The Art of Manliness - The Code They Killed For — Honor, Manhood, and the American Gunfighter

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.420 When you picture a gunfighter, you probably think of a Hollywood cowboy.

00:00:15.400 Spurs jangling, six-shooter on his hip, squaring off at high noon in a dusty frontier town.

00:00:20.420 But gunfighters weren't just products of Hollywood.

00:00:22.700 They were real men who lived and died by a code, one rooted in a particular sense of honor.

00:00:27.980 My guest today is Brian Burrow, author of The Gunfighters, How Texas Made the West Wild.

00:00:33.360 We dig into the true story behind America's gunfighting era, how it grew out of the South's dueling culture,

00:00:38.860 was intensified by the violence of post-Civil War Texas, and spread across the frontier via the cattle drive.

00:00:44.340 We explore why so many gunfights had less to do with crime and more to do with reputation,

00:00:48.460 why the Colt Revolver transformed personal conflict into deadly spectacle,

00:00:52.260 and how young men came to see violence as a right of manhood.

00:00:54.780 Along the way, Brian also explores how gunfighters went from frontier figures to pop culture icons,

00:01:00.160 and which films, in his view, captured their essence best.

00:01:03.560 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash gunfighters.

00:01:07.100 All right, Brian Burrow, welcome to the show.

00:01:24.060 My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

00:01:25.320 So you recently published a book called The Gunfighters, How Texas Made the West Wild.

00:01:29.540 And this is all about the Old West gunfighter that you see in old westerns and TV shows.

00:01:36.540 I'm curious, why did you do a deep dive into the gunfighter?

00:01:40.960 Because I felt like the time was right.

00:01:44.240 This was a field of study, if you want to call it that,

00:01:48.240 that was probably at its high watermark 50, 60 years ago in the 60s and 70s.

00:01:54.520 And while there have been books on individual gunfighters, in fact, you know, there's a new Jesse James book pretty much every year,

00:02:00.760 a new Billy the Kid every two or three years,

00:02:02.900 I kind of felt like it had been quite a while since anyone had come in and really taken a fresh look at the entire subject,

00:02:09.520 the entire field, and tried to tell the whole story of this gunfighter era that took place in America on the frontier after the Civil War.

00:02:18.200 And I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say new, but I just felt like it was time to freshen up the cannon

00:02:27.020 and that I could take a big, I thought I could swing for the fences on this one.

00:02:31.020 And so I kind of did, it kind of went out over my skis a little bit to badly mix my metaphors.

00:02:36.160 And the reception, you know, as you know, has been very generous and very surprising.

00:02:40.880 Yeah, I think what you do in this book, I really appreciated this,

00:02:43.640 is you provide the context of why there was this period in American history where you had guys shooting at each other.

00:02:52.060 Let's talk about this, like what makes a gunfight a gunfight and like what makes a gunfighter a gunfighter?

00:02:57.340 Well, typically the way you would differentiate is a gunfighter is anyone, I think widely defined,

00:03:04.820 as anyone who had an exchange of gunfire on the American frontier that did not involve the military,

00:03:10.880 so not a soldier or Native Americans.

00:03:13.600 So this is exclusively civilian gun violence.

00:03:16.980 It could be a sheriff versus a bad guy.

00:03:20.040 It could be two feudists.

00:03:21.520 It could be two drunken cattlemen.

00:03:23.840 It was civilian gun violence.

00:03:25.440 But having said that, it comes in every way, shape and form.

00:03:28.980 I guess the one thing that makes a gunfight a gunfight is if there is an exchange of gunfire as opposed to,

00:03:35.760 you know, for instance, Jesse James, most of the people he killed, he just executed.

00:03:39.340 So there is a difference between a murderer and a gunfighter, and I think generally that's pretty clear.

00:03:45.820 If you think about the classic gunfighter, look, most of us know about this from movies,

00:03:51.120 and the classic one that came up in Westerns in the middle of the last century was, you know,

00:03:57.180 two men standing alone in the middle of a sandy street in a small town, and then they draw and they shoot.

00:04:04.240 And while that's not unknown, I can maybe point to 10 or 15 actually like that.

00:04:13.620 In fact, Old West gunfights are not typically different in style from any gunfight today.

00:04:19.840 I can point to you gunfights on horseback, gunfights where one guy was laying down and the other was standing up.

00:04:26.420 I got one where one guy shot another while he was down in a well.

00:04:29.680 I mean, it just happened in every way, shape, or form, but the rarest was probably that classic two men squaring off.

00:04:38.420 Although, ironically, the one that I opened the book with and the first nationally recognized gunfight,

00:04:44.240 what really began to make the gunfighter a thing was very much that type of classic cliched gunfight,

00:04:52.140 two men in the street.

00:04:53.000 In this case, it involved the famous gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok in his first nationally recognized gunfight in July of 65 in Springfield, Missouri.

00:05:02.440 And it was very much in the style of an old duel, like from the Old South, where they came together and, you know,

00:05:09.300 in the middle of the square in Springfield, Missouri, this fight was over a gambling dispute with townspeople lined up on both sides.

00:05:16.700 And then they draw simultaneously.

00:05:19.440 And, of course, Hickok is the victor.

00:05:21.620 And shortly thereafter, an Eastern writer for a big magazine found out about this, wrote about it.

00:05:26.580 And it was really the first moment where Americans became aware, oh, not only are there people shooting each other out on the frontier,

00:05:35.060 but that this is – it somehow struck a chord.

00:05:37.780 Something in the American character that really – you know, at a time where people were shooting each other on the streets of Boston and Baltimore every night,

00:05:44.540 nobody cared other than it being a crime, this seemed to be something different.

00:05:49.720 And the gunfight, the frontier gunfight has fascinated Americans really for 160 years ever since.

00:05:56.220 I mean, we're still talking about this stuff 160 years later.

00:05:59.540 How do you demarcate the gunfighter era?

00:06:01.660 When did it begin and when did it end?

00:06:04.040 Well, one big challenge for me going into this, of course, is that how do you write a book about gunfighters when they're all over the place?

00:06:12.260 Because this goes on for, you know, decades.

00:06:15.560 And most of these – you know, Jesse James has nothing to do with Billy the Kid, who has nothing to do with John Wesley Harden.

00:06:20.440 And so the first thing I did was demarcate my time.

00:06:23.580 So I grandly call what I dubbed the gunfighter era from July of 1865 until 1901 when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid famously got on that freighter for South America.

