Angry Planet - America’s Favorite Gunfighters and the Birth of the Old West

Episode Date: June 7, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comAmerica loves the Western. Stories about frontier towns, outlaws and lawmen, and—most of all—killing. How did the myth and legend of the gunfighter come to permeate the U.S.? Were there rules to gunfights? How did you become famous by killing people? Did Texas, yes Texas, make all this possible?We’ll answer those questions in this episode of the show as we discuss the new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. It’s the work of returning guest (and Texan) Bryan Burrough.Texas is both the West and the SouthWhat made Texas so violentWhat, exactly, is a gunfighter?The rules of the duel“Boys, I’m killed”How to win friends while killin’ people“What is more equalizing than a man alone with a gun?”Olive, Isom PrenticeHistoriography of the gunfighterModern bank robbers are boringThe cattle business is the perfect vehicle for violenceThe future belongs ... to pirates?Buy The Gunfighters from an independent bookstore or from AmazonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Did you know that Angry Planet is almost entirely listener supported? It's true. Go to Angry PlanetPod.com, sign up for $9 a month,

and you get commercial-free early access to all of our mainland episodes, as well as bonus episodes. The one that's up that I just posted right now is all about Silicon Valley's dreams of the future and why they might not be physically possible. Go to angry planetpod.com to take a listen. Hello and welcome back to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galtz. And I'm Jason Fields. And Jason, you want to do something a little lighter today?

Do you want to talk about a romantic vision of the Old West? Do you want to talk about gunfighters? Yes. Yes, I do. That sounds like a nice change from where we've been. We are lucky to have Mr. Brian Burrow back on the pod. I think this is your third appearance on Angry Planet, sir. But for those who may not know, can you introduce yourself and tell us about this lovely new book you've got coming out?

My name is Brian Burrow. I am a long-time writer at Vanity Fair before that, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the author of now eight books. Four of them, New York Times bestsellers, four of them you've probably never heard of. And my latest is called The Gunfighters, how Texas made the West Wild. And it is a new look at those people, almost all men, who became famous on the old Western Front. frontier by shooting other people. You're White Earp, your Wild Bill Hickok, you're Jesse James,

your Billy the Kid, these kinds of people. All of them. The only thing I would quarrel with you with, because I quarrel with myself about it in the book is I kind of guilted myself into telling the story of Jesse James here, even though I feel strongly that he was not an Old West gunfighter. He was a Midwestern bank and train robber,

but that is an argument that I can really only get into with about six and seven people. He gets, I mean, yeah, he gets roped into the legends, right? He does. Spoken of in the same breath.

Yes. Okay, so I would say that you write here, one of the things that really attracted me to this book is its subhead. And now I'm leaning over to make sure I get it correct. How Texas Made the West Wild. As a Texan, I am constantly fascinated by how,

Texans process their own history. And it's important, I think, for people to understand that Texas is the West and was the West, but it's also the South. And I think sometimes it doesn't get enough credit for how Southern it is and how important it is to Southern history. Can you kind of talk about how this phenomenon of people who got famous for killing people is kind of a uniquely southern and also a uniquely Texan phenomenon. Well, the book is, you know, is an overview, a narrative history of what I call the gunfighter era.

From the first nationally recognized gunfight in 1865 involving Wild Bill Hickok up until 1901, when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid got on that freighter for Argentina and never returned. If you know about the people that populated that era, the most famous gunfighters, I would say that the fresh thing about this book, what it rests its utility on, is the idea that much of the behavior that gunfighters made popular was emanated from the Old South and the Old South's honored codes, often, you know, symbolized by the duel. and I theorize that Old West gunfights essentially can be traced back to the factors intrinsic in southern duels. What changed was what happened when southern behaviors came to Texas, which was very much a southern state in those days. Its dominant business was slave-farmed cotton, but it had something that the rest of the South and the rest of the country didn't have, which was not one but two violent frontiers. the Mexican frontier, of course, on the real ground, but also people forget the Native American frontier, the Comanche frontier primarily, that cut Texas in half on a diagonal well into the 1870s.

All of this created a highly martial culture that to this day is known for its knowledge and expertise of firearms. It was Texans, Texas Rangers famously, that while they didn't invent the coal. revolver were the first in the world to adopt it and to actually head back east and work with Colt himself to create what became the father of a long line of six shooters that made this gunfighter era popular. And then we could talk about this later, but I, you know, I spend a lot of time in the book talking about the unique nature of violence that arose in Texas in the 10 years after the Civil War and how with the spread of the open range

cattle industry, which Texans dominated, the spread up the Chisholm Trail toward Kansas and northern states, northern part of the Great Plates, but also west into New Mexico and Arizona, which were states practically colonized by Texas ranchers. This type of Texas, that martial culture of Texas, spread and really became a primary driver of this type of gunfighter culture that has gone into American legend. How do you define a gunfighter? That's an excellent question because many people

