The Real Wild West: Deadwood, Vegas, and Everything In Between... in a brand new episode of TWW!

Good luck, sister. Thanks. Coming up on today's Wild West, we'll saddle up with the Pony Express and re-ride its legendary 1,800-mile trail. He said it was probably the best experience in his life working for Paul Bond. They call it the legend worn by legends, Paul Bond Boots, the amazing story of the man behind the brand. Plus, we'll take you to Cowboy Christmas in Las Vegas. It's a great place to come. And historic Deadwood, South Dakota. Last stop for Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. It's all next on Today's Wild West. The Wild West. It's still out there. We'll show you how to find it. This is Today's Wild West. It just played a very vital role in the final settlement of the United States. Deadwood, South Dakota, final resting place of Old West icons Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane is my heroine. Whose graves in Deadwood's Mount Moriah Cemetery are a must-see for the four million visitors who flock to this historic Wild West town every year, like I did on my motorcycle back in 1980. It's history, and I'm a history lover. My father took me to see Calamity Jane when I was about six, started a love affair with the Wild West. She died seven miles from here in Terry, South Dakota. Deadwood ran and got her body and buried her next to Wild Bill. And that was 1903. Deadwood was already marketing in 1903. It was genius. History is our economic engine for Deadwood. The entire 19th century town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And it's in honor of our role in the American West. Which you can tour with a stagecoach ride down Main Street. Driven by guys whose families have been doing this for more than 100 years. The days is 76. It doesn't touch. Been doing it ever since this started. That was 103 years ago. The Deadwood stage that Buffalo Bill made famous in his Wild West show ran here until 1890, when railroad service finally came to town. The horse-drawn transportation continued in the surrounding area well into the early 1900s. Deadwood's role in the American West is very important. Deadwood didn't even exist when the Panic of 1873 triggered America's first Great Depression. The railroads had basically bankrupted the United States. With thousands of bank and business failures and massive unemployment that left people desperate. Custer comes through here in 1874 and finds gold, and everybody rushed to the Black Hills. Wild Bill Hickok, famous gunfighter and lawman, arrived in Deadwood Gulch from Cheyenne in July 1876, the same day as Calamity Jane. Wild Bill was a handsome man, so they only met when they came to Deadwood on the same wagon train. That's the first time they met. They arrived on July 12, 1876, so Wild Bill was only in Deadwood about three weeks prior to his murder. Hickok was gunned down August 3, playing poker at the No. 10 Saloon, holding a pair of aces and eights, known today as Dead Man's Hand. That Old West drama is reenacted for tourists every day in the summer. And you can get away with murder four times a day. Nah. Ain't that right, Wild Bill? Hey, shut up. You can do better. That summer of 76 was incredible. You know, it was the centennial of the United States. You have the Great Sioux War. You have Custer's Last Stand. You have the gold rush into the Black Hills. There was a lot going on in that year. Calamity Jane was the frontier woman who dressed like the men and drank and swore like them too. Think about how difficult it was for a woman to be in this part of the country at that time. She couldn't read, she couldn't write, but she was learning how to fit and survive in a man's world. So we celebrate Calamity Jane for that and for many other reasons. Like her compassionate heart of gold. She helped out during the smallpox epidemic here in Deadwood and although she has a very raucous background, she was a very good person too. The town Wild Bill knew in 1876, burned down just three years later. Lantern tips over in the Empire Bakery, catches that building on fire, and next to that is a hardware store. Several kegs of black powder explode, cinders go flying all over, and when it's all done, there's over 300 buildings burnt. But the rebuilding began as soon as the ground cooled off. What burnt up was log structures, canvas structures. It was boomtown architecture. And when it rebuilt, it really rebuilt itself for the longevity of this community in the Victorian architecture we see today with bricks and mortar. With ongoing preservation efforts paid for by the gaming legalized here in 1989. We made a promise with the citizens of South Dakota when we