00:06:35.660 The ending of the last brand name outlaw seemed like an appropriate place to end it.

00:06:40.360 And so then the question became, how do you tell that all as a single story?

00:06:44.740 And I think I found a way that I could actually hold it all together as one story.

00:06:50.620 And how many gunfights were there during that era, you think?

00:06:53.440 It would all depend on how you define gunfights.

00:06:56.120 I honestly have no idea.

00:06:57.680 Clearly, it's in the hundreds.

00:06:59.120 I know Bill O'Neill, a well-known Texas historian.

00:07:02.940 In fact, I believe he was a state historian for a while.

00:07:04.780 I want to say he came up with like 580 what he called significant gunfights.

00:07:11.300 And again, very difficult to explain to you what significant is.

00:07:15.160 But in large part, they're the ones that made the newspapers and thus the history books and typically more than one newspaper suggesting some public interest.

00:07:23.240 So certainly things like the gunfight beside the O.K. Corral, starring Wyatt Earp, certainly anything involving Billy the Kid, John Wesley Harden.

00:07:31.980 In general, the notable gunfights, what I call marquee gunfights, are those that made more than one newspaper at the time.

00:07:39.160 Gotcha.

00:07:39.720 Okay, so you mentioned that all these gunfights, they happened all over the place.

00:07:45.120 They seemed like they weren't connected.

00:07:47.020 So your challenge was trying to figure out, okay, what is the connection?

00:07:50.680 And your connection that you found was Texas, where you live, your home state.

00:07:56.360 And what I took away from the book, Texas contributed several factors that gave rise to the gunfighter.

00:08:05.920 And a big part of that is cultural.

00:08:08.400 Let's talk about this cultural component of the gunfighter.

00:08:10.940 You talk about how they're developed after the Civil War, or even before the Civil War, this idea of Texan honor that developed out of Southern honor.

00:08:23.080 So tell us about that.

00:08:23.940 Tell us about the Southern honor code, and then how did that develop into the Texan honor code?

00:08:28.220 And then we can talk about how that led to the gunfighter.

00:08:30.960 Sure.

00:08:31.100 When you're looking at a way to explain why all this happened, it's the only thing that I could figure out to do was to understand why it happened, why it happened there, and what were the factors that caused all these gunfights.

00:08:44.320 And I remember one of the first times it really hit me was in reading accounts of that first Hickok gunfight in 1865.

00:08:52.760 And, you know, they were ostensibly fighting over the other guys, took Bill Hickok's watch as a gambling debt, and Hickok wanted his watch back.

00:09:01.300 And later somebody said, why on earth would you kill a man over a watch?

00:09:04.300 And he said, I'm not killing a man over a watch.

00:09:06.420 This was about my honor.

00:09:08.120 This was a challenge to my honor.

00:09:10.020 I'd read stuff like that before in Western literature.

00:09:13.040 And I happened to be from the South, and I happened to be from Texas.

00:09:16.740 And that struck a real chord to me.

00:09:20.180 And just immediately I realized, well, when was the only time in American history before the gunfighters, after the Civil War, that a group of, you know, civilian men were famous for shooting each other?

00:09:32.260 And it was in the dueling culture in the antebellum South from the 1790s or so into the 1840s.

00:09:40.040 Duels were a very big thing in the South.

00:09:42.080 And what mattered to me was less the formal structure of the duel, because obviously we didn't have a ton of duels in the Old West, but rather the factors that caused it.

00:09:51.760 There's this thing that historians write an awful lot about in the antebellum South, and it's the male honor culture.

00:09:57.840 And that is, you know, it calls for things that you might expect, you know, to be brave and kind to women and kind to horses and such.

00:10:06.080 But the part that matters for our story is that any time that a Southern male in that time period was challenged, if he was told that he was ugly or his wife was ugly or his horse was ugly, you know, he had an opportunity and in many cases an obligation to respond with force, even deadly force.

00:10:24.780 And that's what led to these duels.

00:10:26.720 And what you find as you, you know, follow that culture as it moves west with the South into Texas, Texas became, you know, another Southern state.

00:10:38.880 But Texas was different.

00:10:40.120 It was the only Southern state that had not one but two violent frontiers, the Mexican border, of course, but also we forget the Native American, the Comanche frontier, which split the state in half on a diagonal into the 1870s.

00:10:52.540 It made the Texan particularly adept.

00:10:56.600 It was a martial culture.

00:10:58.020 They were adept from the beginning with guns.

00:11:00.580 It was the Texans, the Texas Rangers, to be sure, who initially discovered and popularized the first Colt revolvers.

00:11:07.600 You know, it was Texans who made it a thing. 1.00

00:11:09.960 But it really wasn't until the 10 years after the Civil War, when Texas was engulfed with a rebellion against the federal government, that that type of hyper-violent ethos really rose to the fore, where it was just Texas was during Reconstruction.

00:11:26.860 And I think just about every academic study puts it this way, by far the most violent of the Southern states.

00:11:32.880 You can find academic analyses that will say that the decade of civilian violence in Texas after the war may have been the bloodiest period of civilian violence in American history.

00:11:44.320 And what I posit is that it made the Texan a little bit of a different animal.

00:11:50.320 If you go and look at the marquee gunfights out there, Brett, I'm saying 60, 70 percent of them involve a Texan in some way.

00:11:59.140 And what I had not understood, what confused me initially is, well, what were Texans doing having gunfights in Arizona, in New Mexico, in Wyoming, in Nebraska?

00:12:08.060 And that's when I discovered the thing that spread Texas culture and this Texas kind of hyper-violence across the frontier was the open-range cattle industry.

00:12:17.020 It was a business that began in Texas and that thrived in Texas after the war.

00:12:22.300 Texans pretty much had a monopoly on beef cow for a few years.

00:12:26.640 And what began to spread Texas cattle and Texas cattlemen, Texas cowboys, across the frontier, of course, was the need to get to northern markets.

00:12:34.380 It's when they began driving these cattle up the cattle trails, up the Chisholm Trail, most famously, into Kansas, which really became kind of the beginning of this gunfighter era when gunfighters began to get national attention.

00:12:48.360 Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.

00:12:49.500 But honing on this honor idea, I think this is very foreign for a lot of modern listeners.

00:12:56.460 Because, I mean, this idea of honor that these guys had in the South, and you see it somewhat in the North, not as much, but it really took hold in the South.

00:13:06.240 It was all about protecting your reputation.

00:13:08.400 Exactly.

