The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild

by Bryan Burrough

Overview

“One hell of a good read.” —The New York Times

“One of the most important books written on the American West in many years.” —True West Magazine

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Big Rich and Forget the Alamo comes an epic reconsideration of the time and place that spawned America’s most legendary gunfighters, from Jesse James and Billy the Kid to Butch and Sundance

The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers turned the heat up further. And the explosion in the cattle business after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the whole of the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable blood meridian. When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning. It’s never stopped.

The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the most unhinged tastes. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly. Like all great stories, this one has a rousing end—as the railroads and the settlers close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South America, ending their era in a blaze of glory. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984878915
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	53 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Bryan Burrough is the author or coauthor of seven books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including the Wall Street classic Barbarians at the Gate and, most recently, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. A longtime correspondent at Vanity Fair and now editor at large at Texas Monthly, he lives in Austin.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Thing About Texas

Sometimes I strike an unprotected town
Paint it red.
Choke the sheriff, turn the marshal upside down
On his head.
Call for drinks for all the party
And if chinned by any smarty
Pay in lead.

-Excerpt from "The Wild Cowhand,"
a poem published in the Fort Worth
Daily Gazette, circa 1886

The Old West was a kaleidoscope of personal violence. From Texas to Montana, everyone from the U.S. cavalry to buffalo hunters to homesteaders fought Native American tribes. From California to Nebraska, outlaws preyed on trains and lonely stagecoaches. On the Mexican border, ranchers and lawmen fought bandits. The frontier was home to a plethora of lethal, Appalachian-style family and political feuds. And almost everywhere, cattlemen fought dirty little wars with cattle rustlers, settlers, and sheepherders.

All these conflicts involved guns, but what concerns us here are the civilian gunfights of note, the ones cited repeatedly in the Western canon, those that form the core of the gunfighter legends. They're the confrontations that made figures such as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid famous and helped make the West "wild." These incidents, it must be said, amount to the tiniest fraction of violence in the Old West. They don't include the massacres of Latinos along the Mexican border, or of Chinese immigrants in California, or thousands of other gun deaths. They're simply the ones we most remember, the ones that passed into legend.

Here's the thing. If you study these marquee gunfights at any length, something jumps out at you about the participants. In Kansas, in Wyoming, in New Mexico, in Arizona, all across the frontier, a startling number of these deadly encounters involved a single kind of person:

A Texan.

It's true. Texas cowboys, cattlemen, and outlaws took part in, and often initiated, the notable gunfights of Earp's Tombstone and Dodge City, the manic shoot-outs of Billy the Kid's New Mexico, the showdowns of Hickok's Abilene, and the cattle wars of Wyoming. And that's to say nothing of the gun battles in Texas itself, which saw more than any other state. Take away Texans-Texas cowboys, Texas outlaws, and Texas lawmen-and the American Gunfighter Era shrinks to insignificance.

One Texas historian, Bill O'Neal, has made a fair attempt at a statistical analysis. O'Neal identified 589 major gunfights on the postwar frontier-nearly 30 percent, 160, occurred in Texas. "No other Western commonwealth was the arena of even half as many shootings," O'Neal noted in a 2011 article. Moreover, he found, "more gunfighters were born in Texas than in any other state or territory, and more died in Texas than in any other state . . . 10 of the deadliest 15 spent most of their careers in Texas."

The link between Texans and gunfighter violence is not some modern notion. That the Texan was a rootin' tootin' rowdy with a smoking six-shooter is so much a part of the Lone Star mythos it's a cliché. So it's eye-opening to discover how much truth there is to it. The association of Texans and lethal gunfights was established as early as the 1870s. You can find editorials published in New York that decried Texas-born gun violence in 1878.

"The name of Texas became the synonym for savagery," the writer Emerson Hough, who lived on the frontier, noted in 1907. "So many bad men of Texas have attained reputation far wider than their state that it became a proverb upon the frontier that any man born on Texas soil would shoot, just as any horse born there would 'buck.'"

What interests me is less the number of gunfights Texans took part in than their impact, their role in shaping the way the Old West has been remembered. I don't want to overstate this. Texans, after all, had no monopoly on gun violence. They didn't ride with Jesse James at Northfield, or Joaquin Murrieta in the Gold Rush, or the Daltons at Coffeyville. They weren't at Bodie or Virginia City or any of the mining camps where gun violence was prevalent. Yet even a cursory review of Western literature suggests their impact was wide and deep. What I'm positing is that from Arizona to Wyoming to Kansas, Texans and the business they introduced and dominated on the frontier, open-range cattle ranching, had an influence on the Gunfighter Era that is far more pervasive than we remember today.

