Allan Radbourne was a writer and historian specializing in the history of the US Southwest and Borderlands regions. In addition to numerous journal and magazine articles about Western history, he published an acclaimed biography of Apache Scout Mickey Free in 2005 entitled Mickey Free: Apache captive, interpreter, and Indian Scout published by the Arizona Historical Society. Later in life he began writing about early cinema, with a history of silent movies about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police titled The Silent Mountie Movies 1910-1930 published posthumously in 2021.

The collection consists of seven series of records, notes, photographs, articles, transcriptions, presentations and other reference materials related to Southwestern frontier and Borderlands history circa 1800s to early 1900s created by Allan Radbourne. It contains research materials for articles and papers published by Allan Radbourne in True West, Real West, and Wild West magazines, as well as The Journal of Arizona History and The Order of the Indian Wars Journal. Also included are reference materials, photographs and notes for Mickey Free: Apache captive, interpreter, and Indian Scout, and photocopies of a collection of Radbourne writings from 1972 to 2021. It also holds a series of index cards of source materials, in alphabetical order, for Radbourne's work. Born-digital material, found on a flash drive, has also been surveyed and processed for public access.