legalized gaming 35 years ago That We would use the funds for that to preserve our historic resources. Those resources include four museums. It's the Potato Creek Johnny Gold Nugget. Like the Adams Museum. And it was discovered by a man in 1929 after he had been searching for gold for 38 years. you. Whose collection includes a 10,000 pound locomotive hauled here in 1879 by bull train from the train depot in Bismarck, North Dakota. At one mile per hour. To work the Homestake Gold Mine. Slowest trip in the history of man, I think. The engine was donated in 1932. But how do you get an engine like that into a brand new museum? You cut a hole in the south wall and you lay down its own set of track and it comes in under its own steam power. So here it sits today. The Homestake Gold Mine in nearby Lead, South Dakota, which operated until 2003, made the Deadwood area very prosperous. There was so much money around here. So with the Great Depression, we didn't feel it. Lead and Deadwood didn't feel it like the rest of the country because of that mine. But Deadwood dwindled over the years. Even its infamous bordellos were shut down by a federal investigation in 1980. Today, one of them is a museum. We had some rough patches, Mark. We absolutely did. But when South Dakota legalized gaming for Deadwood, a new gold rush was on. The crowds came back, and so did the town. Gaming saved us. That's an honest statement. And to this day, it helps us in so many ways. Without it, it would be devastating to Deadwood. It's a shinier Deadwood than the one I first visited in 1976, but a good friend and I posed for this picture. Well, look at this place. I mean, how could you not like it, right? Yeah, there's a little bit of gold around too, so... But Deadwood is still the real deal, the quintessential Wild West town. And we haven't even talked about all there is to see and do here in the Black Hills of South Dakota, like the 1880 train, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Mount Rushmore, and Custer State Park, where the buffalo still roam. It was December 29th, 1890, when the railroad comes into town. That happens to be the same day of Wounded Knee. So to me, that's the closing of the American West. And... Deadwood gets connected to the outside world with railroad. As Wild Bill knew, Deadwood is a must-see destination for anyone who wants to experience today's Wild West. Up next, the Pony Express rides again. It's sometime before dawn, somewhere in Wyoming, on the annual Pony Express re-ride As a rider with a buddy retraces his part of the legendary 1,800 mile route crossing Express re-ride. eight states, from Sacramento, California to St. Joseph, Missouri. The Real Pony Express lasted just 19 months, from early April 1860 to October 26, 1861, offering a then lightning-fast way to get a letter to California in just 10 days. The annual re-ride follows the same route with the same 10-day deadline. With more than 700 volunteer horseback men, women, and children relay riding 24/7, carrying real mail in a mochila, just like they did back in the day. The mochila is a four-pouch leather creation that fits over a saddle, carries up to 20 pounds of mail, and can be quickly taken on and off a saddle. Even in the 21st century, the beautiful back roads and trails of the American West the re-ride follows Good luck, sister. Thanks, sir. can feel desolate and remote. So just imagine what it was like to be here in 1860 as a 15-year-old boy, galloping horseback all alone, carrying the mail through all kinds of weather, including blizzards, through what was then a wilderness ruled by native Indian tribes who didn't appreciate trespassers. Not to mention grizzly bear, millions of buffalo, and countless other dangers. Perhaps that's why the ads for riders supposedly read, Wanted. Young, skinny, wiry fellas, not over 18. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. And someone said, wouldn't it be cool if the rider portrayed themselves as the original rider, Warren Boston Upson, who came through right by the museum. And I said, what the heck, I'll do it. 25-year-old Warren Upson was the first to ride east from California on the pony's first day of service. And for the next 19 months, he'd carry the mail over the toughest part of the route, crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains to Genoa, Nevada, sometimes in blinding snowstorms, then back again. There are some tribes. A daring life retold by enthusiastic reenactor Kim Harris. And I knew nobody would believe I was an 18-year-old, 120-pound rider, but it was just fun to tell the history from his point of view. And after that, people started asking us to do it other places. Riders were