get here (hint: eight decades!).

Contradiction Junction

   The voice in your head is not you. Really? Then why is it telling me right now that you are totally full of crap?

   Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past. Really? Forgive me, but I rather enjoy beating myself up over things I can never change.

   Religion is for people who fear hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there. Okay, I can't really be snotty about this one.

   The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Let it go and you will be free. Really? Then who will I have to blame? I need someone to blame, dude.

   Sheesh.

Not bad advice.

   When we got back from San Diego last weekend, this was waiting for me.

A nicely framed article I did for the

Ninth Circuit Historical Society

that was published in their

Western Legal History journal, Volume 36.

It's a review of John Boessenecker's excellent book, "Ride The Devil's Herd"

   Rebecca Edwards and I are compiling and designing a short list of Westerns I'd like to see and this is one of them.

Daily Whip Out:

"Changing Woman 4"

   Lore is a word that treats fiction as a set of discoverable facts. You know, like this: my goal is to be the world's most mature 80-year-old.

   Wish me luck.

"It's dark because you're trying too hard. Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them."

—Aldous Huxley

Highlights And Sketchy Advice From Another Sketchbook

 August 30, 2026

   Finished another sketchbook today. I believe this is in the neighborhood of 177 sketchbooks I have filled with Daily Whip Outs and ideas. Celebrated by going for a walk while it's still in the mid-eighties out.

Nice sunrise this morning

   In the Contradiction Zone, I have come to realize it pays to be hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. Why? I'll tell you why.

   The biggest risk of all is to play it safe.

   Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

   Fame is nothing. Solitude is everything.

   History without discomfort is propaganda.

   Where you are standing was once the goal.

   It's not the end. It's the start of something NEW!

   And, here are a few of my favorite quotes I found while working in the sketchbook (and I wrote them down in the margins):

"If you feel pain you're alive. If you feel the pain of others, you're human."

—Leo Tolstoy

"History sighs, repeats itself."

—The Onion

"If you give them a lot of film, the committee takes over."

—John Ford

"The best kind of cinema is where action is long and dialogue short."

—John Ford

"His cinema, so clean and direct and naive, so human and dignified, has left an indelible mark on the cinema that has followed."

—Sergio Leone, on John Ford

"I grew up with half the outlaws in Mohave County and I'm proud to say I am related to the other half."

—BBB

"People who hate each other love Dolly Parton."

—Fran Lebowitz

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

—G. K. Chesterton

"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame."

—Salmon Rushdie

"What was true in the morning, at evening has become a lie."

—Old Vaquero Saying

"Honor the living. The dead can take care of themselves."

—Old Vaquero Saying

"Up there, he's my sidekick. Down here, it's the other way 'round."

—Jake Kidder, Arizona Ranger

"Water wouldn't sound so beautiful without rocks in its way."

—Marcus Aurelius/ Old Vaquero Saying

"The only truth is music."

—Jack Kerouac

Self-editing too soon can break the mystery."

—Rodney Crowell

"The most dangerous form of blindness is believing your perspective is the only reality."

—Fridrich Nietzsche

"Everything Put Together Falls Apart"

—Paul Simon (1972)

Best Advice Yet

   Stay weird. Eventually they will call it art.

On The Bad Headline Front

   Boomers are leaving behind more art than anyone wants.

   Ouch!

   A sneak peek at one of the Westerns I'd sure like to see:

Three Rode Together.

Barely.

Strange But True

   Ironically the only place left without ads is in a book.

"People have beautiful things to say about you, but you must die first."

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Chili Today, Hot Tamale!

 August 29, 2026

   Back from a long road trip. Good to be home. One of the highlights was pulling into Gila Bend and it was 110 degrees (in Buckeye it was also 110). Yes, this is an obscure, but classic, lyric from a legendary honkytonk band from the Old Pueblo.

Goodbye to Mission Beach Views

"In Gila Bend it's 110, in Buckeye it's 102

Summer's here and I just can't find a way to stop lovin' you. . ."

—The Dusty Chaps, "Heatsroke"

(bonus lyric: "Chili today, hot tamale. . ."

The Parade of Humanity

 August 25, 2026

    For me, one of the joys of being on Mission Beach is sitting in the front yard and watching the humanity go by on the boardwalk. One of the bigger trends in the last year is the number of people wearing earpieces and skating by, or riding bikes, or merely jogging, and they are all carrying on a conversation with someone in the ether, but it looks so strange to see them intent on making it along the sidewalk, but as they streak by, you hear them say, loudly. . .

"I'm going to see her Tuesday. . ."

Or:

"To be fair, you don't like anything I. . ."

Or:

"She hated it, but we never got a why. . ."

   And, then this short, stocky guy, who was walking slowly barked this out:

"And all we had were those little Allen wrenches like you find in a toolbag. . ."

  Yes I took photos of them as well, but I'll post more when I get home.

Daily Whip Out:

"Changing Woman Changes"

"Here's how messed up the country is right now. I actually know who my congressperson is."

—Matt Goldrich

Goat Therapy (Goat Ropers Need Love Too)

 August 24, 2026

   Fourth day on the beach and just saw this old hippie walking along the sea wall in front of our rented condo.  

Old Wall Walking Hippie And His Pet Goat

   When we asked him why he had a goat, he told a sad tale about three deaths in the family, too much alcohol and drugs in his life and he just decided to buy a goat and walk on the boardwalk and make people smile. He succeeded at that.

"The most dangerous form of blindness is believing your perspective is the only reality."

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Beach Time Bingo

 August 22, 2026

   Been on the road for two days with no Wi-Fi. Kind of relaxing actually. Landed here.

Mission Beach in the rain

   Before we left, I finsihed up a couple set pieces for Westerns I'd like to see.

Daily Whip Out: "Mickey Free Rides Away"

Daily Whip Out: "Sepia Maiden"

   And, as for the notion that history moves in terms of themes and eras. . .

"Western History now starts in the post-WW2 era. Enough with Wyatt Earp, Jesses James, Billy the Kid, etc. There's nothing new to be said there -- and nobody under the age of 80 wants to read it."

—A Punk I Know

History We Can Believe Is A Real Sticking Piont

 August  19, 2026

   Have you ever noticed that when you know more about any subject, it gets even more complicated?

The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period of one's life."

—Old Vaquero Saying

   And, by extension, ditto for our country and the entire world.

10 New Westerns I Am Dying to See

   Let's face it, the current crop of Westerns has kind of mushed out in terms of tired themes and the same old same ol' hackneyed characters. That's why it's time for mine.

For starters, give me more Taps, please.

(all ten are in the works)

   This just in: The History we were taught when we were growing up was, to say the least, flawed. The good news is, this ain't the first time, nor will it be the last.

Where Is The True History of Anything?

   It has been my life goal to show some truth in our past, but it has been mighty tough and mighty thin. The good guys won every single time? Ha. ("History is written by the winners.") There is the joke right at the front end of the explanation.

   Here I am at the end of the road and what exactly did I discover about the "true" West?

   The past is almost unknowable because of all the endless details that keep popping up and upsetting the "accepted" version of events. Who said it and why? And when? And what was their ax to grind?

   The one positive aspect of the journey has been the people I have met who had a similar passion.     Of course, some were flaming assholes, but enough about me.

"The infighting among historians is so vicious because there's so little at stake."

—Academic Truth #1