don't. A gunfighter is essentially, as I define it, and I think most in the people in the literature define it, is somebody who had an exchange of gunfire in the Old West with another citizen, with Native Americans, that would be Indian fighter, to use the 19th century pilots, or with soldiers. So it was civilian and typically extrajudicial violence. Typically, these are gunfights that arose because somebody got offended and they chose to take it outside. Maybe it was, you know, among feudists. The old west was the side of Moore and the bloodiest feudist. feuds in American history, but it also could be, you know, a sheriff and an outlaw. So a lot of different type of American archetypes could be gunfighter. It's a large category that just excludes gunfights involving Native Americans and soldiers. Can I ask what the rules of a gunfight are and the tradition that comes from the South? And as a northerner, just one other quick thing, just, I mean, are we talking also about the same thing that got Alexander Hamilton killed?

Well, in fact, that's exactly where I try in, in search of kind of where this came from. I mean, look, guys, if you just think about it, it's really strange that a lot of men became famous on the Western frontier for killing people. I mean, as I say in the book, men did that on the streets of Baltimore and Boston every night. and nobody remembers them and rightly so. But the violence out west became special, and it's remembered today because it became part of that, you know, the American creation myth, that worship of individualism.

And so I wanted to figure out where the heck did this come from? And I think the only place to the trace that really is the southern dueling tradition, which arose. It came over with the English and Scottish, of course. There was a duel, you know, at Plymouth, a year after the Pilgrims landed at, at Plymouth Rock, after the duel in which Aaron Burr famously killed Alexander Hamilton

and Weehawk in New Jersey in 1804, dueling and that type of male honor code that gave rise to dueling all but disappeared in the north. But it rose and became even more popular in the south. In fact, you can find actual written, the most famous code of dueling is a book of dueling. It's a book of dueling instructions written by the governor of South Carolina during the 1830s. The code duelo? The code dwello was what it was based on. The code dwello came out of Ireland. What I, in chapter one or two, I follow kind of the evolution of that dueling culture

as it moved west from the very formal written rule type of duel that we saw in civilized places like New Orleans and Charleston out through the story. southern frontier. If you look at the duels in early Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, they became something that looked like gunfights by appointment. They became a more raw thing. And by the time they get to Texas and Texans kind of introduce their own ways, it becomes a very different thing than a classic duel. That is, I think that the duel's evolution was less about the formal rules, because you just don't see duels in the old west, but it's very much about the reasons for the duel. The honor system that became such a part of life in the

antebellum center, honor, honor essentially being the ways that all Southerners, especially southern aristocrats and platters, measured themselves. And so part of the Southern Honor Code was the idea that if anybody offended you, did anything to, you? Did anything to, you? to take down your honor. You were obliged to challenge him with force, even deadly force. And that's the type of behaviors that you see prevalent throughout the Western frontier. And that I, you know, argue that Texans were instrumental in spreading. What's the line between a formal duel and just a fight?

well a formal duel typically would have seconds so everybody both guys have another guy and they try to talk sense into them and maybe they can and everybody goes and has a beer

maybe they can't and these people have rules for instance if you if you fired your gun before the judge who was there yelled fire one of the seconds could open fire on you there were actual rules when you get out

beyond Texas into the 1860s and 1870s, all that falls by the wayside. About the closest there are to a rule is in an exchange that you see that previews a lot of old West gun fights. And it commonly uses the word outside. You and I had an argument, Matthew, and I would say, I'll see you outside. Come on, say that to me outside. That meant that we were going to go out and have a fair fight. That's the closest vestige of dueling structure that you find in the Old West. Matthew, that's an interesting question, but I'm just curious, what's the difference between a duel and murder?

No duelists were never even indicted murder, but is it considered a fair fight? Is that right? Agreed upon by two men knowing exactly what they were getting themselves into. And it was a fair fight. That's why there were so few murders, you know, among gunfighters. There was this, there was this legal doctrine, and I'm not calling it to mine right now, but essentially said if it was a fair fight, you weren't going to, you weren't, nobody was going to prison. And that was prevalent, you know, into the 1920s.

Why do you think these men, actually, let me, let me, because this is such a great story that I really things sets up basically everything else in the book, which is why you start the book with it, I assume. Tell me about Wild Bill Hickok and his fight that you opened the book with. Guys, guys, what is so cool about this is that, look, I'm attempting to lay structure on an activity, gunfighting that seems like it's just all over the play. How do you write a history of that, right? Well, it turns out there was actually a beginning. There was a first gun fight. No, it wasn't literally the first gun fight, but it was the first gun fight that drew national attention. It was the first time somebody said, wait, there are gunfires in our midst.

It happened in Springfield, Missouri, toward the southwest part of the state in July 1865, like 60 days after Appomattox. Late on a Friday afternoon, just before 6 o'clock, I think it was July 19th, 1865. Two men walked into the square. On the north side was a former Confederate scout turned gambler named Davis Tut, Tutt, T-U-T-T-T-T. On the south side was a guy A former Union Scout named James Butler Hickok who has gone down in history as Wild Bill Hickok And their difference was over gambling debt.