considered heroes of the West, typically riding 100 miles as fast as they could, switching horses at relay stations every 10 miles or so. But during Indian troubles on the trail, Pony Bob Haslam once rode 380 miles, 190 miles one way, resting nine hours, then riding back, despite being shot in the jaw by an arrow on the return trip. Three riders were killed along the trail by Indians during the 19-month run of the Pony Express. A dangerous occupation for sure, but what an exciting adventure it must have been for courageous young men. Today, it's still a thrill to participate in the ride. Remember the day by autographing the mohila. But safety comes first. Horse riders who must use roadways get an escort. Something could easily go wrong with cars and horses. And many others ride with a buddy. Congress made the Pony Express route a National Historic Trail in 1992. Do you just have a family every year? Yeah. I've been doing it. I'm 40, and I've been doing it since I was 5 or 6. A trail the National Pony Express Association brings back to life for 10 days every June as its members, easy to spot in their red shirts and brown vests, live their dream in today's Wild West. 1968, John Wayne came down here and ordered three pairs of boots. Up next, the legend worn by legends, Paul Bond boots. Paul Bonds are legendary in the cowboy and rodeo world. Steve McQueen, Paul Newman. Johnny Cash, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and many more, all owners of custom-made Paul Bond boots. 1968, John Wayne came down here and ordered three pairs of boots for $300. His order is over here. John Wayne was actually here a lot in Nogales. He was pretty good friends with Paul. So there's Sam Elliott's order and John Wayne's order. Paul Bond was a legend himself with a life story that would make a good movie. So here's Paul doing his trick riding. He believed that white horses were good luck. Born in 1915 to a ranching family in New Mexico, he grew up horseback, riding 10 miles round trip to school every day on horses he was breaking for a local U.S. cavalry outpost. The teen spent that time teaching himself to trick ride, and by age 17, he was performing those stunts on the rodeo circuit, like Roman riding, one foot on the back of two galloping horses running side by side. Plus, horseback handstands, somersaults, flips, and crawling under the belly of a galloping horse, where he often got knocked in the head by the horse's ankles. Stories he shared when I interviewed him for a magazine story back in 2008, four years before he passed at age 98. As he got more into rodeoing, he got more into leather. Paul also rode bucking horses in the rodeo, traveling coast to coast and border to border. And throughout it all... He had a passion for working with leather, a craft he learned growing up working for a cobbler. And figured he needed a good boot to rodeo in. Nothing was flashy enough for him. Nothing was, you know, gripping that stirrup for him. Bond began making his own flashy boots for his rodeo shows. And he always wore his boots with his jeans tucked in. Paul believed that all the the craftsmen hard work needed to be put on display. John Wayne was actually here a lot. He was pretty good friends with Paul. You would see them going to Safeway together wearing their 16-inch tall cowboy boots tucked into their jeans. Paul left the rodeo arena to make boots full-time in 1946. He was 31. I think it's the best experience of my life to have worked for Mr. Bond. He said it was probably the best experience in his life working for Paul Bond. He was a just person that you could confide in and trust. Eliasar worked with Paul Bond for years and still deeply feels the loss of a man who was both his employer and his friend. So not only did he learn, you know, how he ran the business, but he imprinted on him a way to just go through life as well. Eliasar is among the dozen artisans handcrafting custom-made Paul Bond boots today. And he handles a lot of our special projects, if it's super intricate inlay or a design Mine we've never tried before, straight from someone's imagination. It gets given to Eliasar. The boot making process always starts with the last. Anyone's welcome to take Katie's tour of the shop. Step one is taking the measurements. Thank you very much. See how it's done. I don't make the last. What I do is I alter them to fit the people. The last comes like that. They're all pre-made, and I just add leather on there to fit the foot. So every last you've ever used is stored up here? Almost every last, we have everything from a triple A, which is very narrow, to a double E. When you offer something as custom as shoes, you get those clientele. So