Almost every day we still use words and slang phrases that came from the Old West. Words like brand, maverick and railroaded, along with phrases like climb down off your high horse and passing the buck. These creative words and phrases are poetic, descriptive and often quite humorous, like the saying "He's wearing a ten-dollar Stetson on a five-cent head," or "she's as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs." The memory of the Wild West is kept alive by the language that we use. Ride shotgun with me as we explore the meanings and historical origins of these Western words and slang phrases.

A sad and tragic tale of the American West is the near extermination of the buffalo. Herds that once numbered in the millions were almost totally eliminated from the face of the Earth. A few survived. How? Who saved them?

This is the story of a few brave, compassionate individuals who helped to save our national mammal, the buffalo. There was Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA, Samuel Walking Coyote, Charles Goodnight - cattle rancher, Charles "Buffalo" Jones and William T. Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo and influential friend of Teddy Roosevelt. In Yellowstone, our first national park, the buffalo herd was being decimated by poachers. A buffalo skull sold for $100 on the black market in the 1890s, the equivalent of $3000 today. The surviving buffalo herd was reduced to less than two hundred. In the bitter, cold sub-zero winters, the U.S. cavalry fought back. The buffalo almost followed the passenger pigeon into extinction. Today, they number nearly 300,000. Because of a few people helping to create a national shift in conciousness, they survived.

Robbins was country and Ronstadt was rock and roll. They were Arizona born and raised and growing up absorbed the sounds, the stories and the music of this region. Marty Robbins always called himself a "cowboy singer" and learned tales of the Old West from his grandfather, who was an Arizona Ranger. Linda Ronstadt's father immigrated to Tucson from Sonora, Mexico and she was raised in a musical family with an appreciation of their Mexican musical heritage. Both of them grew up to be American music superstars with wonderful, instantly recognizable singing voices and lifelong careers in music. This is their story.

On the eve of Christmas in 1944, twenty-five Nazi German prisoners-of-war escaped from the Papago Park POW camp on the outskirts of Phoenix and headed towards Mexico. These men were hardcore Nazis, ex-U-Boat commanders and submariners, who had successfully dug a nearly 200-foot underground tunnel that took four months to complete. Many people may have heard of this event, but few know the details. This presentation tells the story of what happened to these German POWs and the Arizona residents who encountered them.

In Arizona and throughout the West, three innovations helped make ranching and living possible: Windmills brought groundwater to the surface, barbed wire sectioned the vast landscape into parcels, and railroads moved men, women, families and materials from back East. In the old West, there were over eight million windmills, a man caught cutting a barbed wire fence was often found hanging from a rope, and railroads gave us time zones and the Blue Plate Special. Brave men and women won the West, but the new technology made it possible.

Should women be allowed to fly? In the early days of aviation, many people didn't think so. Flying was too dangerous and many early pilots were killed or seriously injured. At the Wright Flying School in Dayton, Ohio the Wright Brothers refused to accept female students.

In 1911, a mysterious new student, wearing a veil covering the face began taking flying lessons in Long Island, New York. This new student was a woman, her name was Harriet Quimby, and she became the first American woman and the second in the world to earn a pilot's license. She was soon followed by the very young Katherine Stinson, nicknamed The Flying Schoolgirl. Georgia Ann Thompson was married at age 12 and became a single mother at age 15. She also was the first woman to parachute out of a plane.

In the story of early aviation, most Americans know about Amelia Earhart and hardly anyone else. The early women aviation pioneers profiled in Barnstormers, Daredevils and Flying Waitresses deserve to be recognized. They were interesting, fascinating people who were ahead of their time and helped to change the culture of aviation, making it accessible to everyone.

Western historians estimate that two out of every eight cowboys on a cattle drive were black men. They were also miners, soldiers and farmers in the West. You would never know that if you grew up, as I did, watching Westerns on television and the movies. After the Civil War, many ex-slaves found themselves freed with no places to live, or job opportunities, so many headed out West. The first cow-boys were young men; Anglos, Hispanics and Black freedmen who were hired to help round up rogue longhorn cattle who were running wild in the Texas chaparral country. This is where the story begins. Black men and women were part of the struggle in the settlement of the American West, but their story has largely been forgotten and ignored. This presentation helps to change that.

Herb Jefferies was America's first and only African American singing cowboy. He appeared in movies and on stage for African-American audiences during the 1930s. He could ride, rope and sing with the best of them. After his movie cowboy career was over, he became a singer in the Duke Ellington band. This presentation will explore the life and career of Herb Jeffries, the Bronze Buckaroo.

Pulp fiction magazines sold for a dime and in the 1920s to the 1950s, they filled American newstands. Nobody admitted that they liked them, but everybody read them. They were American pop culture at its best and worst. Western magazines were the most popular. During their heyday in the 1930s, there were 162 different Western pulp fiction magazines and a couple of loyal readers included Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.

Western pulp fiction magazines helped to create and perpetuate many of the myths of the American West and it's how, along with Western movies, the rest of the world learned about our Western culture. Pulp writing was usually formulaic and cliched, but not always. Several well-known Western writers like Elmore Leonard, Jack London and Louis L'Amour wrote for pulp magazines. Classic Western movies like The Searchers, Red River and 3:10 to Yuma, first appeared as pulp stories.

The cover art was fantastic. It was American illustration at its best - bright, bold and energized - made to stand out and attract magazine buyers like bees to a field of wildflowers. Each cover illustration was originally an oil on canvas painting. Unappreciated, even by the artists themselves, the cover art was nearly all lost or destroyed. Pulp fiction magazines were replaced by paperbacks, comic books and television in the 1950s. The magazines disappeared from the newstands and hardly anyone lamented their loss or noticed when they were gone.