Tut said that Hickok owed him $35 for a poker game. Hickok insisted it was $25. Tutt snatched up his watch as payment, at which point Hickok spread the word six o'clock town square a crowd uh uh forms the men all all all when they both get in a place all hiccuck does is yell here i am dave and they both go stock still tut draws first he does the amateur move which is drawing from his hip and firing from his hip from a distance of 75 yards not many people are going to make that shock hiccock uh you know emphasize

as Wyatt Earp and others did, that speed was nice, but accuracy was far more important, actually drew his Navy Colts, you know, fast, but he thrust out his left arm, and he put the barrel of his Navy Colt across his left forearm, took dead aim, and shot, at which point a red bloom was seen across Tuss. Chast, he yells, boys, I'm killed, staggered into the street, and died. A magazine reporter happened to interview Hickok soon after, and the story appeared in Harper's Weekly's. Harper's Weekly. That is the beginning of the whole idea of gunfighting and a gunfighter.

I mean, and the funny thing is the article is most notable because it portrayed Hickok not only as a gunfighter, but a man who had literally killed over a hundred people. As best I can tell the actual number at that point was two. But, you know, he was, you know, a common exaggeration. So while Hickok became kind of the fake patient zero who birthed this whole legend. And, you know, he became a celebrity. And after that, the newspapers and the press suddenly were kind of on the lookout for gunfighter. Suddenly gunfighter was the thing.

And so, you know, people who had just been killing each other, an argument and such would occasionally be lauded by the press for being an excellent gunfighter. How do you become famous for this? Because surely there were people that killed a lot of folks and then didn't get in the paper. That's right. I argue in the book that a gunfighter's fame or infamy in almost case, in almost every case, is directly proportional to his engagement with a written word. So either they got profiled by a, you know, a magazine writer like Hickok. They wrote an autobiography as John Wesley Harden of Texas did. They appeared, they got involved in a gunfight that got a lot of national attention like Wyatt Eark. Or like Jesse James and Billy the kid, they wrote angry letters to the press and to governors.

You know, that's the big five gunfighters, right? There are men who shot far more guys. I'm thinking about men like Pink Higgins like God, there's just so many Deacon Jim Miller who probably killed 51

that nobody remembers or in many cases even heard of because they had the bad luck not to befriend or get noticed by some type of ink stain ret some type of writer. Wait, 51. Does that mean

that he was just really offended easily? what does that mean? Deacon Jim Miller was that rare one. The rarest type of old West gunman, he was a paid assassin. He was a gunman for hire. The market was wealthy cattlemen trying to kill rustlers, settlers, Tom Horn, you may remember from a Steve McQueen movie back in the 70s. He's probably the most famous of these assassins, but probably the most, the one who killed the most was Deacon Jim Miller, who, upon his hanging by a group of vigilantes in a darkened warehouse in Oklahoma in 1909, his last words were, actually his last words before they hung him were letter rip. The sentence before that was, let the record show I killed 51 men. You cannot make this

stuff up, guys. What is it that, what is it about the American character that makes is fascinated with this. Because I love, and I will speak for myself, I love all this stuff. I've been reading this books since I was 11. You know, since I got my first stuff. You know, gunfighters and pirates.

Look, there's a number of things you can say about that. One, the gunfighter, in terms of, as the protagonist in a story, is essentially the new world equivalent of old world wandering men,

of violence, the samurai, the Cossack, heck, the highwayman. The gunfighter is just the American version. But there's more to it than just gunfighters being characters in fun stories. As I referenced early, there is something about the Old West that is much more than the Revolutionary War became the favorite American source of, you know, kind of this creation myth of how America became America. It was the place where you went to make it on your own. And I think that the gunfighter became the embodiment of that. What is more equalizing than a man along with a gun? Everybody becomes equal. And as a protagonist of the story, you know,

you throw in jeopardy because the very nature of what a gunfighter does places him in jeopardy. It makes him a natural for our entertainments. You know, less so in the 19th century, the gunfighter was not really a thing until Hollywood discovered him during the 20s and 30s. And especially when episodic television discovered the gunfighter in the 1950s. I mean, it really has only, the gunfighter is pretty much a figure of the 20th century. And the sad thing is, sad, you want to take it this way, is I think he's passing from the scene now. I think a lot of the entertainments that used to be set out in the old West are now setting outer space. Yeah, I guess you're right.

I'm thinking about when's the last good Western, do you think? What's the last one that strikes you as a good one? I think, well, there had been a lot. Look, I think the 90s was the last great period. You had Clint Eastwoods Unforgiven. You had Kevin Costor's dances with wolves. And you had the Kurt Russell Tombstone, which is a great trio of westerns there. That is not to say that there haven't been good Westerns in the last 30, 40 years.