these are ones that Mike can use to alter. We also have records dating back all the way to the 1960s. So this station is where we keep all of those patterns I was telling you about. And here's one from our stock work boot. The mesquite from our stock work boot. The details that go into a custom-made boot are amazing. As you can see, it's a very intricate, very tedious process. Like the intricate, colorful stitching. A lot of our designs feature more than one color on the stitching. And there, every single time the color changes, the craftsman has to pick up the needle and change the thread. So, not only do you have to do the same pattern six or ten times, but you also have to get a gradient in the stitching. All made in virtually any leather of any color you can think of. Gio does the skiving. So he's taking off a very thin layer on the edges, so when he does the process of gluing them together, it's a seamless attachment. So we're going to stretch the leather over the last and actually nail it down so we can give it shape. And then these boots have already been mounted and they're waiting to get their toe shaped. If they want a round, if they want square, if they want snip, if they want point, this is where they get their character. And again, all done by hand. So this is what it looks like after the toe has been shaped, after the boot has been mounted, and then he actually hand tightens this as well. And then these are... the soles that are going to go on the bottom we hand stack hand shaped pieces of leather vaqueta to build out the heels so he's getting the rough edges out and then the last step is just doing finishing touches so we have this station where they put shine cream polish to make the boot look as spiffy as possible ready to go for the client And as you can imagine, they are an investment. Our base price starts at $21.50, but I've seen boots end up with an ending ticket of upwards of $10,000. But there is a chance to get a pair of custom-made Paul Bond boots for much less. So we have a bunch of boots that, for whatever reason, didn't fit the client. At the Cinderella Wall. And we guarantee the fit if they're measured in-house. Paul Bonds are legendary in the cowboy and rodeo world, and just to try a couple on is an experience in itself. And sometimes they fit, which is why we call it the Cinderella Wall. Alligator? Yeah, alligator vamp with an alligator collar and a calfskin top with six-row stitching. We have it in two designs. Paul Bond also offers a stock work boot made just like the Customs, but for much less. And there's a new line of great-looking off-the-shelf Paul Bond boots that when we visited started at $350. We really want to offer the same quality that is Paul Bond, just at a more approachable price point. The Big Barn is not only a handmade custom boot shop and retail store, but a museum as well. This is just the area that... He welcomes everybody, kind of gives everybody a taste of what Paul Bond is. Right when you walk in, you have some family pictures of Paul in his prime doing his rodeo stuff and then also in his later years with Margaret. The tall horn, that's the one he used to use for trick riding. Paul Bond's trick riding saddle is on display, and his paintings hang on the staircase wall. Definitely had to create a button. Yep. If you're a basketball fan, we got Dr. J. There are lots of photos of his famous customers. You can also see the boots he made his wife, Margaret, with a matching leather vest, boots for the grandkids, and the boots he golfed in. If you got boots and you like golf, you might as well have golf boots. So we got a couple different styles. that he actually used to wear. I bet he was the only guy wearing boots. Yep, most fashionable guy on the green. Paul Bond had his own custom-made home boot jack, but he got a little older so he didn't have to bend over. Here's how it works. You just put your boot in Off it goes. How easy is that? He, he, he, he, he, he. The legacy of a true Western legend, Paul Bond Boots is a fascinating landmark in Nogales, Arizona. So our tagline here at Paul Bond is, Wear the Legend, and it truly is a blessing to keep not only the heritage and traditions of bootmaking alive, but also Western culture. If you love the West and its tradition of handcrafted excellence, you've got to make the pilgrimage to Paul Bond Boots. It's a great place to come. We come every year. Still to come, Cowboy Christmas in Las Vegas. Christmas does indeed come early for Cowboys at Cowboy Christmas in Las Vegas. It's a great place to come. We come every year. Every December, Sin City's Convention Center becomes the world's biggest Western store. We were in Las Vegas a