Ep. 740: The Gunslingers

Steven Rinella talks with Bryan Burrough, Randall Williams, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. 

Topics Discussed: Bryan's book, "The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild" is out; settling the score with a duel; the Colt revolver; robbing trains and robbing banks; Hickok, Jesse James, Billy The Kid, and more. 

Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network

Steve on Instagram and Twitter

MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
If this is the meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underware listening podcast, you
can't predict anything.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first Light.
Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
dot com. F I R S T L I T
E dot com. Brian Burrow, Dude, this book makes me

(00:41):
so happy, like like I love reading it.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
I'm not done with it, I'm halfway through it. I
love reading it.

Speaker 4 (00:48):
Well, I'm happy for you.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
It is how you could have so much fun reading
about so many people getting shot.

Speaker 4 (00:54):
Well, that was the primary challenge of the book. Sure
is how to convey one's enthusiasm for a pastime and
get people to keep reading a book that is, you know,
averages three or four dead people every page or so.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Yeah, it's incredible.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
A lot of the reading I do, I have to
read stuff just because I'm reading it for work research stuff. Right,
this is my this is me. Like when I want
to have fun, I work on reading your book.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
It's not work. I just I love the book.

Speaker 4 (01:22):
Well, thank you, I as you can probably tell love
to doing it. Yeah, you know, I've kind of reached
the age I'm sixty three where I stop doing stuff
I don't want to do, OK, And I just want
to pursue projects that I really want to go disappear
into a room and learn about for five, six, seven years.
This we took seven and dude, I've been reading about

(01:43):
gunfighters since sixth grade, since I was eleven. This is
a book I'm wanted to do for like fifty years.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
You're from Texas, A Yeah, and as you point out,
we'll get into it. Texas is like.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Just kind of is a force that pushes gun fighters
out into the American West.

Speaker 4 (02:02):
It's probably the most important of the number sources. Yeah,
I think that's fair to say.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, you got a bunch of you got a bunch
of books. I'm gonna tell people about your books because
they might recognize some of them.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Barbarians at the Gate.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
You have eight books, four New York Times bestsellers, Public Enemies,
America's greatest crime wave, in the Birth of the FBI
nineteen thirty three to thirty four, The Big Rich, The
Rise and Fall of the greatest Texas oil families. Forget
the Alamo, the rise and fall of an American myth.
When you talk about that for a second, I haven't

(02:36):
read that one. And we're here now to discuss the gunfighters.
How Texas made the Wild West?

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Can we touch on the Alimal? Yeah? What am I saying?
How Texas made the West wild? I don't have my
glasses on two ws.

Speaker 4 (02:52):
I get it well.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Not only that it's Krin put it in italics? Which one?
You're as you as you age. As you age and you.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Start losing your ability to see letters up close, italics
is becomes your worst enemy.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Metallics as hell, Yeah, it becomes.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Your worst You just leave your glasses on at all times.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, I could leave mine name, but then this would
be clear and you'd get blurry.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
It's like a real time.

Speaker 5 (03:19):
Drop them down.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Is that what you're doing right now?

Speaker 6 (03:23):
I thought you just did that to look pretentious.

Speaker 5 (03:27):
That's what happens when you get old.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Because no matter what, if you got a hoodie and
a hat on, I don't care what you do with
your glasses, you're not gonna look.

Speaker 7 (03:35):
I just's if I put doctor in my there's a certain.

Speaker 8 (03:39):
Feeling when someone looks at you over the top of
their glasses. It makes me think that I did something
like get authoritative. Yeah, it's a power move.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
I feel like, what's your take do you think? Do
you think uh see, you're from Texas.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
I don't know if you're not gonna give a straight answer,
because Texas get prickly about this subject. Do you think Crockett,
uh Crocketts they caught him alive? Or do you think
that Crockett got killed in action?

Speaker 4 (04:04):
The versions that we have from people on the ground,
which are Mexican soldiers, but just let's face it, all
the Americans died. There are multiple versions that say that
he was captured and executed.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Yeah, so you believe that.

Speaker 4 (04:17):
I don't have any reason not to. I mean, it's
the only non fiction based source for Crockett information. Most
of kind of the famous stuff about him swinging Old
Betsy is kind of neo fiction.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
Yeah, so, no source. It's a good point you're saying,
the only.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Sources that could have described what happened at the end
of the battle would be Mexican soldiers, right, And there's
no source that ever came forward to say, oh no,
Crockett went down swinging his rifle.

Speaker 4 (04:49):
The problem is, for years that just made sense, right.
We didn't really have much information until decades after the
battle about that some people might be captured. For the
longest time, it was just assumed that everybody died because
ultimately they died. The idea that some of them were
executed after being captured is in an idea that really
didn't start popping up till maybe fifty years after the battle.

(05:09):
Got it? Got it?

Speaker 2 (05:12):
What's your primary argument in the book? Like I said,
I haven't read it. I'd like to, but why I
forget the Alamo?

Speaker 4 (05:20):
Well, we at Texans have put are enormously proud of
our creation and should be. But you know, we wrote
the book with a sense that we love history. We
love the accurate stories of history. We don't believe that
the accurate stories of history make Texas any less special.