00:13:08.920 I mean, that's what it was.

00:13:09.440 It was all about your reputation as a man.

00:13:11.880 And if your reputation was somehow called into question, you had to defend it with violence.

00:13:17.800 And there's like a theory that the reason why the South has a particularly strong notion of honor, I think, was it Richard Nisbet, his book, The Culture of Honor?

00:13:27.420 Yeah.

00:13:27.860 Talked about how a lot of people in the South, they came from these shepherding cultures in Scotland. 0.73

00:13:35.700 Scotland and Ireland especially.

00:13:37.420 Yeah.

00:13:37.800 With those who work around livestock, it's always been violent cultures, in part for the need to dissuade thieves. 0.99

00:13:44.820 And for whatever reasons, much of it becomes wrapped up in honor.

00:13:50.260 You can read so many explanations of why Southerners became obsessed with honor.

00:13:55.940 You know, a lot of historians seem to believe it has to have something with slavery.

00:13:59.000 You can read people that say it has, you know, has something to do with the heat.

00:14:03.100 I come down with the feeling that it basically arose from the planters class, the wealthiest class in the South, where we had something in the South that we never had in America,

00:14:13.740 which was the idle rich, an entire class of idle rich for whom black people, slaves, did most, if not all, of their work. 0.96

00:14:22.740 And so in a need to kind of differentiate themselves from those, you know, below them who worked,

00:14:29.480 they modeled themselves after the aristocrats of Europe, for whom honor had been sacrosanct for hundreds of years.

00:14:36.960 And that's kind of my feeling on how Southerners became obsessed with honor.

00:14:42.680 And, you know, it filtered down through the classes.

00:14:45.440 If you wanted to move up, you know, you needed to have honor.

00:14:48.780 And, you know, this happened in a world where not a lot of people had college degrees or educations that they could talk about or financial statements.

00:14:56.600 And in a world where everybody, you know, kind of looked the same, honor became the way you measured people, the way you measured men.

00:15:04.860 And as silly as it may sound to our ears today, if someone went up to you in New Orleans in 1844 and pinched your nose or called you ugly or made a remark about your children,

00:15:18.880 you know, you were expected to lash back in some way, shape or form. 0.93

00:15:23.100 And I think it was the development of that culture that migrated into something different,

00:15:29.280 something even more violent via Texas on the old West frontier.

00:15:33.240 Yeah, my take on it was the honor code in the South.

00:15:37.200 And again, you saw it somewhat in the North, but it was really pronounced in the South.

00:15:40.560 The way you protected your honor differed amongst classes.

00:15:44.280 So amongst the upper class in the South, you would follow the código duelo, like the dueling code.

00:15:51.520 Right.

00:15:51.740 And it was designed basically to prevent violence.

00:15:53.940 Like there's all these different, you know, protocols you went through.

00:15:56.300 You had a second, you tried to do some negotiation.

00:15:58.480 And then oftentimes you just show up and like shoot your pistol in the air and you called it good.

00:16:04.340 The lower class, they tended to just like, they didn't use weapons.

00:16:09.320 They didn't follow the formal dueling code.

00:16:11.560 They would just oftentimes engage in like, they called it the rough and tumble.

00:16:14.980 I mean, I'm telling you, fight, fist fighting and wrestling back in those days was a different

00:16:20.040 thing.

00:16:20.460 I mean, you're talking about gouging out eyes and ripping people's mouths.

00:16:24.600 I mean, several states had to pass laws against eye gouging, if you can, if you can imagine.

00:16:29.900 Anyway, this whole honor thing seems to have come out of the Revolutionary War when American

00:16:34.760 officers kind of got close and personal with their British and French counterparts for whom

00:16:39.500 honor was a very big deal.

00:16:41.480 But it stopped in the North, as you point out, and most people believe that was about the Aaron

00:16:47.080 Burr-Alexander-Hamilton duel in Weehawka, New Jersey in 1803.

00:16:51.280 After that, duels all but disappear from the North.

00:16:55.020 And yet, they not only don't disappear in the South, they're all but embraced.

00:16:58.640 I mean, you can point to any number of known people, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Abraham

00:17:04.080 Lincoln, who all either involved in duels, you know, shot people in duels, or in Lincoln's

00:17:09.700 case, he managed to talk himself out of one. 0.87

00:17:12.120 Duels were not, like, I think we look back now and think, oh, that's kind of a lunatic

00:17:16.660 fringe type of deal.

00:17:17.860 But if you look at the people who are engaged in duels, who, you know, put out public notices,

00:17:23.400 they were often politicians and people involved in public life for whom an assault on their

00:17:29.700 honor was kind of widely known.

00:17:32.180 If you were an up-and-coming congressman in St. Louis and somebody, you know, talked bad

00:17:37.460 about you, I mean, you were challenging them to duel.

00:17:39.980 Missouri was, Missouri and St. Louis was kind of the northern boundary of all this.

00:17:44.740 Yeah.

00:17:45.240 I mean, for our listeners, if you want to see an example of, like, a lower class notion

00:17:49.500 of honor, like the rough and tumble that we were talking about, that wrestling, like,

00:17:52.620 no-holds-bar wrestling, there's a great scene in the Gangs of New York where the DiCaprio

00:17:57.940 character, who's from Ireland, he first meets Bill the Butcher, and there's, like, some

00:18:01.680 other, one of Bill the Butcher's heavies is there, and there's some sort of insult or

00:18:06.580 slight, and then they just immediately take off their coats and they start punching each

00:18:10.720 other, but then there's some, like, fish hooking and things like that.

00:18:12.640 I'm like, that's an old-school Civil War notion of honor amongst the working class.

00:18:19.780 Yeah, I had forgotten about that.

00:18:21.140 That was a very good example of it, yeah.

00:18:23.780 Yeah.

00:18:24.380 Okay, so, and then this notion of honor, it moved to Texas.

00:18:27.560 And I think what happened in Texan, in this sort of notion of Texan honor, it got democratized,

00:18:32.760 I think, and significant.

00:18:34.460 It wasn't just, like, the aristocrats who were protecting their honor.

00:18:38.800 It was these guys who had herds who felt like they needed to maintain their reputation for

00:18:44.640 violence so people would just not mess with them.

00:18:46.540 And then you see this introduction of, you mentioned earlier, the Colt Revolver.

00:18:52.080 So there's a technological component to the gunfighter.

00:18:55.260 Tell us about that.

