In our July 2024 issue, we are expanding the West and celebrating the magic of Western travel — from wild Idaho to UXU Ranch to historic Indigenous sites and beyond.
“I was a little boy on a reservation, laughing when my little brother or cousins got bucked off. But not so much laughing when I got bucked off. We used to chase the shadows that the clouds had made across the prairie, pretending we were hunting buffalo.”
Mo Brings Plenty shared that memory in the opening of his acceptance speech for the inaugural New Horizon Award at the Western Heritage Awards in early April. The Lakota actor, beloved for his role in Yellowstone, is the American Indian affairs coordinator for several Taylor Sheridan projects and the American Indian cultural consultant at this publication. He’s a storyteller and a cultural bridge builder. He’s also a cowboy — and a rancher, a family man, and a descendant of Lakota warriors who fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Mo, like all of us, is more than one thing.
The West, too, is more than one thing. Its diversity is one of the attributes that we love and that we celebrate in our July 2024 issue. We travel from the rugged terrain of Idaho to the historic UXU Ranch in Wyoming to Native lands throughout New Mexico, Colorado, and beyond. Everywhere our storytelling missions take us, evidence of the varied splendor of the American West abounds.
From mesa and valley, canyon and bluff, river and mountain, it’s apparent that a higher power believes in diversity. “If it weren’t so,” Mo pointed out, “then we would all be one race of people. It would only be one species of trees and one species of animals with four legs.”
Mo Brings Plenty appeared on the cover of the August/September 2021 issue of C&I.
Over the last three decades, C&I has reported from places as diverse as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where Mo Brings Plenty was born, to The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where he was honored alongside folks like Reba McEntire, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award, and the late cutting horse legend Buster Welch, who was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners.
Wherever we go and whomever we meet in the West, there’s always more dimensions to discover. Queen of Country and Oklahoma native Reba McEntire told C&I that she always wanted to be a better barrel racer, like her friend Gail Petska. And lifelong Texan Buster Welch is remembered by his family as not just a horseman and rancher, but as a voracious reader and lifelong learner.
Kevin Costner, who graces our cover for the seventh time in the July 2024 issue, proves again and again that he’s more than just one thing. We remember when Dances With Wolves came out in 1990 and it became abundantly clear that he wasn’t simply an actor. The actor-director-producer-screenwriter (and frontman of American country-rock band Kevin Costner & Modern West) is offering yet more exciting proof that he’s a multifaceted multihyphenate: the much-anticipated debut of his multipart epic Horizon: An American Saga.
There’s always so much more to know about each other, ourselves, and the world we inhabit — and no better way to learn than to get out there. Whether you’re going by plane, train, automobile, horse, or armchair, wherever your travels take you, may your journeys of discovery be as diverse and revelatory as the land and people who make up the wondrous place that is the American West.
Where in the West have you visited lately? Email [email protected] to tell us about your favorite Western destinations.
