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Historic Tours and Cruises - Wild West Adventures - Victorian Era Tours - Western Horseback Rides

Steve Shaw, owner of Great American Adventures, has had a passion for the Old West and travel since he was a small boy.  Every summer he’d travel with his parents to Texas and Oklahoma to visit family, always wearing his Western clothes, his beloved cowboy hat, and buscadero holster rig and play-guns from his favorite TV Westerns.

Embarrassingly as it sounds, during his last year in college and having been accepted to the United States Air Forces’ Officer Training School, he and his best friend traveled the country looking for “background” for their homemade, thirty-minute, 8-millimeter Western called “Butch and the Kid,” patterned after Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”  You can imagine what his Air Force recruiter thought when he saw this!

In fact, while in the military and graduating from B-52 Navigator/Bombardier School, Steve chose, of all USAF bases, the one in Rapid City, South Dakota … Ellsworth Air Force Base.  Why?  Because of the surrounding area’s history: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the Sioux Nation, Gold Rush, Deadwood, General Custer, Wounded Knee and much more.

His love of the Old West was rekindled when, around the mid-1990s, he discovered the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS), a competitive shooting organization based on shooting guns of the Old West, in Southern California

Steve soon gravitated to writing short stories, interviewing Western celebrities and developing a history column for SASS’ international publication, The Cowboy Chronicle.

Wanting to do more than just write about Old West adventures, he soon was traveling to be part of the action … such as riding in Wyoming at the Hole-in-the-Wall location where Butch, Sundance and their Wild Bunch hid out.

Steve’s wife, Marcie, was childhood friends of the Captain of the Delta Queen Steamboat and she mentioned it would be fun traveling the Mississippi River on a steamboat (after all, Steve owed her since she rode in Wyoming for five days with him).  Cruising on this historic paddlewheel and wearing period correct clothing, Steve had a brainstorm … if they were having this much fun, why wouldn’t others?

Thus began Steve’s “Greatest Adventure” … he acquired his travel agents credentials and began offering Old West and Victorian-type adventures on steamboats, trains, and horseback.

Since 1998 Great American Adventures has offered steamboat cruises on the Mississippi, Ohio and Cumberland Rivers, the Columbia River in the Northwest, and in Alaska.  His train trip to the Canadian Rockies has become a favorite and his horseback rides are historical in every detail … offering cavalry training school, riding and fighting with Custer on Crow Indian Reservation, riding the Crow’s Nest and staying at the 7^th Cavalry’s barracks at Fort Abraham Lincoln (a 1^st in 130 years), following Billy the Kid’s trail from Lincoln to Fort Sumner, New Mexico and the list goes on, including his Hole-in-the-Wall Ride and evading the sheriff and Indians and the South Pass, Wyoming rides.

Although not mandatory, most of his passengers dress in Victorian clothing during the cruises and train trips and dress Old West cowboy on his horseback rides.

Want a vacation of a lifetime?  Take a Great American Adventure!

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