The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the Wild West by Bryan Burrough

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The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the Wild West by Bryan Burrough

'The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the Wild West' by Bryan Burrough

The gunfighter, crucial to the mythology of America’s Old West, emerged as an archetype after the Civil War. And while the tales were embroidered in the retelling, they were based, as Hollywood would later insist, “on a true story.”

According to the lucid account by New York Times bestselling author Bryan Burrough, the “Gunfighter era” began in 1865 when Wild Bill Hickock, a Union veteran, shot down Davis Tutt, a Confederate, in a dispute over a pocket watch. Hickock was born in Illinois, an anomaly in Burrough’s narrative, which holds that most of the gunfighters came from the South, and most of them from Texas.

In The Gunfighters, Burroughs identifies the roots of the Old West gunslingers in the Old South’s custom of dueling. White Southerners aspired to a culture of personal honor, whose downside was that no slight could go unanswered. As for Texas, it was, from the first raising of the Lone Star flag, “a violent place, its borders especially,” a white settler society at war with Mexican raiders and Native Americans.

The image of the gunfighter was enabled by technology. In 1836 a new weapon was introduced, invented by a Yankee by the name of Samuel Colt. Armed with a revolver, a gunman could now fire rapidly and accurately. Colt sold them to the Texas navy, and when the republic joined the Union, the defunct navy handed their Colts to the Texas Rangers.

Burroughs unearths many other forgotten facts, including the brutal crime unleashed in many places by Civil War veterans whose moral compass was smashed underfoot on the battlefield. Many kept their weapons, and the culture of gun ownership was especially strong in the former Confederacy, whose whites resented federal authority and feared an uprising by the formerly enslaved. Journalists and dime novelists turned fast-gun killers into celebrities. Many of the emerged “from the wreckage of postwar Texas.”

Buy The Gunfighters on Amazon here.

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