couple of mornings ago. During the 10-night run of the National Finals Rodeo, the NFR, the Super Bowl of that action-packed sport. Cowboy Christmas shoppers get plenty of their own action during the days of NFR where you got to keep moving just to see everything, which might even include Wynonna Judd, a country music star dropped by for an interview at the Cowboy Channel set inside the convention center. And she even posed for a picture with me. Not far away is NFR star barrel racer Shelley Morgan. I think it's awesome to be out here meeting the fans that support our industry because of them, that we can do what we do, and they love the sport too, so it's fun to share ideas and meet everybody. Very inspiring to be here. A pretty exciting encounter for 15-year-old Minnesota barrel racer Sophia Kingdom. You're welcome. It's a good experience. You can learn a lot from her. Vegas is a really cool experience, and anybody that wants to be here, I say put in the work, work hard, and don't give up until you get here. A group of cowboy rodeo stars were meeting their fans over at the Wrangler booth, including 1983 NFR bull riding champ Cody Snyder. Oh, it's awesome just to have everybody come by, and I'm just glad to be here representing Wrangler. You know, to see him on TV and see him at the rodeos, but see him up close is pretty cool. Welcome to Wrangler. There's no bigger name in the West than Wrangler, title sponsor of the NFR, and Cowboy Christmas is a great time to shop. If you buy any two items, your third item is free of equal or lesser values. Every big name brand you can imagine is here. Marriott, Yeti, Durango Boots, Stetson Hats, and many, many more. I love the shopping. I mean, you get all the great name brands and all the small businesses in one place, and then you get to meet all these amazing people. What's the secret to being a good hat shaper? Having fun. And whatever cowboy hat you buy or already own, Bill Karnes will be happy to shape it. Okay. Hats are personal, and every hat's different, so we like to... Crease hats and make them where they fit them and don't look like they're out of the box. Among the hundreds of vendors are lots of small artisans and entrepreneurs. One of our line is Yellowstone Italian style which perfectly matches with western culture and western fashion. Coming here you get people from all over the world not just all over the country. Who make and build their own things from scratch. And we just love being able to have those kind of connections here. Like Jesus Miranda. J-E-S-U-S. I'm not Jesus. I'm Jesus. I'm not that good. Who makes unique, one-of-a-kind Western furniture. Oh, this is a hand-hammered copper. It's like a work of art. We sell all custom furniture. Everything is one-of-a-kind. We just use reclaimed wood. We do mesquite. There is all kinds of fabulous western art for sale here, including the creative works of silversmith Clint Ormes, who's been coming to the NFR since he started his now prestigious company more than 30 years ago. What I love about this show is that you get to see rodeo cowboys, you get to see the rancher cowboys, you get to see the farmers, you get to see people from New York, from England, all over the world people come here to buy. The National Finals Rodeo runs for 10 days in December, and it might take that long to see everything there is at Cowboy Christmas, because there's so much cool stuff to see, like the guy who makes these frock coats. What do you think? I like it a lot. I always loved the romance of the 1800s, so I tried to inject a little bit of that into the clothing, but by no stretch am I doing period clothing or costume wardrobing. It is fashion for a modern Western guy who cannot find quality Western stylized designer clothing. That's where we come in. Don't forget the official merch, everything from leather jackets to ball caps. For those with a bigger budget, you can pick up a side-by-side. How was talking? Giving off some free sunglasses. Giving off some free sunnies. Or a brand new Dodge pickup truck. I love it. It's great. And if you're lucky, you might even win one. You know, you gotta pray. Luck's a good thing to have in Vegas, and it's lucky just to get to come to Cowboy Christmas every December during the National Finals Rodeo. That's it for now. We're back next time with more cool stuff from today's Wild West. Good luck, sister. Thanks. I'm Mark Bedore. We'll see you down the trail. For more information on the people and places featured in Today's Wild West, or to order show DVDs and books, visit todayswildwest.com. Funding for Today's Wild West provided by the Ruth and Percy Jones Foundation and the Chuckwagon Trail Riders Foundation.