True West Magazine
The Courageous Life and Death of Oliver Loving
In 1867, beneath a bluff a few miles from Carlsbad, New Mexico, two Texas cattlemen one of them a trail-hardened 52-year-old, the other a 23-year-old roughneck were fighting for their lives, surrounded by a marauding party of Comanches. If recorded at all, such an event would have been no more than a blip on the historical calendar of the American West, but this one and its aftermath turned out to be one of the most amazing examples of courage, loyalty and sheer grit in all the annals of the frontier.