“All Stories TRUE!”: The Nonfiction Western Magazine Collection at Boise State University

This article describes the genre of specialized magazines known as “nonfiction western magazines.” These magazines focused on telling stories about the “Old West”—the nineteenth-century western United States. Joe Small founded the genre’s first magazine, True West, in 1953. Over the next thirty years, the magazine’s popularity increased and dozens of imitators were published. This article discusses the rise and decline of these magazines and also explores the magazines’ usefulness both as a source of western American history and as cultural artifacts themselves to study how the “Old West” was perceived during the period in which they were published.