00:18:56.060 How did the Colt Revolver change the game in the Old West?

00:18:59.280 There is no gunfighter.

00:19:00.640 There is no gunfighter age without a revolver.

00:19:03.680 If you think of it, back in antebellum days when they would have duels, typically it would

00:19:08.240 be with single-shot pistols.

00:19:10.440 So bang, the other guy goes bang, and then everybody takes 15 seconds to reload.

00:19:15.000 You can't exactly kill a lot of people in that way.

00:19:18.120 But when you had a six-shot revolver, you could do an awful lot of damage.

00:19:22.260 We sometimes forget that when Colt first, Colt was kind of a nobody, a rich kid out of Massachusetts

00:19:28.260 who was fascinated with tinkering and thought he could make a revolving gun.

00:19:34.060 But when it was introduced for the first time in, I want to say, 1837, it was a complete

00:19:37.440 flop.

00:19:37.900 In fact, five years later, Colt is out of business and no one's using revolvers.

00:19:43.060 And then out of nowhere, a young officer named Jack Hayes in the Texas Rangers, who spends

00:19:49.740 much of his time on the Comanche frontier fighting Native Americans, stumbles on a shipment of

00:19:55.080 them that was basically sitting in a warehouse.

00:19:58.020 It had initially been sent, I love this, to the Texas Navy back when Texas had a Navy as an

00:20:03.080 independent nation.

00:20:04.340 Jack Hayes took these revolvers, showed his men how to use them.

00:20:07.580 And famously, in 1844, at the Battle of Waller Creek, northwest of San Antonio, he was engaged

00:20:15.160 with his crew of, I want to say, 23, 24 guys against a group of Comanche that was set to 1.00

00:20:21.540 number around 100.

00:20:22.900 And for the first time, the Rangers charged into the Comanche, firing the revolvers. 0.95

00:20:27.560 And in the ensuing fight, 23, 24, Comanche were killed and only one Ranger.

00:20:34.040 And the great takeaway, quote, afterwards, years later, the chief who had been involved

00:20:39.360 there said, I shall never fight Jack Hayes again, for he has a bullet for every finger

00:20:44.740 on his hand.

00:20:46.120 And then how did the Colt change the game for gunfighters?

00:20:52.000 Well, first off, you don't notice a huge difference immediately, countrywide, until the years after

00:21:00.280 the Civil War, when you can talk about how the war influenced gunfighters and these people

00:21:07.640 doing this violence to each other out on the frontier.

00:21:10.180 And common sense tells you the war must have had something to do with it.

00:21:13.160 It's often been speculated that many of these gunfighters must have been suffering from

00:21:16.520 something like PTSD, which is compelling and probably correct, but it still has to remain

00:21:21.920 speculative because we don't have anybody at the time, you know, blaming, I'm sorry,

00:21:26.160 I killed those four guys.

00:21:27.320 I had a bad day at Gettysburg.

00:21:29.080 But what you can point to about the war influencing violence is that in 1865, 1866, something on

00:21:38.640 the order of 1.3 million handguns were auctioned or given away by the federal government after

00:21:45.200 the war. And so for the first time, what we call today is open carry.

00:21:50.080 Well, not unheard of before the war, you can find memoirs in which people say, oh, I saw a man

00:21:56.820 wearing a gun on his hip in Georgia in 1815. It happened. But what becomes clear is that after the

00:22:03.240 war in the 1860s, it becomes commonplace, such that people are just kind of stunned that men across

00:22:09.580 the South, across the frontier, are wearing pistols with no more thought than the way they used to

00:22:14.800 wear a necktie or their glasses. And one of my favorite memoirists out of Missouri, you know,

00:22:21.300 reference to that rough and tumble type of style says that that type of, you know, problem resolution

00:22:27.700 is gone now. People here handle handle such things with a pistol in a much quicker and more efficient

00:22:34.460 fashion. And that's really the dawn of the gunfighter era.

00:22:38.200 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:22:43.880 And now back to the show.

00:22:45.800 Okay. So you had this notion of honor instead of a duel with these elaborate procedures and

00:22:53.020 rituals. You just had guys who were like, let's just take care of it now. And they're all heavily

00:22:58.540 armed. They're all carrying pistols. Some guys had two pistols on them. It's just everyone was armed

00:23:04.020 in Texas and in the frontier. Pretty much. Another aspect or another way technology contributed to the

00:23:09.860 rise of the gunfighter was the telegraph and mass media. Tell us about that.

00:23:15.700 It's funny. I think most people that look at this think that gunfighting and gunfighters were somehow

00:23:21.440 a creation of the media, a creation of dime novels and pulp fiction. In fact, the gunfighter type

00:23:28.460 type violence that I'm writing about here and that we see in movies was very real. I think what

00:23:34.120 telegraphs and the media allowed is for the fascination with this phenomenon, which, by the

00:23:41.420 way, did not begin in the East. It begins in the communities where these things happen. You can read

00:23:46.340 it in the local newspapers. All the pulp fiction and dime novel writers did was pick up on something

00:23:53.200 that was initially very popular in the West. You can read one of my favorite stories about this.

00:23:59.300 It's from very early in the game when Mark Twain, as a young writer, went out to Nevada during the

00:24:05.660 Civil War to become a journalist. And on the way, on these stagecoaches, all anybody ever wanted to

00:24:12.000 talk about was a certain gunfighter, a guy named Jack Slade, who was a local legend. And that was months,

00:24:18.940 if not years, before anybody uttered his name back East. So I think that the media, and we see this

00:24:24.500 especially with Hickok's creation, you know, the media broadcast this legend, but they don't create

00:24:31.180 it. I think that's where a lot of cynics want to say they created it. And I would argue, no,

00:24:37.200 this was a genuine organic phenomena that they picked up because it fascinated Americans. For some

00:24:43.160 reason, and we can speculate why, you know, this type of behavior really struck a chord with Americans.

00:24:48.940 So there would still have been gunfighters, but I'm not sure they would have become the American

00:24:54.660 archetypes they did, if not for media. Why do you think it struck a chord with Americans at the time?

00:25:01.520 I think it has to do with the fact that the American West really became the American origin story.

