Blame Texas, and Maybe the South!

Burrough, Bryan.  The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild.  New York: Penguin Press, 

        2025.  ISBN: 9781984878908

 

 

Do the names Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Luke Short ring a bell with you?  Or maybe the Shootout at the O.K. Corral?  Or just about any western novel or movie which has a gunfight (High Noon) or gunslinger as a hero (Louis L'Amour's The First Fast Draw).  Well Bryan Burrough makes a case for blaming Texas and its exports of shootists, gunmen, and "range detectives" for the violence that swept the West after the Civil War.  

Burrough opens The Gunfighters with a chapter on why he is focusing on Texas.  He then delves into the history of the first gunfighters with the Texas Rangers in the 1840s and California in the 1850s before the 1865 fight between Wild Bill Hickok and Davis Tutt that many claim was the "first Western gunfight."  Mark Twain in Roughing It discussed the mystic of the gunfighter.  Burrough in the next seventeen chapters covers the gamut of the West from 1865 Texas to Kansas in the 1870s, Dodge City, a detour to the Midwest with Jesse James, the Texas invasion of New Mexico (think Billy the Kid), Tombstone (AZ) with the feud between the Cowboys and the Earps, the range wars in Wyoming and Montana (Tom Horn & "Deacon" Jim Miller), Oklahoma in the 1890s, and finishing with Butch Cassidy.  The final chapter - From Headlines to History - provides the endings to various of the gunfighters in the 20th century.  

If a reader is interested in the truth behind the legends of the West, they would do well to pick up and perusing Bryan Burrough's The Gunfighters!