(05:40):
I think the argument that got people most irked was
when you go back and you read Steven F. Austin
and the Father of Texans memoirs. When you go back
and read a lot of people, do you realize that
the primary driver that split Texas from Mexico was the
Texans insistence that they could only live there if they
were to use slaves to bring in their cotton, because

(06:02):
that's why they came. That's the only way they knew
to raise cotton. And so for that first ten years,
from eighteen twenty to eighteen thirty, that was primarily what
they were arguing about. And there's ample evidence of that.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Got it, got it, And you dig into that in
the story. Oh yeah, yeah, uh, I got a bone
to pick with you about this one here.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Okay, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Don't really get a thing you did. So everyone that
reviewed your book. I read a bunch of reviews of
your book, which are all good. I haven't found any
bad ones yet, and they're all like, all the reviewers
get a kick out of you saying that Hitcock was
a Titanic fraud. Okay, yes, the Hitcock was a fraud.
Hitcock wasn't a badass. He wasn't the ultimate gunfighter like

(06:54):
people think he might have been.

Speaker 4 (06:56):
I argue that he was came into view as a
Titanic fraud.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
No, you say he was a Titanic fraud. Well, and
then you go on to totally contradict yourself at that point,
he was a tight because you're blaming you're blaming Hitcock.
So Hitcock, just a refresh, you could tell the story.
I'm just gonna give a little quick outline just so
you understand my gripe. Some journalists early on in Hitcock's life,

(07:22):
some journalists or some you know what passed for a
journalists in those days, interviews Hitcock or whatever and comes
out saying, oh, Hitcock killed one hundred men with his pistol,
and all Hitcock Hitcock doesn't contradict him. Hitcock's like he
wants to say that that's fine, and then goes on

(07:42):
to shoot all kinds of people. And you're saying he's
a Titanic fraud.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
But it's not his fault. He couldn't control what the
guy said.

Speaker 4 (07:49):
And we don't. I don't argue that it was his fault.
No reason, The same reason, the same reason with Johnny Ringo.
Johnny Ringo is a Titanic fraud and he never once
made a claim. They were all made years after his death.
With Hiccock, yeah he was the only reason you know
his name is that article by oh yeah, you never
know of him otherwise.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
But you start the book with him shooting a guy.

Speaker 4 (08:12):
Yes, but that does not make you some notable gunfighter,
that you shot one guy. What makes you the nation's
first gunfighter is to claim that you shot a hundred
guys when the actual number at that point would appear
to be like two.

Speaker 5 (08:26):
That's how you build a reputation, I know.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
But I just think Titanic fraud. I was thinking when
I said that when I read that in the reviews,
I don't want to start out negative here. When I
read that in the reviews, I thought, Okay, he's going
to dismantle Hickcock. But then I'm reading the book and
I'm like, the one hundred that notwithstanding that hundred thing,
he still was kind of a remarkable gunfighter.

Speaker 4 (08:50):
I yes, but when he first became known, he became
known for what I think was a fraud fact that
he killed over one hundred people. I think it's notable
about him is that after that you can argue, as
I think you're trying to, that he grew, that he
grew into his legend, that he became a notable lawman
and became a notable gunfighter. But I'm sorry, when it

(09:11):
was first written in eighteen sixty seven, he wasn't okay.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
Like I say, you win, but lay out the premise
of the book, like how you lay it out in
the beginning. You know, you kind of fine, first, you
kind of go like what is a gunfighter? Like what
is and you kind of you kick around different people
that carried pistols and different Western icons, and then you
settle at when I say a gunfighter, here's what I mean.

Speaker 4 (09:38):
Yeah, the first thing to do is to define our terms.
A gunfighter is generally acknowledged as someone who was involved
in exchanges of gunfire among civilians on the on the
old Western frontier, so not involving soldiers military of any kind,
and not involving Native Americans generally speaking. What I set
out to do was I identified, you know what, what

(10:00):
do all these guys that have in common, from wide
Europe to Hiccock to Jesse James. The only thing they
really had in common is a they got famous shooting people,
mostly for shooting people. And it all happened during a
period from eighteen sixty five till I ended at nineteen
oh one. So I've grandly dubbed this the gunfighter Era.
And I set out to tell a narrative history of

(10:22):
those thirty six years.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
And you set out explaining, uh, sort of asking this question,
why is it, why does it seemed to be Texans?

Speaker 4 (10:34):
Well, that was one of the first things you notice
if you read, if you immerse yourself in this literature,
is that if you look at what I call the
Marquee gunfights, that is the famous ones, the ones that
made the newspapers in the history books, a startling thing
leaps out at you almost immediately, and that's the sheer
number of Texans who were involved in these gunfights. I

(10:57):
would argue someplay, if you totted them up, I would
say between fifty and seventy percent of these gun of
these famous gunfights from Kansas to Texas to New Mexico,
Wyoming and Arizona involved Texans. At first, that didn't make
a lot of sense because not to get all into
it here. But I only discovered late brogan to understood

(11:18):
how there was this Tayek, this Texas diaspora, this spread
of Texans across the frontier that came with the spread
of longhorn cattle. If you look at the great cattle ranches,
the great cattle herds from Montana all the way down
to Arizona, ninety percent of them came from one place.
They came from Texas, and they came with.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Texas, and they came with pistols.