I'm just not immediately calling them up. How about you? Well, as far as movies go, some of these are weird. As the genre gets older, things get strange. Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Bone Tomahawk. Bone Tomahawk. Oh, rough over.

I would argue, like, the Revenant, hell or high water. Basically, I think I would say that the entire, like, Tyler Sheridan, or Taylor Sheridan, Ovoa is like,

and it's one of them the most popular things on television right now. And I think all of his shows are kind of westerns. Some of them actually set in the old West, but those are incredibly popular.

And I would say also video games. The Western is a great setting for a video game as kind of, you know, like Paladin have card will travel reads the card of a man, a knight without honor in a savage land. They're great video game protagonists. And like one of the biggest video games of all time, Red Dead Redemption 2, is a video game about the end.

of that era. And Fallout New Vegas is also a Western. It is out the end of a frontier society. And it uses a lot of the tropes and stories of Western films and books in it.

So I think this stuff lives on. I think it lives on and a better thing for me to have said would have been that I think that the Western is just moving into other modes and away from big movie. I think you, as you rightly say, it's huge in video games and Taylor Sheridan has made it huge on streaming TV.

Look, part of it has always been Westerns are cheap. You know, you don't need a lot of buildings. You just need some horses and old clothes. You know, I mean, that's why people, that's the first reach of Hollywood's like the movies. All the sets are already built, right? Yeah. Well, then why go to Italy? Why go to Italy to even lower the cost further? Because that's where Sergio Leone lived. Yeah. What's that? Because that's where Sergio Leone lived. Oh, God.

I'm sorry. The good, the bad, and the ugly is one of my favorite movies of all time. I don't know if it lives up for you guys. I went for a time where it was my ring tongue. That's a good ringtone. Do you have a favorite gunfighter? Oh, that's hard. I don't.

Look, I have some that I want to believe I'm kind of rescuing from obscurity. I would say, look, with all these, what you're trying to do is separate reality from Hollywood as best you can. And I think one of the ones that is set up for a big fall is the biggest one of all, which is White Earp. and, you know, Earp, a listener may not fully realized, was deeply controversial in his day because of some extrajudicial violence in Toomsa. He was, we now know, thanks to research in the 21st century, he was for his entire life an escaped federal prisoner two years before becoming, you know, a deputy in Wichita. He had escaped from a little jail in Arkansas. He and his brothers before they became lawmen were pimps. and they ran brothels. And yet when you look at Earp's career,

I find he is a shining beacon of all that, you know, of the moral good that one is longing to see in so many Western stories and doesn't.

At a time, so many Western lawmen were drunk, corrupt, and often both, he and especially his wingman back master, And Strasen in Dodd City, you know, they were the real deal. And, you know, he's an easy one to try to take down. And he's the one kind of that I gravitate most poured. Almost all the rest have so much more gray and darkness attached to them. You know, people like John Wesley Hardin, who probably killed 40 men as a teenager, difficult to find a lot of moral uplift in his. in his story.

I would say the ones I'm drawn to most are the fake ones. So Hickok started off as a fake. The biggest fake that we know of, no fault of his own. He was just created by imaginative writers during the 1920s was one of the gunfighters

that Earp faced off against in Tombstone, Johnny Ringo, who turns out to have shot exactly one man when he's, you know, during a drunken fight in a bar and otherwise was never even in anything actual like a gunfight. So I'm, I was drawn in the book, guys, any place I thought I could, I could find something that would surprise you, the reader. So yeah, there's a ton of gunmen.

There's one named Print Olive in Texas, who among the ways he killed people with, not only would he shoot them, but if he thinks. found you, he was a cattleman. And if he rustled something on his ranch, a horse or a cow, he killed one pair of wrestlers, I remember by, I'm trying to remember it was a uniquely Spanish tile of torture in which you wrapped them in green cowhide. And as the cowhide shrank in the sun, it squeezed them to death. So yeah, he was among my favorite. Also later, he killed a couple of men in a gunfight in Nebraska and ended up burning their bodies. And so his nickname late in his career was man burner. Now, I think that was probably one of my more favorite Old West nicknames.

So you're really showing us, I feel like, that some of these people were just psychopaths. They're serial killers. Some of them. Serial killers. I would argue John Wesley Harden, perhaps, one of them. I don't, I don't judge him a serial killer. I judged him a cycle of that. I think there's a different serial killer is some who plots and stages these things. Every single one of Hardens is he gets offended.

You know, somebody you know, offends his wife, offends Texas in general and he shoots him. I mean, the most famous one and this, and nobody wants to believe this. It's been, it's, people have been downplaying this for years,

was his last shooting in Dodge City was he killed a Texas cattleman through a wall in a hotel in the middle of the night. And the myth that arose later was that he killed the man for snoring. I actually think that's true. Why else do you shoot somebody through a wall in a hotel that you've never met in the middle of the night? So yeah, it's fair to say that Mr. Hardin had issues. I really hope my wife doesn't listen to this because apparently I snore and I don't really want to give her any ideas. How do you

track down the history of this? How do you assess whether or not a story about John Wesley Harden shooting somebody through a hotel wall for snoring is true or not? Well, you can't.

