What adventuresome lad or lass hasn’t dreamed of sleeping Indian-style in a wickiup under the stars way out West? Here’s your chance: a whole village of wigwams (actually, tepees: a wigwam is arched or oval, without a point) available at reasonable rates, with color TV and ample parking.
Tornado was the greatest bull in rodeo history. Just outside the Cowboy Hall of Fame, he is interred along an ambling oath that takes visitors past some magnificent bronzes of cowboys as well as monuments to a select few of their best-remembers animals: Baldy (“A Great Cow Pony”), Steamboat (a horse, “Symbol of the Spirit of Wyoming”), Hell’s Angels (“Great Bucking Horse”), and Midnight (a horse: “Please, God, Rest His Soul”).
Every year as part of Tucson’s gala Fiesta de Los Vanqueros in late February, the city stages the longest nonmotorized parade in America: 350 Conestoga wagons, stagecoaches, buggies, buckboards, and fringe-top surreys, along with detachments of high-stepping horse and rider in full regalia.
Tombstone, site of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, bills itself as “The Town Too Tough to Die.”
Near this spot on Highway 89, the great cowboy movie actor Tom Mix died in a fatal one- car crash on October 12, 1940. He went out of the world as he had lives: fast and rolling in money.
Here’s the place to stock up on rubber tom-toms, child sixe feathered war bonnets, and deerskin moccasins in styles that haven’t changed since Lucy and Desi traveled West with the Merzes.
“We are the only salt house in North America,” said the woman in charge of the Salt Palace, and when we asked about salt houses on other continents she admitted that she had heard of none. So this may be the only salt house on earth!
When “Bonanza” first went on the air in 1959, the Ponderosa Ranch where it was supposed to take place did not exist except as soundstages in Hollywood. Outdoor scenes were filmed at the north shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada; at the beginning of each episode, the titles appeared over a burning map that shoed exactly where Ben Cartright and his three boys (Adam, Little Joe, and Hoss) lived.
Old Tucson consist of 140 buildings originally constructed in 1939 as a set for the movie Arizona, which took place in 1865 and featured some on thousand modern Tucsonians in roles as extras, playing their ancestors.
Old Rip was pet horned toad who belonged to the son of Eastland Justice of the Peace Ernest Wood, and who was put into the cornerstone of the town courthouse, alongside a Bible, when the building was dedicated in 1897.