Speaker 4 (11:39):
They sure as I did. Look, Look, I would never
argue that Texans created the gunfighter archetype or certainly created
gun gun violence in the West. They didn't. I wouldn't
want to overstate this. But what I'm saying is that
Texans had an impact on what we remember that's far
more or significant than we remember.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
And you get into it in the beginning of the book.
You get into this, this this idea of that people
wanted to would defend their honor at all costs, and
you kind of talk about how they had these that
at that time it seemed that people had like somewhat

(12:25):
fragile egos.

Speaker 4 (12:27):
Well, that's one way to see, that's one way to see.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
That's not your word when you look.

Speaker 4 (12:31):
At their behavior, that's the way it seems to us.
I think another way to interpret this is that during
the nineteenth century, at the eighteen hundreds, at a time
where we didn't have a whole lot of university degrees
or financial statements for ordinary men and women to brag about,
what emerged, especially in the South, that I'm arguing gravitated

(12:52):
out onto the Western Frontier was a male honor system
that well, it's a little it's almost hard to explain it,
but it's a little like pornography. I know it when
I see it. You know, when I have attacked your honor,
maybe I call you ugly, or your wife or your dog.
The thing about the Southern honor system, or really you
could argue the American honor system in those days, is

(13:14):
if you felt your honor had been impugned, if you've
been insulted, you had an opportunity and in many cases,
an obligation to respond with violence, even deadly violence. You
know that famously. I mean, I argue in the book
that the genesis of all this gunfighter behavior was duels.
Duels back in the Old South. That's really the only
place you can point to American men shooting each other

(13:37):
in kind of structured contest with guns before this.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
You know, that's the thing that people talk about, how
caustic American politics has become.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Artstick to myself, not like then, dude, I mean like people,
you'd have.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
An election, the election would be resolved, and it'd be
like it'd be like Biden, It'd be like Biden and
Trump would the election to be over Trump's like, I
don't you know, there's a fishiness to the results.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
They'd be like, okay, let's have a duel and well
at noon.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Whoever, that'll wind up being like that, that'll wind up
being the final say.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
The voters, in fact, have not spoken.

Speaker 4 (14:20):
In the years leading up to the war, there were
fist fights and worse on the floor of Congress, as
well as any number of duels involving politicians. Andrew Jackson,
as you know, was involved in one, Abraham Lincoln almost
was until he talked his way out of it. And
our great Texas President Sam Houston was involved in one
which he aimed a little low and ended up shooting

(14:41):
the other gentleman in the crotch.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
You know, what was that role you explained? It's not
ever heard of it before. What was that role in
a duel?

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Like where you bring like your second Yeah, you bring
like an advocate?

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Explain that? Can you explain that duel?

Speaker 4 (14:57):
In the formal duel as laid out in rules written
by the Governor of South Carolina in eighteen thirty seven,
you were you know, it laid out exactly how this
is supposed to happen. Now, how often people went by
the former rules. I can't argue. But one of the
things you did see in many, if not most duels,
is the you would bring a buddy who was officially
called your second, and they would you know, kind of

(15:19):
argue for the reasons that they should have a duel
and should not have a duel, and you know, often
people went ahead with it. But the main place where
you where the duel where the second could come in
is if one of you broke the rules. Let's say
I fired at you and then fired again before anyone
was allowed, the second could take a shot at you.

(15:43):
And so there were all sorts of famous duels where
like joke, there are all sorts of duels where like
Joe and Jim would go out to an island in
the Mississippi, they would shoot at each other from from
ten paces and then miss. And the famous one of
these involved the Texas yer, old Jim Bowie, who was
a second, and both men were so angry and their

(16:04):
seconds were so angry they just a melee, you know,
broke out and they started shooting each other. And Bowie
had this, you know, six foot short sort of a
nice knife, the famous Bowie knife. So I almost don't
want to emphasize the formal rules of duels too much
because I think there were many more that were informal.

Speaker 8 (16:21):
But the fact that there were formal rules speaks to
how prevalent it was and widely accepted.

Speaker 4 (16:27):
Yeah, you know, the funny thing you saw in the
South from the high water mark of duels, which is
say the seventeen nineties in the eighteen thirties, which I
know overlaps with some of your work, is a sense
that everybody said, you weren't supposed to do it. The
preachers want women's associations. Formerly, you weren't supposed to do it.
But everybody was like, wink, wink, this is the greatest

(16:49):
things that slice bread. I mean, nobody ever got no
sheriff ever walked out into the middle of a field
yelling stop, you're all under arrest.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
And they'd have like towns that have a a formal
maybe not formal, but they would have a they would
have a what you well understood to be the dueling grounds.

Speaker 4 (17:06):
Yeah. Every southern statey not just some every single one.
I can't you know. Saint Louis had an island out
I think they call it Bloody Island. Out in the Mississippi. Uh.
The famous one, the most famous one was you could
still go there in the Oaks and underneath the Oaks
and City Park in New Orleans at the end of
vestipl In made. And you know, there were so many

(17:27):
duels there during the eighteen thirties, you practically have to
make an appointment. There were some Sundays right right, because
there would be ten or twelve duels on a single afternoon.
Now the big asterisk there is in New Orleans. Duels
were almost always done with swords rather than guns, and
typically those duels ended when one man drew blood.