I'm just telling you, I believe it. And that's where you come down with so many of these stories. You cannot often definitively prove something. But you can, look, guys, if you had a camera, you could pan back and see the 350 gunfighter books on my office shelves. I read them all. I make, you know, I make my own judgments.

And the good thing about the book is my judgments are very clear. I mean, if I'm talking about something that's in dispute, I'll say, according to one version, I'd like to believe, you know, that's kind of all you can do. You do find that with the spread of newspapers on the Old West, the details become clearer, the versions become more uniform. There are early gunfights involving West Harden in the 1860s and Hickok that are basically just rumors. They cannot be confirmed that made no newspaper. What you find, though, is that by the time of Toonstone in 1881, the gunfight beside the OK. Corral, it's actually stunningly well documented, not only by two newspapers who began reporting on it the next day, but by a judicial inquiry that called everybody in to take

testimony. I mean, you may be surprised. Billy, the kid was many things over in New Mexico, an outlaw, a feudist, a cattle rustler. He also sat for depositions, you know, in judicial inquiries, there are such things. and the good thing about the old West gunfighting literature is it's finite. It is not infinite. You can buy everything. I did. This is, I get paid to do this. And, you know, so I call this book what it is. It's a survey. I didn't do a ton of original work in archives. What I did was I read everything out there and I'm putting, I would like to believe that I'm, presenting it in a fresh way. Let's say I'm 16 years old. I live in Baltimore.

And it's 1870. And I decide I want to go out onto the frontier. Is there a book or anything I could buy? Like, could I learn how to be a gunfighter? Were there aspirational gunfighters? There were. There were all, I mean, I can almost all of them. excuse me, easily two-thirds of them.

Luke Short, I'm thinking of, Bat Masterson, wandered on to the frontier, typically from adjacent areas, in their teens. But there were also ones that were aspirational who came from the east. Harry Longabaw, better known as the Sundance Kid, went west because he was either bored or, depending on the story you believe, got into some trouble. And so his family sent him west to Cowboy for an uncle in time. Colorado. I don't think a lot of them went out to become gunfighters. They went out to work in the

West, whatever that may mean. Typically, it meant working with livestock, which probably, you know, made you a cowboy. But the aspirational part of it, I don't, I can't think of anybody that came from the East to be a gunfighter. Where you do see that, Matthew, is in the records, the memoirs, and the photos kept by the thousands of young Texans who, you know, spread out from Texas in the 1870s to become cowboys in the rest of the West. There were memoirs in which, you know, Teddy Abbott talks about, I was dying to go to Kansas and I was dying to kill my first man because then I'd be a man. You know, that type of thing, it actually did exist. There were, you know, a lesser type of Texas cowboy that didn't want to go kill anybody. But if a Yankee sheriff put his hands on in, he would take him down.

That type of hypersensitivity to one's honor and to any infringement upon one's honor is you do see a lot of. Was there anything that you could read? If there was, I don't know it except to say there was an entire category of literature, the dime novel, that popularized almost everybody that I write about in this book at some point was in a dime novel. But most famously, Jesse James was whose exploits were all east of the Missouri, Kansas line. He was primarily active in Missouri. For some reason, the dime novelist took his bank and train and robberies and shootouts, and instead of staging them in Missouri, reinvented them in the West. I mean, that's where a lot of, that was the most popular kind of gunfighter type of dime novels.

Hickok and most other gunfighters were kind of flops when it came to being a 19th century literature. How do you win? How do you stay alive in a gunfight? What's the advice in a 19th century gunfight, to be clear, if I've got a Colt Navy? Well, I think you win by walking away. You could also walk away in shame. Maybe you just ran, right? So you win by killing or otherwise causing the other guy to withdraw.

draw. And, you know, if we want to judge the Southern and Frontier Male Honor System for one to ten, if you were a four and you shot the other guy and didn't, you know, and didn't get convicted and murdered, after that, you're probably a six on your way to good, you know, being an eight. I mean, they measured themselves by this stuff. But, you know, unlike the Code Dwello and the duel, there were no, there were no rules for gunfights. they were just, um, you wanted to walk away. So does that mean you'd actually stand there? Let's say, let's, let's say you got your shot off first, but you missed. Right. You just stood there. No. See, you're, you're dealing with the cinematic stereotype.

That's what I meant. The one in one. You're, you're, you're thinking that gunfights were like the Tut Hickok face off, two guys standing like you see in movies. Guys, there's. maybe 10 or 12 like that, I can find in the literature. Most of them are exactly what you think. People running around and hiding behind jails and rocks and, you know, that type of gunfight. Much more feral, much more desperate.

You know, there were plenty where people did kind of face off, you know, in a fair fight. But they were much, much rarer. Do you think there's something about the arms themselves, other than their mere existence, but that lent themselves to an increase in violence? Like, was there something about the six-shot revolver? Was there something about the repeating rifle? Yes.