00:25:09.140 You know, we can tell all the tales we want about George Washington and men in powdered wigs

00:25:13.900 beating the British. And that's clearly the actual origin story. But stylistically, and in terms of

00:25:20.000 values and behaviors that we might want to emulate, I'm not sure there was that many that people look to

00:25:26.840 the, the revolutionary war to find. Instead, I think when people think about American values,

00:25:33.540 when they think about the American dream, the American dream, as I define it, would be

00:25:39.260 the idea that any person, and certainly any man in America can rise from humble beginnings and chart

00:25:47.340 his own way. And nowhere was that more evident than on the frontier, where thousands of Americans went

00:25:53.980 out, you know, and pitched a dent on a patch of dirt and tried to make something of themselves.

00:25:59.700 And it made the frontier, I think, kind of a cradle for the American worship of individualism,

00:26:06.520 the idea that anyone can do it. And there's something about the gunfighter who's kind of

00:26:11.220 the ultimate individual, isn't he? You know, what's more, what is more of an equalizer than a gun

00:26:16.980 where a man who's four foot 11 could kill a man who's seven foot tall and a wrestler? The gunfighter

00:26:22.520 became kind of a symbol, one of many probably, but a symbol, an abiding symbol of American individualism

00:26:29.360 and of the American dream. That's my theory, at least.

00:26:32.180 Yeah. So these gunfights are happening organically. Back East, they picked up on it,

00:26:37.300 started writing about them in the paperbacks and the dime novels. And then the National Police

00:26:42.660 Gazette was a big place where all these stories were published. I'm curious, I've heard that,

00:26:49.340 kind of fast forwarding and looking at another area of American history related to crime and violence,

00:26:56.560 The Godfather, the movie The Godfather. I'm going a completely different stream here,

00:27:00.420 but I'm going somewhere with this.

00:27:02.800 I'm with you.

00:27:03.500 Some people speculate that the movie The Godfather influenced the mob, the actual mob. Like these

00:27:09.480 mobsters, they watch The Godfather and they're like, well, we got to act this way because that's

00:27:13.360 what it says in The Godfather. Do you come across anything like that where you see that with the

00:27:17.300 gunfighter? Like there's young men who are reading these dime novels and they're like, well, I got to,

00:27:21.240 I got to carry my gun this way or I got to do this so I can be like the gunfighters that I read

00:27:25.620 about on the National Police Gazette. I know way too much about The Godfather and you're exactly

00:27:30.500 right. I mean, the woods are so full of mafia guys, you know, back in the 80s, 90s who talked

00:27:37.080 about how, yeah, they, they needed to live that way. And you see exactly the same thing in the old

00:27:42.060 West. I can think of individual moments, for instance, Butch Cassidy in his second robbery in

00:27:48.020 Utah. And I want to say 1896, which was very late in the game on the frontier. He had a partner named

00:27:52.680 LZ Lay. And I can remember in the middle of this robbery when one of the guys that they were robbing

00:27:59.360 tried to make a move. LZ Lay said to him something like, don't pick up that gun or I'll fill your

00:28:04.660 belly full of hot lead. Like who talks like that? The fact is nobody talks like that. It's so clear

00:28:11.020 that he got that from Pulp Fiction. He got that from a dime novel. But you also see that from the very

00:28:16.800 beginning with the Texas cowboys who spread across the frontier, first to Kansas, but then to New

00:28:24.480 Mexico and beyond, you can find memoirs. I'm thinking of Teddy Blue Abbott, a famous cowboy

00:28:29.900 memoir. And he talks about how he was yearning to get to Kansas so he could shoot someone, so he could

00:28:36.800 prove his honor, so he could prove his manhood. You know, being involved in a gunfight was not

00:28:42.780 something in that time, in that place among those people that was something to be shied away from.

00:28:48.860 It was something, in fact, that a lot of young men attempting to prove who they were yearned for

00:28:55.660 and sought. And it's one way that, you know, when you look at the behavior of Texas cowboys

00:29:01.580 in the 1870s, especially, I mean, there's so many things where you're like, really? They shot him over

00:29:07.160 that. They shot him because he got jostled in a bar. They shot him because somebody, you know,

00:29:12.200 beat him at Go Fish. They're just silly things that caused gunfights. But if you take into this 0.72

00:29:19.020 the context that many young men wanted to prove their manhood with guns, some of those silly gunfights

00:29:25.620 make much more sense. Well, speaking of the cowboys, that was another factor that contributed to the rise

00:29:31.040 of the gunfighter. It was an economic factor. You see the rise of the Texas cowboy and the Texas

00:29:37.520 long, the longhorn, the steer. How did the cattle boom from Texas contribute to the gunfighter?

00:29:44.240 Well, the cattle boom took a Southern honor culture that had been already, you know, pumped up to pretty

00:29:51.480 new heights in Texas and added kind of the final block to the wall, if you will. And that is

00:29:58.720 the Texas cattle business, especially as expanded into new areas in the 1860s and 70s. So moved from

00:30:06.660 South Texas into much of the rest of the Texas, especially Central Texas, was legendarily violent

00:30:12.960 because this was open range cattle ranching. So no barbed wire fence. Cattle range free. You put a

00:30:20.520 brand on them. And when it was time to go to market, you went and rounded them up. Well, obviously that

00:30:25.180 made this industry especially prone to thievery, to theft of livestock. And so that's the reason why Texas

00:30:32.540 cattlemen, like generations of cattlemen before them, resorted to violence so readily. You know, often it

00:30:39.500 was hanging. And this, by the way, played out in a dozen of kind of feuds across Texas in the decade after

00:30:48.060 the Civil War, all of which dwarfed the body count of a feud like Hatfield and McCoy. This was, you know,

00:30:54.860 probably eight of the 10 worst feuds in American history were around the cattle industry in Texas.

00:30:59.580 And a lot of the violence was hanging, but much of it was also gunfights. And especially as those

00:31:06.460 behaviors spread across the West, that's how you explain Texas cattlemen in gunfights pretty much

00:31:13.020 everywhere you want to look in the West. And this is, this is why you say, you know, Texas made the

00:31:17.580 West wild. The cattle industry spread through what was an Indian territory up to Kansas, Abilene,

00:31:24.740 Dodge City. And that's why we had that famous gunfight in Arizona, the OK Corral. I mean,

00:31:29.860 that was basically... I mean, Texans practically colonized New Mexico, Texas cattlemen. When you look

00:31:36.560 at Arizona, I think Arizona went from, I want to say, 3,000 cattle in 1870 to 5 million in 1890.