Speaker 6 (17:48):
That's the French connection exactly.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
He talked about too, a style of duel where you
take like you and me bind are.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
Left hands, right, and then you get a knife. Dude,
that's a wicked google right there.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Do you know what I'm saying? Like me and Randall,
we bouting on them.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Me and Randall clasp our hands left our class, our.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Left hands, and they bind them, tie them.

Speaker 5 (18:17):
Yeah, what if you're a lefty, that's what.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
That's my mold.

Speaker 4 (18:21):
Right.

Speaker 8 (18:22):
Then you complain, Yeah, your second has got to make
a case for you.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, and then you then you're like on the counter three,
and you each got a knife and your hands are
tied and on the counter three.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
Go go stab you in this fight wherever fight.

Speaker 4 (18:37):
Yeah, it was a you know, a structured knife fight
from a distance of about two and a half feet.
The only problem with that is I, at least I
was unable to find a single one in the non
fiction annals of history. It remains popular in some movies.
If you remember the Long Riders nineteen eighty Walter Hill

(18:57):
movie of the James Gang, there was a beautiful one
involving Cole Younger and Sam Starr. The problem is we
just can't find any that you know, actually actually happened.

Speaker 8 (19:09):
We run into that a lot with our audio projects.
There's just stories that you hear about the mountain men
did this, or the mountain men did that, and then
you spend months reading every mountain man account you can find,
and it just seems to be an invention of later authors.

Speaker 4 (19:27):
Or I prefer to call it folklore, folk suggesting that
they're probably and I suspect this did this practice that
we're talking about now did not arise out of nowhere.
It came from something. But the thing is they didn't
have Harvard professors with them in Wyoming in eighteen thirty one,
and a lot of those guys didn't live to author memoirs.

(19:47):
So I don't doubt that there were incidents where men
tied their hands together and went after the wind knives.
I just think that a lot of documentation about that
stuff in the early especially in the earlier Frontier, is
pretty pre sparse.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
I'm from Michigan.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Do you think that I could pull like if you
saw me running around? I keep thinking about switching to
those shirts you got on, but I feel like it'd
be like, uh, you know what I mean, might not
be cool if I switched to a Yavar being from Michigan.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
What would you think.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
I think you can pull it off?

Speaker 3 (20:18):
Really?

Speaker 4 (20:18):
Oh yeah, now, I mean if you're I think it's
a geographic thing. I think it's harder to pull off
north of Texas, north of areas that don't have a
large Latino population. I think he's also age appropriate. I
don't see a ton of twenty five year olds or
youngsters your age wearing them. But once I got to sixty, I.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
Was I'm fifty years old.

Speaker 4 (20:38):
Okay, well, you're coming up on the age of my body.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Brad from Texas. He wears the same shirts.

Speaker 4 (20:42):
They're the most comfortable thing you can wear.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
God, I want to switch bad.

Speaker 7 (20:47):
That's close to trying to pull off a cowboy hat.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
I'm worried about. Yeah, it's what I'm worried about. I
want to buy five or six, get rid of all
my other shirts and just run. Why of ours?

Speaker 4 (20:57):
I got ten or twelve? And in Texas we can
wear eleven months a year. And uh, they're just they're
just comfortable as I'll get as I'll get out.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
He's looking at the writer in that Son of a Bitch.

Speaker 4 (21:07):
No, see, I've also been I've also been told I
look like a waiter.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
No, not to me, man, you look like a Texan
and a writer.

Speaker 4 (21:15):
Well thank you.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
Uh you mentioned James Gang.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, you are one of the I kind of laughed
out loud in your book where you like, I don't
want to put Jesse James in my Gunfighter book. I'm
only putting him here because you think he should be
in here, it's true, And then you go on to
explain at great length why he does not belong your book.

Speaker 4 (21:38):
Jesse James killed people with guns, but we are talking
about the Old West. And Jesse James was most certainly
not a creature of the Old West. He was a
Midwestern bank and train robber. He he pulled Johnson, Minnesota
in Alabama.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Why do people think he's a Western guy?

Speaker 4 (21:57):
Because the dime novels in the pulp fiction that came
after him, for some reason, began gravitating his story, which
is extensively in Missouri out west, because that's where people
expected bang bang and gunfighters and bank robbers and all that.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah, you even explained in that chapter people didn't rob
banks in the.

Speaker 4 (22:18):
West, well, not until the eighteen nineties. It was all
but unheard of because there's no money. There just wasn't
enough hard currency. The one place where you could rob
something making serious money was trains, and even that was
pretty rare.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
Yeah, the banks, like oh sorry, oh no, sorry.

Speaker 8 (22:37):
I was just the other point that you made in
there that I appreciated was there's people shooting each other
in Eastern cities all the time, and they're not Obviously
there is a higher rate of violence in the West
and in Texas, but you're like, no one's writing, you know,
folklore about somebody shooting someone on the streets of Brooklyn

(23:00):
or anything like that.