Forget the repeating rifle. This is all about the revolver. This type of thing didn't happen before Sam Colt invented the six-shot revolver in the late 1830s, and then the Texas Rangers discovered it, popularized, and caused him to reinvent it. The gunfighter era, the era itself that begins in 1865 that I write about, but also the prologue that took place over a decade in Gold Rush, California, which was already the

first place that Americans began turning six shooters on each other with regularity. This is purely about the existence of the revolver. But not just the existence. Keep in mind that after the war, in 1865, 1866, the federal government auctioned off or gave away something like 1.3 million used handguns. And while open carry was not unknown in the South before the war, it became a thing prevalent after the war. You can go back and find memoirists that say, you know, suddenly everybody's wearing a pistol

on their hip. You know, where did that come from? And you can also find a memoirist in newspapers that comment on the chain. changes that brought to violence. Typically, sporadic or spontaneous violence before that was done with guns or really nasty fistfights, you know, gouging out people's eyes and, you know, tearing off the corner of their mouth, just awful stuff. And there's just one memoirist that I got from a Jesse James book in 1866 in Missouri that says, eye gouging and, you know, finger pulling has gone the way of, of machinery that can end. these things in five seconds. You know, the revolver changed everything. It made violence easy. Why does this era end? Why, why 1901? Why is the, the, does it have to end somewhere? Yeah, fair enough. The last words in the regular book is, you know, it was over. And the first words on the epilogue, it really wasn't over because it's never really ended, right? But look,

1901 is clearly I chose because it's the moment that Butch and Sandetz, the last Western outlaws of North, leave the country. It is the moment where we know from Turner that, you know, we know from everything that the frontier is closing. And from 1901, you know, the amount of words in, you know, in American newspapers and literature are devoted far less to Western violence than, um, the romance of the old west, the mythologizing. You know, it starts with Owen Worcester and the Virginia, you know, novels like that. It moved through, what's his name's sculpture. And, you know, it then becomes really starts to go national during when Hollywood discovers the Westerns during the silent era and then especially in the 20s. the talkies. So it seemed, look, it's an arbitrary time to end at 1901. You can find great gunfights

in Arizona going into the 19-teens. But I feel like that's the moment where Western gun violence kind of moves from headlines to history. It seems like the public folk attention then also becomes more focused on the other side of the country and more bank robber. and criminals and like that kind of thing, right? And like the fight between the budding FBI and bank robbers and Thompson machine guns. Right. It's like so like that that spirit kind of moves into a different aesthetic in a different place, I think. That was that was three books ago for me, a book called Public Enemies.

And of course, I wanted to write this book immediately after public enemies. And my, my editor didn't see it. And it was only after I moved back from the East Coast back to my native Texas, that he said, oh, that's perfect for you. So, yeah, it's funny that you mentioned bank robbery, Matthew, because one of the things that surprised me most was reading that bank robbery on the old west frontier was only rare. It was almost unheard of. And at first I didn't understand until I read a history of banking on the Old West frontier that just basically said there weren't a lot of banks. There weren't a lot of hard currency.

If you wanted to, if you wanted to rob something, it was going to be a stage coach with someone's payroll or more likely a train. That's where the real money was. That's how the Mints moved money around. Bank robbery, you know, you can find entire states like Arizona, there's like four or five states that didn't experience a single bank robbery before 1896. And very few afterwards. Bank robbery really didn't become a thing until 1920 when an Oklahoma bandit named Henry Starr became the first American criminal to use an automobile. Be able to rob a bank. And it was in the 20s and 30s when Jedger Hoover did battle against Bonnie and Clyde and John

Dillinger and a lot of Midwestern bank robbers. That was really the high watermark culturally. Who was the bank robber who said, when asked, why do you rob banks? He said, because that's where the money is. Willis Sutton. It's such a great line. Willie Sutton, 20th century, you know, I think most of his were in the 40s. 50s and, yeah, he hasn't, he hasn't, and Willa Sutton hadn't aged well.

Still quotable. Why hasn't he aged well? I don't know. I think it's because Americans don't care about bank robbers in New York and New Jersey. They want their bank robbers out in the open fields, you know, firing Thompson guns at the moon or six shooters at a sheriff. There's a way we want to, I mean, how many, how many of these, how many of these eight thousand word pieces in the New Yorker.

Have you read about modern bank robbers? I read everyone and they're just boring. I don't care about some guy named Kenneth who is robbing banks in Seattle. I just don't. I actually wrote a story 30 years ago about bank robbery in New York

and it was the most disappointing thing in the world in that it was all done with notes. And virtually nobody actually had a gun. You know, but that just pass along a note, say, I will kill you if you do not,

and they just hand over the money. I think you need an actual threat of violence and I think the possibility that they'll get away. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Well, in fact, that's what I've argued is that I argued this about Dillinger and I argued this about

Butch Cassidy and other Old West Bank robbers who began robbing bankers. who began robbing banks in the 1890s, is that any MOOC can rob a bank. The successful robber, whether it's Dillinger or Cassidy, came up with tactics to get away. That was always the hard part. Anybody can rob a bank.

