It’s a trope of almost every Western movie or TV show: a man with hat on his head and a gun on his hip swaggers into a saloon and picks a fight with one of the locals. Or maybe two men with guns meet on a dusty main street, prepared to settle an old score, based on who ‘s got the quickest draw.
Though it’s tempting to write off these images as stylized fictions of the Old West, a new book by Bryan Burrough tells the stories of very real – and very deadly – violence, and why Texas was at the center of it.
“The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild” argues that the kind of men who came here in the 19th century brought the dueling traditions of the South with them but did away with many rules and niceties of the custom. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: I think a lot of us take it for granted that the way the gunslingers in the Old West are depicted in movies and on TV isn’t really the way it was. But in this new book you seem to be saying, yeah, yeah actually it’s way worse. Care to elaborate?
Bryan Burrough: You know, not only was it way worse, but I think to a degree that I think a lot of us weaned on Texas history may not fully appreciate. Texans, and the behaviors that arose in Texas after the Civil War, had contributed a great deal to this gunfighter.
Every town didn’t have two guys facing off in the middle of [the street] every day at 4 o’clock. But that type of behavior was not that unusual. And recent research in the 21st century has shown that gun deaths and gun fights were at historic proportions in portions of the Old West.
It seems like you’re sort of hitting at something more sociological and cultural that was going on with those who came to Texas and settled parts of it back in the 19th century. Am I right?
I always wanted to understand, why is it that there seemed to be so much of this type of violence on the Western frontier? And why so much memorable violence?
I mean, we still know 100, all these years later, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. We all know their names, and yet there were people who killed on the streets of New York and Baltimore at the time that we’ve forgotten, and rightly so.
So I tried to understand the beginnings of all this, and I trace the Western gunfighter myth and reality to the dueling tradition in the Old South, which really established a precedent for extrajudicial violence. We may forget, but Texas was every inch of southern state – very much a state where they had male honor codes, which if you were insulted, you were expected to strike back, often violently.
Yeah, that’s very interesting because I know you’re aware of a series of books which seems to be wrapped up in what later generations would call toxic masculinity. But there was something else going on there as well. It comes from Scots-Irish. You draw a line sort of down to the Carolinas and Tennessee area. How do you draw the connection then to Tennessee?
Well, it comes out of the Old South. Texas was just another southern state, except for this: It was the only one who had two violent frontiers, the Mexican border and the Native American frontier, which cut Texas in half into the 1870s. And it was the Texas Rangers who popularized the revolver in the 1840s.
But I think the key thing was what happened in Texas after the Civil War. Reconstruction across the South, of course, was a notoriously violent place. But in Texas, it was worse than anywhere else.
It was like an American dirty war. There was a new ethic of violence where men just shot each other an awful lot in Texas after the war, almost always because they felt that they were wronged somehow, that they were offended.
And then the other thing that we have to examine when we talk about violence is is the incredible violence that the cattle industry, which Texans dominated, brought to the Old West. It was cattlemen, as you reference, if we look back at herding societies, going back to 500 years, have been very violent as a way to prevent theft.
In Texas, cattlemen after the war were zealots to the cause, as they expanded first into central Texas, and then later into New Mexico and Kansas. That type of hyper violent ethos that rose in Texas after the war really spread throughout much of the frontier.
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I want to go back to this dueling culture that you were talking about. When I think of the southern dueling cultures, sure, there were scores settled among two people shooting at each other, but that’s not what we’re talking about. In fact, in southern dueling culture, it could be highly mannered. There were a lot of rules for how duels would be settled.
But it almost seems like there was something about the frontier, the lawlessness of it, that almost seemed to invite this, in a sense, at least in the minds of those who engaged in this sort of violence.
You’re exactly right. There are two aspects of the southern dueling heritage that came to Texas and went out into the West. One we kept, one we lost. We lost the formality, the rules and all that. That just fell by the wayside. Come on, Westerners and Texans have never had much use for that type of thing.
But the idea that you could challenge a man to violence, that your revenge on a family member was expected to be enacted, that type of thinking not only endured in Texas, but it’s what Texans, if you go back and you read in the 1890s and the 1880s, you can actually find articles where people – writers in New York – are excoriating Texans for this type of vengeful behavior.
And as the Texas cattle industry spread across New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, all the way into Montana, that’s the type of behavior really that seeded the gunfighter myth and really, its reality.