Speaker 6 (23:01):
But there's this whole cultural.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
Now there's a whole genre of music about that called
gangster rep Yeah.

Speaker 8 (23:07):
Well, I mean it's a similar thing, like there's certain
parts of the country that you associate with violence, but
there's violence ever where it's only what the.

Speaker 6 (23:14):
Culture chooses to focus fixate on. Right.

Speaker 4 (23:18):
Well, that was one of the first things that I
had to confront is, Hey, let's face it, gunfighters do
not seem to be a hugely important aspect of our history.
There's no political or sociological impact in nothing that would
justify putting them in a history book, a textbook. So
I had to figure out why is it we're still

(23:39):
talking about them one hundred and fifty years And obviously
where I came down is that they are important culturally
for America. We have decided that there is something in
these exploits that connects with us. There's a reason that
gunfighters became an aspect of twentieth century, especially entertainments of
movies and literature. And I don't spend a lot of

(23:59):
time trying to get all academic about why they were important,
but I do think I had to address at least
address why you know this the only gunfighters that anybody
remembers rose in America on the frontier in that thirty
five year old in that thirty five year period, I.

Speaker 7 (24:19):
Want to ask you a question that's like a twenty
first twentieth century, twenty first century gun control spin.

Speaker 4 (24:29):
On that era.

Speaker 7 (24:31):
Would that gunfighter era have occurred without the proliferation of
six shooters, like after the Civil War?

Speaker 5 (24:40):
Like when that technology part.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
Of the book?

Speaker 4 (24:43):
Yeah, Yeah, I think you have to argue they were.
I mean, what made the gunfighter era possible? What made
all these famous shootings possible was the invention of the
revolver by Samuel Colt in the lighteen eighteen thirties and
its adoption and thus popularization by the Texas Rangers in
the eighteen forties. When you talk about the phenomenon that

(25:05):
we call today open car Carrie, it was not unknown
before the revolver. You can find memoirists who toured southern
areas and rural areas that are like, gosh, I saw
a guy carrying a gun this in Arkansas in eighteen
thirty seven. But after the war, especially after in eighteen
sixty five and eighteen sixty six, the federal government auctioned

(25:28):
off or gave away something the order of one point
three million dollars one point three million side arms. I
think you have to acknowledge that open carry became not
only prevalent but accepted. There you can find memoirs writing
about at the time who were like, good lord, can
you believe men are wearing guns like they used to
wear bow ties? And I think I think that these

(25:52):
gun fights, what you needed for them to happen were revolvers,
something where you can fire a lot so cause a
lot of mayhem. You don't really have gun fights pre war.
Back in the day with a primary handgun was a
single shot.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
Short gun fight.

Speaker 4 (26:06):
Yeah, you know, the typical duel be bang bang, and
then everybody takes ten minutes to reload.

Speaker 8 (26:12):
Yeap oh, And there's a very similar phenomena. I mean,
I'm not just vaguely. The Tommy gun arrived too late
on the scene in World War One to really be
issued to troops, so they sold all of those after
the war, like in hardware stores, right, And that's the
rise of okid of the nineteen twenties gangster.

Speaker 4 (26:37):
I would I wrote an entire book that that that argued,
in part I knew.

Speaker 6 (26:41):
You could speak that, which is why I brought up
my face.

Speaker 4 (26:44):
Either spread of surplus Tommy guns in the twenties did
as much to create al caponent as anything else, because
suddenly if you could shoot hundred rounds a minute or
whatever it was some sheriff named Goober out in Iowa
was just you know, he he's not gonna be able
to face off with you.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, you know, uh, you know, I want to I
want to talk about the Colt Pistol, but I want
to back up to Mint, to the man that doesn't
belong in the book, but he's in there.

Speaker 4 (27:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, can you explain to folks like who was Jesse James? Like, like,
what did that world that he came out of?

Speaker 4 (27:17):
Right?

Speaker 3 (27:18):
Because that winds up having a little bit of an
impact on a number of these people, it does.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yeah, that's some of the goings ons in the Civil
War shaped a lot of these individuals.

Speaker 4 (27:30):
One of the things that a number of the early gunfighters,
those who kind of began their careers in the late
eighteen sixties have in common is a number of them,
from Jesse James to John Wesley Harden of Texas to
Doc Holliday, were inveterate and angry Southerners. Jesse James was
the biggest one in terms of his fame. He was

(27:53):
a teenage boy during the Civil War whose brother Frank
was out there fighting at a time that the warfare
in Missouri was much less about the movement of armies
and much more about rural gorillas descending on farms and
burning up farms and such. Frank was into that Jesse

(28:15):
joined him. Jesse was shot twice in the chest during
the war, survived, and then goes utterly black for four years.
We don't know much about him, but we do know
that many of the Confederate guerrillas known as bushwhackers did
begin to engage in crime in Missouri in the late
eighteen sixties. And the first time we see Jesse and Frank,

(28:35):
the first time they walk out onto the pages of history,
is eighteen sixty nine and Gallatin, Missouri, far north. They
walk into a bank ostensively to rob it, but you
learn immediately that robbery was just second. They go up
to a gentleman who's sitting at a desk, and they
call him by a name, let's say Burluson, whatever it was,
and shoot him in the hat. They thought he had