00:31:43.020 And all those were brought in by Texans. It's funny, when you look at the outlaw gang that Wyatt Earp 0.92

00:31:49.700 fought against in Tombstone that led to the famous gunfight beside the OK Corral, they were known

00:31:56.560 as the Cowboys, usually spelled cow hyphen boys, except from below the border where they stole many of their

00:32:03.240 cattle. Mexican ranchers called them the Tejanos because so many of them were from Texas.

00:32:10.160 All right. So the rise of the gunfighter, we've got the honor culture that morphed into Texan honor

00:32:14.920 culture, the rise of the Colt Revolver, and then the cattle boom spread this violence across the

00:32:21.060 American West. Something else I was struck by in your book, a lot of the gunfighters you highlight

00:32:25.280 were gamblers. What was the connection? Why were so many gunfighters gamblers?

00:32:29.260 Well, first off, almost everybody in the Old West was a gambler because there wasn't much else to

00:32:35.100 do. Keep in mind, no TV, no internet, no radio, nothing much to do but sit around and talk and

00:32:43.080 drink and, oh yeah, play cards. So almost every main gunfighter I can think of, other than maybe

00:32:49.860 Jesse James, who is not really a gunfighter, but that's a story for another day, engaged in gambling

00:32:56.000 as a pastime and occasionally, you know, as their profession. And there you could cite Doc Holliday,

00:33:02.760 you could cite the Texan Ben Thompson and the Texan Luke Short as being kind of the three great

00:33:08.260 gambler gunfighters. But to raise a question that perplexed me at the beginning, which is if you start

00:33:13.200 to look at these marquee gunfights, you see a disturbing number of them involve arguments over

00:33:19.660 gambling, which just didn't make much sense to me. If you and I are sitting there playing five-card

00:33:23.780 draw, Brett, and I throw out two fives and you throw out two fours, well, it's pretty obvious I

00:33:28.640 won. What is there to argue about? And then I started reading the histories on gambling and it

00:33:33.080 turns out that gambling on the frontier was a little bit different today. And the reason it was so

00:33:38.900 violent, I came to believe, is that, well, two things. One, Americans finally figured out that most

00:33:46.860 gambling, certainly card-based gambling was fixed, that the people who did it professionally or did

00:33:53.520 it often knew how to cheat. This was thanks to a riverboat gambler who in the 1840s came out and

00:34:00.440 wrote a book about all the ways that gamblers could cheat and did. So everybody on the frontier

00:34:06.240 was on the lookout for cheating and cheating was endemic. And certainly any challenge of cheating,

00:34:13.200 and that's what an awful lot of the gambling-based arguments were about was you cheated. I'll, you

00:34:18.480 know, prove it. Well, here's a gun. But if you were, if you were challenged to cheating, that was an

00:34:24.200 acute challenge to your honor. And that led to a lot of gunfights, an awful lot of them. I mean, maybe,

00:34:30.080 I don't know, maybe 30, 40% of the gunfights that I write about seem to have something to do the

00:34:34.840 gambling. Yeah. It's called, I think it's called giving someone the lie. It's like when you cue someone

00:34:38.880 of a line. Ooh, I wish I knew, I wish I'd known that. That's a good line. Yeah. Let's talk about

00:34:43.120 some particular gunfighters that stood out to you. So a lot of these gunfighters, thanks to the,

00:34:47.600 the dime novels, the pulp newspapers, they had a lot of hype around them. Like, well, this guy killed

00:34:53.440 30 men and this guy killed 50. If you look at the actual numbers, most of them maybe killed one or two

00:34:59.140 guys. Some of them got up to the, you know, maybe five. Out of all the gunfighters you researched and

00:35:04.860 wrote about, which one actually lived up to the hype that they had? John Wesley Harden of Texas,

00:35:10.880 who of the, the, what I call the big five gunfighters, meaning the most famous, those

00:35:16.040 would be Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and the least known as John Wesley

00:35:21.360 Harden, who very much is a transition figure from kind of exclusively Texas violence to violence out

00:35:28.940 on the frontier. He was just another kid in rural Texas until he killed a black man in 1868 when he

00:35:39.380 was 15, an argument over a wrestling match, at which point he was obliged to become a fugitive.

00:35:46.320 And Harden, very much like Jesse James and many of the earliest gunfighters, was a diehard rebel

00:35:52.780 who felt like the South was being unjustly occupied and dominated by Northern troops. And so Harden,

00:36:00.920 you know, embarked on a career for six years where he kind of wandered Texas killing people. And

00:36:08.500 generally not for reasons he expected, almost always because of arguments and things that went

00:36:15.180 around. You know, Harden was the type of guy, if you said something wrong about Texas, he would shoot

00:36:19.800 you. I mean, he was literally a serial killer and he was almost certainly, by the dictionary

00:36:26.100 definition, a psychopath. He also embodies this spread of Texas violence because after killing and

00:36:33.840 he is credited between 24 and 42 killings. By the time he was 21, most before he was 18. And of course,

00:36:43.880 his most famous jaunt was the single cattle drive. He took up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene in 1871,

00:36:51.540 where he came face to face, but did not shoot while Bill Hickok, who silkily kind of disarmed him

00:36:57.440 before gunplay. But in the four months that Harden was in the Abilene area, I think Ike taught it up

00:37:04.160 that he killed, believably, eight men, five at once in a big gunfight out on the prairie with his

00:37:10.760 cousins. And the most famous of Harden's gunfights, which really was not a gunfight, was the one

00:37:16.480 where supposedly it was always said that he killed a man for snoring. And of course, for 150 years,

00:37:22.540 people have kind of rolled their eyes and said, oh, that's just a Texas myth. But the facts are he

00:37:26.700 was asleep or drunk in his hotel room there in Abilene at four in the morning. And he shot a man

00:37:32.760 in the next room through the wall with four gunshots. And, you know, they probably didn't get into an

00:37:38.780 argument since they were in separate rooms and couldn't see each other. I think, why else would

00:37:43.680 you shoot somebody through a hotel room wall than if they were snoring? So I'm prepared to believe it. 0.55

00:37:50.200 Who was the most overrated gunfighter?