Brian, you made a point when we got started with this conversation where you were saying that there were people who engaged in this sort of lawless behavior in Texas and we remember their names today. And yet there were shootings in New York settling scores in a similar sense. We don’t remember any of those names – and you added, and for good reason.
Now I think about some of these famous names from the Old West – John Wesley Hardin, for example – they are almost regarded as kind of folk heroes, especially once the media got a hold of them. And I’m not sure: Should we have – as a culture, as society – held on to that mythology and built it up?
Well, a lot of it has to do with the West being kind of the American creation myth and the idea that in the West, men were free of the rules of Eastern society. They were free to pursue their their own lives.
And the gunfighter kind of became the embodiment of that myth, at least as people started talking about it in literature and in movies in the 20th century.
So bigger than Texas in a sense, really, it was part of the American myth?
Oh, very much so. But you know, I don’t take a stance on whether the glorification of gunfighters like Hardin and Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp, all people I write a lot about here, whether that should be done or not.
I write history. And what I say is basically look, love these guys or hate them, they’re undeniably a part of our shared history, of our culture, of what has made the country the country. I came up with what I thought is a fresh new way of telling their story all in one place, all these guys in one single story, and I just found it tremendously exciting.
You know, you have the Hatfields and McCoys, people talk a lot about them even today. But you write about another feud, a Texas feud, that was really more deadly. What can you say about the Taylor-Sutton feud?
Well, Taylor-Sutton was the longest. First off, you have to understand, we’ve all heard of Hatfield and McCoy. Those guys were pikers compared to Texans and these Texas feuds that erupted after the war. Sutton-Taylor started in ’68 and went well into the mid 1870s.
But David, you got to remember the Lee-Peacock feud in North Texas around Sherman, where the body count was estimated at 50 men. And I think that was conservative. There were all sorts of feuds, both because of post-war tensions in North and East Texas, but also the cattle industry and the type of violence we were talking about earlier. It triggered a lot of these feuds.
Not only Sutton-Taylor down east of San Antonio, but you got to remember the Hoodoo War around Mason. There’s more than a dozen of these type of feuds that were going on. And that’s the type of thing that once the cattle began spreading across the West, that spread across the West.
How did this era of the gunfighter end?
You know, I call this the gunfighter era, from 1865 until Butch [Cassidy] and [the] Sundance [Kid] got on that freighter for South America in 1901, just because they were kind of the last brand-name American outlaws. And after they left, I think it’s safe to say that the frontier, if it wasn’t closed, it was closing.
People were writing a lot less about Western violence than they were about Western literature and art and eventually film. So you’ve got to kind of choose an ending. And I chose to do it once Butch and Sundance disappeared.
It almost makes me think that you don’t think the gunfighter era all together ended, the way that you just said it.
Well, I think that gunfighters went from headlines to history. They go from being a thing, especially in the 1870s, 1880s, and to a lesser extent, in the ’90s, and then suddenly, you’ve got a gunfighter showing up in silent movies within 20 years.
And ironically, you got some of the participants, including Wyatt Earp, gravitate toward Hollywood and serving as technical advisers on those early films.
So, the gunfighter idea, the gunfighter ethos, the gunfighters as an important component of American culture, certainly didn’t go away. In fact, it became a much bigger deal in American literature and film and I think in our minds in the 20th century that it had been in the 19th.
I almost thought that you were going to say law enforcement got better, because when I think about the time when you start to have the emergence of films and Wyatt Earp being a film consultant and that sort of thing, in real life you’ve got Clyde Barrow, for example, emerging from a Texas jail and hooking up with Bonnie Parker, and they become their own sort of gunfighting legends, but then it’s not so much about settling scores as it is about the shootouts with law enforcement and that becoming the stuff of Texas lore.
Well, you are certainly right that one component of the closing of the frontier, the biggest component was the railroads, which brought standard civilization into so much of the West.
But yeah, if you look at some of these cases, if you looked at the bumbling law enforcement people that went after Jesse James, that went after Billy the Kid, allowing them to remain at large for so long. And then as you look through some of the later gangs, I’m thinking, especially the Doolin-Dalton Gang in Oklahoma, you begin to see serious professionalism among federal agents. And so that’s certainly a component of the closing of the frontier.
And you mentioned Bonnie and Clyde and of course, as awful as they were, they’ll always have a warm spot in my heart since my grandfather was among the bumblers trying to bring them down in the 1930s. As you may remember, I wrote a book about that years ago called “Public Enemies.”