(28:58):
this guy had killed one of their commanding officers. They
were there to exactly they were wrong and they killed
the wrong guy. That led to Jesse and Frank forming
a group that two years later began robbing banks and
continued very successful for ten years. Jesse James in his

(29:18):
career as a bank and train robber. What's important, what's
important for people to understand is what a unicorn he was.
There was nobody like this in the country that was
doing this, that was doing it this much or making
this money. And when you look at the entirety of
this period from eighteen sixty five and nineteen oh one,
there's nobody else that comes closed. I mean, if you

(29:40):
wanted to say who is the second most successful outlaw
of the Old West, if you put Jesse James at
the top, you'd probably say Butch cast was a distant second.
But Jesse James was the first household name criminal in
American history. But he was not, as you point out,
he was not a gunfighter.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
You say he was just a murderer.

Speaker 4 (30:02):
Well, he never actually even did anything that we can
figure out west of the Missouri Kansas line, which is
kind of the beginning of the Old West. When you
look at the people that Jesse James shot five or six.
Everyone was essentially executed with a shot to the head
because he did something that pissed Jesse off during a robbery.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Yeah, it wasn't like going out into the street and
being like draw.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
It was he was a shoot.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
He to shoot people.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
The only time we knew Jesse James was in a
legitimately contentious gunfight situation. A detective out of Saint Louis
somehow stumbled upon him and one of his cousins on
a wooded road in Missouri in the eighteen seventies and
the detective came right up to him and there was
an exchange of gunfire. All three guys missed at a
distance of like fifteen feet. Like you can look at

(30:47):
some of these gunfighters. Hitcock, Ben Thompson, the Texan, Butch Cassidy,
who did an awful lot of practicing. Billy the Kid
practiced daily, as did Hitcock. There's not a single story
that I could find in any of the ten Jesse
James biographies I read that showed Jesse James ever practiced
with a gun, And I think it shows.

Speaker 8 (31:07):
He's the kind of guy that would go out and
buy one box am when it would last ten hunting seasons.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
Yeah, like when I was a kid.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
If you own a box amb, well yeah, it's good
for like twenty shells.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
You're like, oh, that would be good for fifteen sixteen
deer every few years. I'll make sure it's my gun
still accurate.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
Well.

Speaker 4 (31:24):
The thing to remember about Jesse James is if he's
in a gunfight, he's failed. You know, he wants to
be able to walk into a bank point a gun,
maybe shoot a single shot into the ceiling, and get
out with the money before anybody notices him. So there's
a reason that he probably didn't hone his gun skills.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Who wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford?

Speaker 3 (31:47):
It was.

Speaker 4 (31:49):
He's a real good writer, Robert Hanson.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Was Hanson.

Speaker 4 (31:54):
Someone type that didn't read the book.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford?
It was made Ron Ron Hanson, Ron Hanson. That's the
hell of a book. Are you? Are you much so?

Speaker 2 (32:04):
So?

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Robert Ford kills James. Robert Ford kills Jesse James. Yes,
Bob Ford kills Jesse James. Do you haven't read much
about the guy that then killed Bob Ford.

Speaker 4 (32:16):
No, I put it in a footnote. I know that
he was killed by a guy that basically walked into
a bar he owned or was working in. Ten fifteen
years later.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Many different versions of what happened, it's agreed upon that
he shot him with a double barreled shotgun.

Speaker 4 (32:29):
Well, you know, there is there is a there's a
fence around this book. There there are places that I
kind of go up to the fence and going okay,
that's probably a footnote. I'm not going to read through
three more books.

Speaker 2 (32:43):
Hanson, Ron Hanson, that was his name, Ron Hanson.

Speaker 6 (32:46):
Robert Hanson, the FBI All of a sudden.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
The Ron Hanson's the author with author, So he writes
a novel. But it's like very informed.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Right in there he has his detail that the guy
kills Robert Ford has a coach gun, has a shotgun,
and he took a bunch of pipe, cut the pipe
and little teeny discs, and then took a hammer and
chisel and cut those diss into little shards, and then
took a funnel and funneled the shards down into the shotgun.

(33:20):
Because when you're reading about the guy that when you're
reading about the guy that killed Bob Ford. Everybody talks
about he was nearly cutting half. Some say cutting half
at the way, some say cutting half at the jaw,
but it's agreed upon that he was very shot up.
And I was wondering if you knew about that detail
that's true or not about filling that gun full of
pipe shavings, which is a dirty deed.

Speaker 4 (33:42):
I don't, and I feel like a personal failure that
I can't address that for him.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
But you know what, here's what, here's where you can
find cover for yourself. You argue that he shouldn't even
be in your book. So the last thing you need
to do is spend a whole bunch of time talking
about the guy that.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
Was out and then the guy that killed him. It's
just getting very removed story.

Speaker 4 (34:00):
At some point, you got to realize people probably are
not going to read the eight hundred page version of this,
So I do have to make I have to make a.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Lot of calls gunfighters speed versus accuracy. You know, that
was the thing that would debate.