Skeptical? Maybe look at it this way: It's clear from articles at the time that Texans got blamed for an awful lot of gunfighter-style violence. So the question becomes: Was that blame justified? Was there something different about the behavior of Texans? Or was this all a matter of skewed perception? In the end, here's what I say:

You bet your ass Texans were different.

Of the fifty states, Texas is the only one to defeat a foreign power at war, the only one to emerge as an independent nation as a result. During much of the nineteenth century, it was the only state with not one but two violent frontiers-the Mexican border, where Texans fought bandits and the incursions of an embittered Mexican army, and the Native American frontier, the site of hundreds of desperate battles and atrocities involving the Comanche and their allies, which cut the state in half on a diagonal into the 1870s.

What emerged was a highly martial culture, its people deeply attuned to violence and expert at it. It's no surprise it was Texans who first popularized the newfangled revolvers that ushered in the Gunfighter Era. But there's another issue here, one a facility with firearms doesn't explain, and this goes to motivation, the why of it: Why were Texans involved in so many gunfights? Why shoot someone in the first place? And why did people on the frontier, Texans especially, seem to do it so very often?

Scholars have debated frontier violence for decades. Most suggest it was the inevitable product of any frontier society, and that's true as far as it goes. Wide-open, unsettled land typically means less law enforcement. It also tends to attract young, unsettled men, who are inclined to alleviate the boredom of underdeveloped space with alcohol, all factors cited to explain violence in the Old West. But too much booze and too few sheriffs doesn't in itself explain why people shoot each other; if it did, pool parties and ZZ Top concerts would be frequent sites of mayhem. There has to be a perceived reason, even a stupid one, for someone to resort to deadly force.

Could there be a distinct reason so many men shot each other in the Old West? Was there something unique about the place, the time, the people? Men like Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo, after all, didn't emerge from just anywhere-not the frontiers of Canada or Australia or the Trans-Appalachian frontier of the early 1800s. They rose in a specific place, in a specific window of time, in a fateful intersection of new technology, commerce, and culture.

Culture is the underexplored variable here. At base, a gunfight was a product of certain human behaviors-mostly the whens and whys of personal violence-that were shaped by unwritten societal codes; that is, the way a society dictates how people resolve their conflicts. In modern society, depending on the severity of the dispute, Americans are expected to turn to the lawsuit, the police, or, increasingly, the internet. In the Old West, not so much.

So, what was it about Texans in the 1800s? I have a theory. First, that the Old West developed elements of a distinct code around violence, an evolution of older American norms. Second, that crucial components of these norms emanated from a region of America whose influence on western customs has been shortchanged:

The South. That's right, the South.

Make no mistake, antebellum Texas was every inch a Southern state, its dominant business slave-picked cotton, deeply hostile to people of color, fully half its early colonists from just two states, Alabama and Tennessee. And yet, while new scholarship has demonstrated the profound influence Southern customs had on the West's political development, less discussed is the impact Southern mores may have had on people on the ground, on how people on the frontier lived, including how they handled their disputes.

To understand Southern codes of behavior and how they influenced violence in the Old West, it helps to suss out the gunfighter's origins. Finding literary antecedents, by the way-and the gunfighter lives as much in literature as history-is easy. A staple of tales told around the world, he is the New World version of the wandering man of violence, the medieval swordsman, the Cossack, the samurai. In America, where those who pursue settled lives have long been fascinated by those who don't, he belongs to the second or third generation of "frontiersmen," heroes of narratives inspired by John Smith, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson. He is Natty Bumppo's swaggering nephew, only with a six-shooter and an attitude. The gunfighter's emergence as a hero in so many American stories is an extension of the tales we've told for eons.

The forerunners of history's gunfighters, though, of Ben Thompson and Harvey Logan and Pat Garrett, can seem harder to identify. There were no broadly famous American gunmen or even lawmen before their time. Some might argue for any number of outlaws who worked the Mississippi and Ohio River frontiers between 1790 and 1830; men such as the river pirate Samuel Mason and the murderous Harpe brothers come to mind. None, however, were known for their prowess with firearms. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were renowned frontiersmen, but they faced off against more Native Americans and bears than citizens.

The gunfighter's true antecedent, I'd argue, is the duelist, a figure born in medieval Europe who found keen popularity in the antebellum South. The duel was deeply ingrained in European societies, especially in Britain and Ireland, the source of so many immigrants to America. It arrived with the earliest British settlers; a duel with swords was reported in Massachusetts the year after the Pilgrims landed. Duels remained rare, however, until the Revolutionary War when, according to one history, a dueling fad sprang up "rather suddenly."