00:37:53.080 Johnny Ringo. He was very famous up until, let's say, the last 50 years. Like there were Johnny Ringo

00:38:00.060 television series in the 50s. There were Johnny Ringo movies during the 60s. He was kind of a second

00:38:06.820 tier gunman in Tombstone, best known, you know, as a gunfighter who had a particular animosity for

00:38:14.780 Doc Holliday. But beginning in the 70s, a series of researchers basically realized that not only was

00:38:22.980 he not a gunfighter, he had never been in a gunfight of any type. The only time we ever know,

00:38:28.080 understand that he actually fired a gun in anything like anger was once in a drunken argument with a

00:38:35.200 miner, in which I think the miner was winged. And the only other gunfighter he was ever in, he

00:38:39.760 was probably the one that killed him. In fact, we believe he committed suicide. You know, found dead

00:38:44.900 against a tree in the middle of nowhere. Wyatt Earp famously, years later, decades later, bragged that

00:38:49.540 he did it, but he didn't. And we now know that Johnny Ringo, and none of this was Johnny Ringo's fault.

00:38:56.160 You know, the Old West kind of disappeared from American conscience for about 30 years,

00:39:00.880 from the 1890s into the 1920s, when it was rediscovered famously by a magazine article in

00:39:07.740 which the writer's lead was, Who Remembers Billy the Kid? Which ignited this interest in gunfighters

00:39:14.700 and all manner of Western things. And that was really the beginning, and in some ways, the peak

00:39:20.000 of Ringo's fame. I mean, there were people that wrote in books that he was not only the greatest of

00:39:25.280 American gunfighters, but that he was a college man known for spouting stories in Latin, all of

00:39:31.940 which is purely made up by modern writers or writers from the 1920s. Poor Johnny Ringo was not

00:39:38.060 responsible for any of it. The runner-up, though, was probably Wild Bill Hickok, who, while he became

00:39:43.940 a gunfighter of note, when he first got all the attention as a result of that opening gunfight

00:39:49.020 there in Springfield, Missouri in 1869, the writer wrote with a straight face in Harper's Weekly,

00:39:55.800 you know, a notable magazine, that he had no doubt that Hickok had killed over 100 white men.

00:40:02.560 And by my count, the exact number at that point would appear to be two, although two men that he

00:40:09.060 wounded and one of them died, but they were killed by other people. So technicality. But even that is a

00:40:14.260 long way from 100. So that type of thing, you know, you see in three or four of these careers.

00:40:19.700 On the other hand, Brett, there's any number of gunfighters whose stories are even better than

00:40:25.300 we remember. You know, Hardin's is probably underappreciated solely as a source of, you know,

00:40:32.160 gunfighter mayhem. This is probably a morbid question, but after all your research, like which

00:40:37.540 gunfight was the most impressive, for lack of a better word? Well, you know, I mean, I hate to go

00:40:44.340 to the one everybody knows, but OK Corral is amazing. Eight men, it was initially 10, and several of them

00:40:51.840 backed away. And so it was four Earps versus three bad guys. So seven guys shooting from ranges from

00:40:58.660 five to 15 feet. And a gunfight that lasts 30 seconds, three guys end up getting killed. That was

00:41:05.120 pretty impressed. The other two crazy ones were one from California of all places during the gold rush

00:41:12.740 before the actual gunfighter era, but in kind of a manic prelude in which one guy on a mountain trail

00:41:19.660 with his sack of gold powder was ambushed by a bunch of bandits. And he killed 11 of them by himself

00:41:26.480 with a gun and then with a knife. But hands down, the craziest gunfight of all, I think, and I got to

00:41:33.220 give you the short version of this because the long is too great, was a group, a young Hispanic

00:41:39.520 deputy in New Mexico in 1884, in what's today the town of Reserve, way out on the Arizona border up at

00:41:48.420 altitude, had the temerity to arrest a drunken Texan for shooting his gun in the air. And the next morning

00:41:54.480 after he processed him through the courthouse, he came out and there was a crowd of 80,

00:41:58.740 8-0 Texas cowboys who worked at the ranches outside town, who chased him down. He took refuge

00:42:06.040 in an adobe hut and they kept him under gunfire, under siege for the next 36 hours. He ended up

00:42:13.600 killing four of them and he walked out unhurt in part because everyone only learned afterwards

00:42:18.940 that this little adobe hut had a false bottom and he was able to lay flat about 18 inch below ground

00:42:27.180 level. And these cowboys just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and every single shot went

00:42:31.140 over his head. And the young man's name was El Fago Baca and he went on to be tried and found

00:42:37.600 innocent twice of murder and went on to a long career in New Mexico as a politician and a sheriff

00:42:43.520 of note. So we've talked about the gunfighter era. When did it start drawing to a close?

00:42:48.380 You know, after the early 1880s, that's pretty much the peak of the gunfighter era. You certainly see

00:42:53.480 gun violence for another 20 years. But a lot of the craziest stuff from the early days begins to pass

00:43:00.740 and gunfights in the 1880s and 1890s tend to be much more about something, typically about fights

00:43:07.520 over the division of resources, whether it's cattlemen, you know, fighting farmers or fighting

00:43:13.260 sheep farmers. It more often becomes about something in those later years.

00:43:18.160 It's not about honor anymore.

00:43:20.260 Not as much. I mean, you can certainly find gunfights that seem to be taking part for a

00:43:25.860 man's honor. But what you see much more often is, you know, big feuds over land. And, you know,

00:43:32.920 after 1901, there were certainly gunfights. I can name some. But what you find there is that

00:43:40.440 in terms of newsworthiness and cultural importance, frontier violence kind of gives way to a fascination

00:43:48.980 with frontier entertainment. So Western movies first, but also Western literature. I'm thinking

00:43:56.280 of the Virginia Owen Wester's 1901 book, certainly the rise of Remington and his sculpture. You know,

00:44:03.000 so I argue that, you know, it's in that decade, in those years, in the early part of the 20th

00:44:08.500 century, where Western violence begins to move from headlines to history. And so I think that's

00:44:14.220 a fair place to end the story.

00:44:15.360 Yeah. And then, as you said, the gunfighter kind of got forgotten a little bit, but then there was

00:44:21.100 this revival in the 20s. And it just seemed like for the next 30 years through the 1950s, I mean,

00:44:26.800 it just provided fodder for Hollywood for these stories where they're pumping out TV shows, radio shows, 0.65

00:44:33.720 comic books, movies. What do you think was going on there? Like, why this sudden uptick in the

00:44:39.840 interest in the Old West, and particularly the gunfighter?

00:44:42.720 Well, it's funny, because the gunfighter really wasn't a thing in the Old West. I mean, you could

00:44:47.760 read stories about gunfighters, but in terms of like dime novels and popular entertainments,

00:44:53.900 Indian fighters, even detectives, soldiers were much more popular stock figures than gunfighters.

00:45:01.220 Kit Carson was a popular dime novel character.