Speaker 4 (34:15):
It was typically journalists that would ask them, and we
don't have a ton of those interviews and exchanges, but
of those we do. Arp was weighed in on this,
as did Hitcock. Those men who lived long enough to
tell the story argued strongly in favor of accuracy. That
the dumb ass thing to do, and you see people

(34:36):
doing it repeatedly through the in this book, is to
draw and shoot from the hip. Just as as as
a question of accuracy, especially at distance, that's pretty questionable.
In the in the in the gunfight that opens the book,
in which while Bill Hiccock kills this fellow, Davis Tutt
at seventy five.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Yards the Titanic fraud, while Bill Hiccock kills a man
at seventy five yards because that's right.

Speaker 4 (35:01):
Uh, you know, Tut fired from the hit Hitcock famously
had a Navy colt. He thrust his left arm forward,
placed the barrel of the Navy colt across his forearm,
took what a millisecond longer than the other guy, and
shot him in the chest.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah, there you have it.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
I did the same thing an you know, any number
of people he shot in the OK Corral fight. You know,
I forget the guy's name. Shot made the mistake of
shooting from the.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
Hip, yep, And he would draw a bead on him, Yes, Uh,
the Colt pistol. It didn't take I couldn't believe when
I was reading this that it wasn't immediately popular.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
It was the Colt Revolver like people didn't want it.

Speaker 4 (35:44):
No, the original was introduced in like I was say,
eighteen thirty seven, about a year after the Alma, and
it was large, and it was unwieldy, and it could
take five six minutes to to mean you practically had
to dismantle it to reload it. So while Colt was
able to unload some of these onto the federal government

(36:06):
and was used were told during the Florida's Seminole War
in the early eighteen forties, I want to say it
was not a big deal. In fact, by the time
a group of Texas Rangers stumbled upon some of these
pistols in eighteen forty four, seven years later, Colt had
gone out of business. And it was only when the
rangers began using them in firefights against the Comanche and

(36:28):
then later in the Mexican War that one of them,
one of the rangers who used it, a fellow named
Samuel Walker, went back east and said, Colt, this would
be a great gun if you could just lighten it
up and make the reload a little bit easier. And
working together, Walker and Colt created the gun that created
the gunfighter era. At the original six shoot of the

(36:48):
Walker Colt.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
And some of these dudes.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
I always thought it was like from just a joke
from Westerns. But some of these dudes you talked about,
what actually they would wear two of them and they
would rig them for crossdraw. But that's real.

Speaker 4 (37:02):
That was news to me.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
I always thought that was like a just goofy.

Speaker 8 (37:06):
When I read that detail, I had to figure how
that was faster me too. I mean, I think the
idea is like you swing it and you're aiming it
in one motion rather than drawing and just and bring
it up.

Speaker 4 (37:19):
But well, let's define our terms real quick. Most people
who wore a gun or a single pistol low on
the right hip or low on their shooting hip. It
was somewhat rare to wear two guns. We know John
Harden Wesley Harden did it. We know Hiccock did it.
But now what we're talking about is the way Hiccock
and certain others Jim Courtney, the Marshallo fort Orth did
it as well. They wore the They wore their holsters

(37:41):
high on their hip, so practically, you know, with the holster,
the northern end of the holster in their stomach. And
their argument was that if you are pulling from low
on your hip, you've got to pull up and then point.
With a crossdraw, you pull out and and and the
barrel is already pointed the way it should go.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (38:01):
So they would argue, and I am not a shooter,
and I've never crossed, and I've never used a crossdraw.
That it costs. The crossdraw worked because it required one
less motion.

Speaker 5 (38:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (38:11):
I was doing this in bed the other night.

Speaker 8 (38:13):
I put my I put my kindle down, and I
was reaching across to this side and.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Told your wife go stand across drawing at the ceiling.

Speaker 4 (38:21):
I was going to say that was the excuse for
all those movements when your wife walked into the room.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (38:26):
Yeah, everybody had been asleep for hours.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (38:31):
The dogs.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
The guy that kills Buster Scrugs and the very excellent
battle to Buster Scrugs, he's rigged high for crossdraw m
and Buster Scruggs I think carries on his hip.

Speaker 3 (38:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
You know, Uh, once these guys got it, they made
they kind of made the Rangers kind of made.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
It famous in like a particular engagement, right right.

Speaker 4 (38:54):
We caught on battle Waller Creek eighteen forty four, the
first time the ranger took these revolvers.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
And they got them like through army surplus or something.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
Right now, it was worse and it was I love
telling this story in Texas because the Rangers discovered these
pistols unused and left over by the Texas Navy. Like
don't you just love that Texas had a navy when
it was an individual country and then they disbanded it,
right they did, because guess what, they didn't need a

(39:22):
Texas Navy, know what was gonna invade from seaside, So
these guns were put I imagined in some type of
surplus warehouse where a young ranger named John Jack Hayes
found him and took him out. That day he had
a patrol with twenty three rangers and they ran into
a group of about one hundred best estimate, about one
hundred comanchee out in hill country northwest of San Antonio.

