For nearly a half-century, Las Vegas, New Mexico, held "Wild West" adventures rivaling Cheyenne's Frontier Days, the Calgary Stampede, and Oregon's Pendleton Round Up. The San Miguel County seat annually hosted full-dress cowpunchers, Native Americans, ranchers, dance bands, artists and writers, moviemakers, and rodeo performers. The Las Vegas Cowboys' Reunion became legendary in western lore, drawing such ten-gallon names as Tom Mix, Jim Shoulders, Montana Belle, Prairie Rose Henderson, and Roosevelt's Rough Riders. Dick Bills and his nephew, Glen Campbell, played at the "Big Balls," and the reunions drew famous western artists, such as Randall Davey. Join author Pat Romero for these reunion tales based on Git Fer Vegas, Cowboy , the exhibit she curated at the City of Las Vegas Museum and Rough Rider Memorial Collection.

Las Vegas, New Mexico, is 70 years older than the Nevada city of the same name. Eleven years after its founding in 1835, it was the first settlement in Mexico reached by invading US troops in the Mexican-American War. In later years, it was an intensely violent place, an equal to Dodge City and Tombstone. Gunmen such as Billy the Kid, Mysterious Dave Mather, Doc Holliday, and others walked the streets of Las Vegas. The town also built grand houses and mercantile buildings. It rivaled Albuquerque and Santa Fe for importance and boasted one of the state's two streetcar systems. Here, Teddy Roosevelt announced his availability to serve as president, and Tom Mix filmed his earliest movies.

Simpson offers a biography of her mother, one of the first female journalists in New Mexico who was known for her informative, influential, and inspiring writing.

In 1866, Charles Goodnight and his partner Oliver Loving began rounding up feral cattle in Texas, forming herds to be driven north into the immense unoccupied grazing land in northeastern New Mexico. The counties of Colfax, Mora, Harding, Union, and San Miguel became the location of some of the great historic ranches of the West. From the 11,000-acre Chase Ranch in Colfax County to the 650,000-acre Bell Ranch in San Miguel County, these ranches have been home to several generations of ranching families. Pioneer ranchers such as Manley M. Chase, Frank and Charles Springer, Samuel Watrous, and Albert K. Mitchell established a tradition of perseverance, self-sufficiency, and sustainable range management that continues to the present day.

The 1980s were a miasma of new thoughts, fashions, music, and ideas and for many people a respite from the turbulent ’70s. The city of Santa Fe is bursting with the new veneer. Even so, there are dark clouds roiling over the city and its inhabitants, stoking fires that will consume the innocent as well as the guilty. The next generation of the Grayhawk clan and their close relatives and friends has begun to make its mark, many choosing the professions of their parents or friends. Although their development is generally positive, the plague of the decade has infiltrated their lives and changed the course of many. Besides the personal impacts of life, the clan finds themselves battling evil on two fronts. One antagonist is executing vengeance on people who have wrought inhuman savagery on the world, seeking true “eye for an eye” justice. The other seeks a much more personal vengeance directed at Memphis Grayhawk and his family and lurks in the background until the time is ready to strike. The passion and determination of all factions heats up until it bursts into a roaring conflagration. Will it consume only the unremorseful perpetrators, or will the flames of hatred burn everything in sight, leaving only ash and destruction?

The fourth estate.