Historians identify two likely causes: the number of Americans exposed to British and French officers preoccupied with honor and prone to defending it via duel; and the schism between Tories and Patriots, which produced a generation of men who could be terribly sensitive to any questioning of their loyalties. By the time foreign forces left in 1782, William Oliver Stevens has written, "the code of honor they had brought to America had taken firm root during the eight years of war. It was now recognized as an American institution."

There's a tendency to dismiss antebellum duels as the pastime of a lunatic fringe. In fact, from the late 1700s until the 1840s, dueling was a staple of American and especially Southern life. Many cities actually had unofficial "dueling grounds." In St. Louis duelists repaired to a sandbar in the Mississippi River known as Bloody Island: the future senator Thomas Hart Benton killed a rival there in 1817. Outside Washington, men faced off at the Bladensburg Dueling Grounds in Maryland. Maybe the busiest venue was in New Orleans, beneath a canopy of gnarled oaks at the foot of Esplanade Avenue in today's City Park. At the height of the dueling craze between 1834 and 1844, a local paper noted, "scarcely a day passed without duels being fought at the Oaks." Ten separate duels were fought there on a single Sunday in 1839.

A list of noted duelists would include Andrew Jackson, the only president so involved; Senator Henry Clay; and Sam Houston, who as a young Tennessee congressman aimed a tad low and shot a rival in the, um, groin. In 1842 Abraham Lincoln, then a legislator in Illinois, reluctantly accepted a challenge from an opponent and, upon learning he was a skilled marksman, chose to fight with broadswords; bloodshed was avoided only when seconds talked the men out of it. It's said the fifth president, James Monroe, once sought to duel the second, the prickly John Adams, until talked out of it by the fourth, James Madison. The most famous duel was between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1804. There was an uproar when Burr killed Hamilton. After that, duels all but vanished from the North.

Below the Mason-Dixon Line, though, they remained not only accepted but embraced, even exalted. But then the antebellum South was a legendarily violent place. Everyone commented on it, travelers, memoirists, Tocqueville. Their journals are replete with arguments devolving into fistfights and shootings in the blink of an eye; an Englishman found the South as "barbarous as a jungle inhabited by wild beasts." Wrote another: "The darkest side of the southerner is his quarrelsomeness, and recklessness of human life." The numbers are shocking; the homicide rate in Florida's cotton districts during the 1830s was fifty times that of the Northeast.

Some historians blame slavery, some the heat, some the fact that many Southerners descended from the Scots and Irish, both renowned for their honor codes, violence, and clannishness-and their dueling. Others note that until the rise of cotton, Southern commerce was dominated by livestock trades, by the raising and selling of cattle, pigs, and horses. Through the ages such "herding societies" have tended to be off-the-charts violent, the better to deal with those who steal things with four legs. (The same, as we'll see, could be said of Texas cattlemen.)

Whatever else it was, then, much of the violence was a clear product of the South's obsession with honor. Honor was its social currency, the yardstick by which men were measured. Any insult, any slight, anything that might diminish a man's honor demanded a response, often a violent one, whether a punch in the face, a challenge to a duel, or, if families got involved, a full-blown feud. Some blame the lack of other measurements of status, university degrees and financial statements being in short supply in the years before the Civil War.

The best explanation may be the simplest. Because enslaved Black people did almost all the planters' actual work, the South developed something new in America, a ruling class whose lives were defined by idleness and leisure pursuits. Glancing about for role models, the planting classes came to revere, and emulate, European-style aristocracy, for whom honor was sacrosanct. Quite simply, it was the way aristocrats-and Southerners-kept score. Those who aspired to join the upper class, meaning practically everyone else, were obliged to follow suit to have any hope of advancement. In time, certainly by the early 1800s, the primacy of honor permeated every facet of Southern society.

When we talk about a Southern honor code, we mean the broadly understood rules that defined how a man in the antebellum South was expected to act. While everyone defines it a bit differently, the code in general required a man to be honest, courteous, brave, and prepared to use violence, even deadly violence, to defend his honor. From this sprang a host of behaviors that made the South distinct, including emphasis on lavish entertainment and oratory, and the routine personal violence, the duels and feuds, the rejection of meager legal remedies for vigilantism, and the zeal for gambling, dancing, and hunting.