You had the element of surprise. Who can't walk in, point a gun, run out with some money? The problem becomes getting away once they start chasing you. How good to you is the Bush Cassidy? movie. Does it have anything to do with Bush Cassidy or is it just fun? Oh, yeah. Oh, it's not, it's not that far off. In terms of, oh, my God, accuracy, that's probably in the top 10%. Tombstone, very is pretty darn accurate other than a big massacre that opens it. I just watched it last night for the 85th time. That's out of a Hollywood screenwriter. But, you know, the many of the most recent, westerns, you know, people kind of demand if they're going to have historical figures. They expect some level of accuracy. I'm not sure, and I'm not as good on Butch Casti as some people

were, but I can't remember anything glaringly inaccurate about Butchastic. The one that I remember that I couldn't believe was actually, do you remember when they go in and they rob an express car? and there's a Clark inside called Wood, Woodcliff, Woodburn, first name with wood, exactly as it happened. They robbed the same guy twice. And in the movie, oh, Woodcliff, you again! And that happened in real. The funniest thing that they didn't put is one of the reasons that train robbers

became so much successful in the 1890s was it was very, of course, the money was in safe in the express car. car was locked. They could never, it was always hard to get into the express car. The reason that they became more successful in the 1890s was the spread of the use of dynamite. Suddenly you could dynamite an express car and often get in or certainly with the threat of it get in. One of the first times Butch and Sundance used, um, used, uh, dynamite. They rush in and there's, it's just what it looks like. There's red liquid, clearly blood everywhere. They got, oh, my God, what happened? And the clerk's like, no, no, no. He was raspberries. We had a crate of raspberries. You blew it up. I thought that would be great to know me.

And you could do it because the money, was the money in coins or gold or was it paper? All the above. Okay. I was just wondering because if you, the Butch probably pulled off. The Wilcox robbery was probably the second largest. In today's, this was a, uh, this was a, uh, a robbery he pulled off in 1901. Today's, I think I put the number around $1.5 million. The biggest was the Texas outlaw, Sam Bass, who robbed a train in 1877, I want to say, in Nebraska. And the modern equivalents at $1.7 million. It was a shipment from the San Francisco Mint. Can you tell us what it is about, I'm curious about this, too.

This is kind of backing up a little bit. But what is it about the cattle business that made it so violent? Why were there so many wars? We call them wars. Well, the cattle business is absolutely key to the gunfetter or myth. It doesn't exist. And by cattle business, we're talking to the Texas cattle business because at the time there was no other kind. The answer is pretty simple.

Texas, it was open-range cattle business, which means your cattle could go anywhere they wanted and you branded them. It made it very easy for them to be stolen. Well, if you know anything about the history of the cattle business or any type of herding society going back to sheep, they were going back to Asia, going back to London, excuse me, going back to England and Scotland, they were legendarily violent because of the prevalence of theft. When your animals, when your animals roam free, the only way to stop people from stealing them was to either kill them or more often to put the threat of imminent violence. If you come after my cows, you're a dead man. Well, in Texas, what you found was they mint it. And there were cattlemen like the guy print

olive that I mentioned earlier, for whom in a five-year period, 15 dead bodies were found around their laying. And it was, you know, these were purported thieves. So that type of behavior we saw spread across the frontier, Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona. I mean, the, and the craziest was just, you know, who got killed most often? Sheep. Cattlemen really hated sheep. They thought that sheep fouled their water and, you know, ate their grass and stuff. And cattlemen, you know, the problem with sheep came out of Texas. But by the end of the century, you would find, you know, massacres of sheep, like 4,000 sheep, you know, clubbed to death. Or the great tactic was they would try to, sheep apparently were not terribly bright, they would try to get them stampede and they would stampede them over cliffs where you could

kill 10 and 20,000 in a night. Texans did not mess around with the killing. They were good at it. Wow. You know, we will today sell you a tour on a chopper to take down some feral hogs too. I was offered that. I remember the first time anybody ever offered me that exact same, that exact same thing back when it was considered odd to go out and kill hogs. And now you can kill them from your car.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, Jason, you may not know this, but the feral hog problem is real and invasive and bad. I had heard about it, but I wasn't sure whether to believe it. So it's good to know. My wife comes from a ranching family. and they are everywhere. Not my family, but they're hogs. I live near a really big park, so you're in D.C.

So I'll be more careful is all I'm going to say. It's different out here. It's a different pace of life. It's a different place. So, okay. Where do you, where do you, what's next? Where do you go from here? What are you going to work on after this? Well, I'll tell you the story real quick. I turned this book in a year ago, April, and I thought it's risky.