00:45:04.720 Much bigger deal than Hickok. Or, you know, Billy the Kid became a household name, but he was the

00:45:09.040 rare gunfighter that at the time achieved true national fame. And much of that was just because

00:45:14.480 he had a stellar nickname. But it really wasn't until the 1920s that the gunfighter was introduced

00:45:20.860 in a serious way into American entertainment. But what took it to the next level was the introduction

00:45:26.460 of television around 1950, which suddenly out of nowhere had, you know, three or four networks

00:45:31.920 and a real need for what we call today original content, for original programming. And frankly,

00:45:38.660 a gunfighter show was stunningly cheap to make. You just needed a back lot with, you know,

00:45:44.660 some Old West buildings. And then it's what, you know, 10 white guys and some guns. I mean, 0.74

00:45:49.080 this is not expensive television to be made. And something like a third or 40% of every TV show on

00:45:57.620 in during the 50s, during the first 10 years of modern television was a Western and most of those

00:46:03.120 featured a gunfighter. But, you know, what really got good though, for those of us who were aficionados

00:46:08.960 was in the late 60s and early 70s with the introduction of Butch Casting and the Sundance

00:46:13.440 Kid in 69, it really introduced something like more realistic Westerns to Hollywood cinema. If

00:46:21.800 you look at the Westerns that came out from Hollywood from 69 for the next decade, I'm thinking

00:46:26.860 about the, you know, Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller with, wasn't that Warren Beatty? I

00:46:32.440 mean, suddenly, you know, we lost kind of the glamour and the glitz and the, you know, singing to

00:46:39.420 damsels in the moonlight and got something that was gritty and dirty and nasty and bloody.

00:46:45.400 And that, those are the movies I think that, that have fueled to the extent that gunfighters have

00:46:51.120 continued to be a thing. I think much of it was because of those movies more even than 50s era

00:46:56.960 television. Having said all that, and with apologies to Taylor Sheridan and Yellowstone and all that,

00:47:02.160 you know, the gunfighter is just not what it used to be. A lot of the adventures,

00:47:06.780 a lot of the narratives that used to star gunfighters now are set not in the Old West, but in outer

00:47:12.400 space. And, you know, it's, it's a shame. There's still a Hickok or a Billy the Kid movie every five

00:47:18.280 or 10 years. And sadly, they no longer really attract the best and brightest. A lot of them just go

00:47:23.480 kind of what we used to call straight to video. What do you think is the best movie that depicts a

00:47:28.740 Old West gunfight? Ooh, you're killing me here. There's so many. I mean, I like Butch Cassidy and

00:47:35.840 the Sundance Kid a lot. It's closer to reality than a lot of people want to believe. The Wild Bunch

00:47:40.080 has to stand out because it was not only the most violent, but people forget it was the first most

00:47:46.880 violent, you know, and it was the first over the top violent Western. I think today, you know,

00:47:53.140 just thinking about movies made in the last 40 years, it's hard not to nod toward the Kurt Russell

00:47:59.760 Tombstone from 93, which people just seem to love. And with the passing of Val Kilmer earlier this

00:48:06.300 year has kind of been rediscovered for a lot of people. I watched that again the other day.

00:48:11.500 And some of the performances in that movie from Powers Booth as Curly Bill Brocious to Michael

00:48:16.960 Bean as Johnny Ringo are just really wonderful. But even though Val Kilmer, of course, steals it,

00:48:24.620 are just really wonderful. And yesterday, I just watched the movie that it went up against,

00:48:29.060 which was the Kevin Costner, Wyatt Earp movie, which put me to sleep then and pretty much put

00:48:34.980 me to sleep again the other day. How do you make a boring Wyatt Earp movie? Well, they pretty much

00:48:39.440 did. Yeah. I remember when I saw Wyatt Earp when it first came out of the movie, I fell asleep in

00:48:42.860 the movie theater. There you go. One movie that I remember, you mentioned it, and it's not very good,

00:48:48.020 but I remember when I watched this when I was, I don't know why I was watching this because it was

00:48:52.140 rated R. I was like nine or 10. But back then, my dad didn't care. He was like, well,

00:48:56.180 you know, he just watched HBO. And if you decide to watch with him, he'd just let you watch a rated

00:49:01.100 R movie. Young Guns. I, for some reason, I watched that movie and I became fascinated with Billy the

00:49:05.880 Kid after I watched Young Guns, but it's pretty cheesy. You know, but it's not cartoonish. Yeah,

00:49:12.200 the facts don't really, I mean, it's, it's, it's what the best thing you could say about it is it's two

00:49:17.800 or three cuts above Young Guns 2. And the one thing that I appreciate about it, watching it,

00:49:23.020 is that Emilio Estevez's portrayal of Billy is, is someone who's not totally stable.

00:49:29.120 And that is a sense that you get about Billy, that he was not entirely stable. And I thought

00:49:34.900 more than a lot of, um, Billy the Kid movies, he brought that out. Well, Brian, this has been a

00:49:40.760 great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work? Oh, golly. You

00:49:44.660 know, I, this is my eighth book. It's called The Gunfighters. It's available on Amazon and in pretty

00:49:48.800 much all bookstores now. It's the first one I've written about the old West. It's the third I've

00:49:52.980 written about Texas. I wrote it for people who don't know much about the old West, but we're

00:49:57.940 looking for one book that would kind of not only introduce them to a lot of these characters,

00:50:02.960 but would really fill in in footnotes and elsewhere with other books where you can go to read, you know,

00:50:08.160 if you want the best books about Billy the Kid, the best books about Wyatt Earp and such, you know,

00:50:12.860 I made a point to point to other people's work here too.

00:50:16.680 It has. Well, Brian Burrell, thanks for time. It's been a pleasure.

00:50:18.200 Sure. Brett, fabulous. Thank you so much.

00:50:21.380 My guest here is Brian Burrell. He's the author of the book, The Gunfighters,

00:50:24.040 How Texas Made the West Wild. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:50:28.140 Check out our show notes at aom.is slash gunfighters where you find links to resources

00:50:31.860 where you delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the

00:50:42.460 AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanlies.com where you find our podcast

00:50:46.240 archives and make sure to sign up for a new substack newsletter. It's called Dying Breed.

00:50:50.580 You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It's a great way to support the show directly. As always,

00:50:55.780 thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind us how

00:50:58.400 the listening podcast would put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - August 26, 2025

The Code They Killed For — Honor, Manhood, and the American Gunfighter

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