Editorial Reviews

It is a reminder that we are selective about our hero's. And that American history was made not just by the Founding Fathers but also by the messy rascals and gamblers and liars and killers who have long filled out its more sordid chapters. Our nation has always been shaped by the latter, too, it turns out, and reading about them years after the fact, antihero's though they may have been, is still a hell of a good time.” —The Washington Post

“Engrossing.” —The Wall Street Journal

“One of the most important books written on the American West in many years.” —True West Magazine

“A captivating exploration of the Wild West, delving into the era of gunfighters with literary flair and historical depth . . . Burrough expertly separates fact from folklore . . . A fascinating work of history that challenges readers to reconsider the role of the West’s legendary gunfighters in shaping the identity of the United States.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A treat for Western history buffs who don’t mind plenty of debunking along the way.” —Kirkus

“The Gunfighters has all the propulsive energy and high tension of a Wild-West yarn. But it has the distinction of being (mostly) true. Burrough takes on the mythic characters of the West with his characteristic wit, thoughtfulness, and eye for the absurd. He tells this story as only a loving—but conflicted—son of Texas could.” —Beverly Gage, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“The Gunfighters is a wild and distinctly American book—brilliant, breezy, violent and unexpectedly moving. The book’s cast of characters—guys like Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and Butch Cassidy—are the mythological superhero's of the old West, men who roamed the hills and prairies at a moment when guns and cattle and lawlessness reigned supreme. Burrough’s great accomplishment is not just that he separates historical fact from Hollywood fiction and retells the gunslingers’ stories for our time, but that he does it without condemning or romanticizing them—he lets them live in all their blood and savagery and private codes of honor. You can feel the bullets whizzing by on every page.” —Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First

“In The Gunfighters, Bryan Burrough takes dead aim at one of America’s greatest foundation myths. The result is a blood-spattered narrative that starts with hyperviolent men shooting each other and ends as a transcendent portrait of the Old West.” —S.C. Gwynne, author of New York Times bestsellers Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell

“A harrowing look at the killers who operated on every possible side of the law during a time that has been heedlessly sealed into legend. For anyone who has ever been curious about the real stories behind Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, Jesse James or Sam Bass, The Gunfighters is a masterful example of one-stop shopping.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo

“In The Gunfighters, Bryan Burrough uses his tremendous gifts as a historian and storyteller to revolutionize our understanding of a core part of the American myth. This is riotous history stripped of Hollywood cliches, a fresh take on the violence and the legends that formed the Wild West and the American story itself.” —Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk and When the Heavens Went on Sale

From the Publisher

★ 04/18/2025

Burrough (coauthor of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth) offers a captivating exploration of the Wild West, delving into the era of gunfighters with literary flair and historical depth. He makes the case that Texas was the locus of gun violence in the 19th century (with the highest murder rate per capita in U.S. history), particularly due to its hostile borders with Comanche territory and with Mexico, the coexistence there of Confederate and Union supporters, and the surging cattle business, which was often accompanied by rustlers, gamblers, and vigilantes. However, Burrough also argues that the violent reality of Texas was inflated by sensationalistic journalism, creating a morass of myths and facts. While focusing on activities in and around Texas, Burrough's book is also a more nuanced portrayal of figures such as Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp than often appears in popular history accounts. The book is fascinating and will be widely popular due to its subject matter, plus it offers two 16-page sets of photos and illustrations and six helpful maps. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the enduring legacy of the Wild West, in which Burrough expertly separates fact from folklore. VERDICT A fascinating work of history that challenges readers to reconsider the role of the West's legendary gunfighters in shaping the identity of the United States.—Lawrence Mello

Library Journal

2025-02-15
A rootin’-tootin’ history of the Wild West’s legacy of cold steel.

There’s something about Texas that makes a person reach for his gun. So hazards Texas historian Burrough, who finds in the Lone Star State a culture of both frontier violence and the social obsessions of the Old South, with a code that “in general required a man to be honest, courteous, brave, and prepared to use violence, even deadly violence, to defend his honor.” The first post–Civil War shootout was fought in Missouri between a Confederate and a Union veteran, the latter none other than Wild Bill Hickok; Hickok would of course meet his fate in South Dakota, but just about every other gunfighter—notably the “psychopath” John Wesley Hardin—cycled through Texas on the way to someplace else. Most fought in the Civil War, and while Burrough notes that gunfights were a fixture of the California Gold Rush, he puts the “Gunfighter Era” as taking place from 1865 to 1901. The big names are there, from Wyatt Earp to Butch Cassidy, but just as interesting are lesser-known figures such as the Texas rancher Clay Allison, “who may have been the frontier’s most feared gunfighter in the late 1870s and was likely the most unstable” but managed to avoid being gunned down by the brothers Earp in Dodge City. The Earps moved on to Tombstone, Arizona, a town full of Texas bad guys, and there engaged in the most famous gunfighter episode ever, the 30-second shootout at the O.K. Corral, most famous because best documented thanks to a remarkably comprehensive inquest. Along the way, Burrough writes of the mythmaking machinery of the pulps and Hollywood, the source of a flood of falsities, but he concludes—and this book helps in the task—that “the truth…tends to win in the end.”

A treat for Western history buffs who don’t mind plenty of debunking along the way.

Kirkus Reviews