First off, if you've read the book, you know it's easy going, it's accessible. I don't have a problem displaying humor. And I thought, oh, great, I'm going to put a book out into the 21st century that kind of is easy, lighthearted about people killing each other. That's the way to stand out. So I thought, uh-oh, I'm in trouble. And I turned it in and no joke. My editor said, this may be the best thing you've ever written. I love it. And I was like, okay. And for the first time we got into an immediate discussion of what I do next, he said, I love what you did for gunfires. Could you do it for pirates?

Ahoy there, maybe. And the pirate, much as there is a gunfighter era, there was a golden era of piracy from 1650 to 1725 that begins with Henry Morgan and ends with black beard. those guys. And I said, no, because there's been 11 million books written on pirates. I probably read 25 of them, and they're the same. They're all the same. He's like, fine. So I went off and spent last summer trying to figure out what I wanted to do instead. For about five minutes, I thought I was going to write a new history of Texas. We need an updated one. And I just couldn't, my heart wasn't in it. And my wife said, okay, honey, if you don't, what, you should be having fun. You should enjoy this. What would be fun? And I was like, effing pirates. I'm going to do pirates. So that's what I'm doing. That's so free. All that. Back to pirates. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you just got to do what you want to do. Come on. Well, I mean, you also kind of, you wrote the, I mean, the Alamo book is a pretty good encapsulation of a lot of Texas history and things that need, like the mist that needed to be knocked down, right? I know that there's much more to talk about, but that's,

That was a pretty big historical project about Texas. It was. You know, look, if I'm going to write history, there's going to have to be, I'm not just going to go write, oh, another history on X. I've got to, I mean, candidly, for a book to stand out, it has to have something new to say, something new and profound. Now, you can argue that the primacy of Texas is, to the gunfighting law is something that maybe 18 people will, and interesting, but I can argue that I'm advancing the literature, that I'm saying something new. I felt like we did that and forget the Alamo. We really put a new and I think wholly defensible spin on the Texas creation myth. And I will confess to you. I don't yet have the new spin on pirates on the golden age of piracy, but I will not print it. I will not come out with something until I find one. I've got a few candidates. Another thing that I think is another interesting thing about this book,

and maybe this is what we go out on, is kind of this idea that if you are willing to go back through, if you're willing to have a big bookshelf full of all the memoirs and stories, that the truth will win out over the legend eventually long term. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, look, this is a literature, the gunfighter literature. That is, and this is no, not casting aspersion on the authors, but it is a forest of small books.

Books written about individual gunfighters. Just about every, I've got probably books on 45 named gunfighters, maybe 10 of whom you've heard of. And the facts, I mean, the literature is dominated. by hobbyists, often retired people, and academics who, let's just say, aren't at Harvard. And these are heartfelt and wonderful and under-exposed books. And one of the things that I found the most fun in my book is I just say it up front, look, this book is a survey of all these other books. And so every other page, you know this, is, I have a little footnote that says,

If you want to know more about this, read this book by this guy. And so that brought me a lot of joy to kind of bring some of these lesser-known books out back into the sunlight. And, you know, everybody always, when I engage in these discussions, Matthew, everybody always wants to know how you do it. And there's no, you just read everything. And then you talk with people who are smarter and more experienced in the field. and you find out what feels new and fresh and defensible, and you take a deep breath in your publishing. Yeah, I mean, that's the great trick of journalism, right?

Is that it is, it's reading things and talking to people. Yep. And if you... In this case, it just took seven years. Yeah, well, if you're going to do a decent job of it, you know, you've got to read a lot and talk to a lot of people, you know, and that's the labor behind to work like this. But luckily...

As you know, it is so much fun. If it basically you are given, someone is paying you to go learn about something that you almost certainly are already enthusiastic about. And you get to go, you get to spend years just reading about it and talking to people about it. And that is my definition of a fun job. It looks like your, your bibliography here is almost 20 pages long. It is, that's the tiniest print in the book. So there is, yeah, just a huge reading list for anybody that wants to learn more. Can I tell you?

I'm going to put on my promotional hat here. If you don't have the appetite for a 400-page book on Billy the Kid or on Justin James, but you want a way into that literature, candidly, this is the best book written in the last 35 years for that because it gives you, it gives you the story of everybody fairly quickly. Yeah, a lot of great. It's good. It's really, really, really good. And thank you for coming onto the show once again and walking us through all of this. Give us the title of the book one more time and do your plugs. The Gunfighters, colon, how Texas made the West Wild out next Tuesday, the third, and ideal for Father's Day. It is. It is. It is. It is a good, bad book. It is not out. It's not out two weeks before Father's Day.

by accident. Brian, thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we will have you on again. Hopefully not in seven years when the pirates. Guys, you do this so well. It's a joy. Thanks very much. Thank you.

That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell, was created by myself. And Jason Fields, if you like us, if you really like us, please go to Angry Planetpod.com and sign up for bonus episodes, written content, early access, commercial free access to all of the episodes. We will be back soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.