(39:43):
The Comanche withdrew into a wooded hilltop as they often do,
and chied it and yelled at the rangers, come on,
come on, let's fight. Well. For as long as the
Rangers had been out fighting Native Americans, the way you
charged was you took a single shot with your musket,
put it back, put it back in in the whatever
you call him, musket holtzer, and then you would take

(40:04):
a single shot with your flint, with your your single
shot pistol, and then you would go in fighting with
kniven sword. And this was the first time in history
where anybody charged a group of Comanche, uh with single
shot musket, put it away, and then and then six
shot revolver. The numbers that I recall as one ranger
died that day in something like twenty five Comanche. And

(40:25):
the takeaway quote years later from the Comanche chief who've
been present that day is I shall never I shall
never fight that Jackayes again, for he has a bullet
for every finger on his hand. That's good.

Speaker 5 (40:38):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
Who's the Harden?

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Is a guy you spend a lot of time talking about, right,
John is John West.

Speaker 4 (40:46):
John Wesley Harden. I call him Wes Harden.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah, you spend a lot of time talking about him.
Like here is a kind of like a maniacal, indisputable
unstableble gun.

Speaker 4 (40:59):
Yeah gun, Well, Wesley Harden, who was probably one of
the big five I would call him, and he's certainly
more well known in Texas than he is elsewhere. He's
the bridge from the violence that kind of took over
Texas in the decade after the war. He's the bridge
into the more the later area era of gunfighters that

(41:21):
we know it was hardened, you know, faced off with
with Hiccock and Abilene. One of the things that's that's
startling about John Lesley Harden, if you know nothing about him, is,
of course he is credited or with killing between twenty
six and forty two people by the time he was
twenty one, and most of it when he was eighteen.

(41:42):
He got into trouble at the age of fifteen when
he killed a black man who he had wrestled with
and they argued afterwards, and then was obliged to become
a fugitive when federal troops looked for him. And so
for the next how many years six years he kind
of wandered Texas and ultimately a little bit into Kansas.
And the wild thing about his career is we call

(42:02):
him my moniacle, but it's hard to point to a
heck of a heck of a lot of those shootings
that were played, they were almost always because he got
into some type of argument. You remember. The most famous one,
of course, was he shot another Texas cattleman through the
wall of his hotel room four in the morning in Abilene, Kansas.
And the story that got told about ten years later

(42:25):
is that he did it because the man was snoring.
And for about one hundred years, it's been cool to say, oh,
that's a bunch of bs. Come on, that's just Texans
making up this stuff. But I'm sorry, why else do
you shoot someone through a hotel room wall at four
in the morning you think he got into an argument
with him? I suspect snoring makes a lot of sense
to me.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
I always think about opening their throat with a razor
blade when I'm sleeping next to a snorer, like dirt,
just like just like very delicate, so delicate.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
He doesn't even wake up.

Speaker 6 (43:03):
First in his throat you met like one of those
mouth people.

Speaker 7 (43:08):
That's why I always make sure I'm sleeping in a
different ten.

Speaker 4 (43:11):
I was about to say, can we can we rethink
that can't.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
I would go up the dirt and I'd be like sleep, sleep,
and just like, take a blade and just open up
that artery in there.

Speaker 4 (43:22):
He's so nice, I think he'd understand.

Speaker 3 (43:24):
He wouldn't even be mad.

Speaker 6 (43:25):
It's okay, I'm not mad.

Speaker 3 (43:27):
It's just I can't handle it. I just can't handle
it anymore.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Uh. Card games man a lot a lot of bloodshed
and gun fighting over playing cards.

Speaker 4 (43:46):
Which I didn't understand because on its face, it doesn't
make any sense. If we're playing five card draw. I
throw down my two aces and you throw down your
two kings. What's to argue about, right? I mean, I
just never understood the fact that easily half of the
Marquee gunfights that I'm writing about here had something to
do with an argument over cards. And it wasn't until

(44:09):
I started reading about the history of gambling that I
realized that things changed in the Old West, or in
the years leading up to the Old West. In eighteen
forty three, or Riverboat Gambler published a book and then
went out on the lecture circuit to explain to Americans
how prevalent cheating was and how professional gamblers did it,
whether it was with hidden cards, they hidden their clothes,

(44:31):
sometimes entire decks. They would have pulleys and things that
they could pull up an ace from their foot. I
mean they had, they would have. They wore rings with
mirrors beneath them so that they could see every card
that they dealt. So what I argue in the book,
and I think I'm on pretty solid ground here, is
that what was different about the Old West, and what
explains much of this violence, is two things. Number One,

(44:55):
cheating was epidemic. More importantly, number two, now everybody knew it.
So just about every game of chance on the old Frontier,
I'm arguing people were almost as keen to to spot
whether other players were cheating as they were to win.
And of course, any type of accusation of cheating, which
let's face it comes up a lot when somebody loses

(45:17):
and has irked about it. Any accusation and certainly any
proof of cheating was about as acute an affront to
a man's honor as you could get. So there were
a lot of gunfights, some of them in the moment,
some of them you know, I'll meet you outside. Some
of them, you know, I'll see you a week later,
and I'm still pissed, and so I'm gonna shoot you.

(45:38):
I mean, gambling became one of the main sources of
dispute on the on the Old Frontier.

Speaker 7 (45:45):
Was it also like a major source of income for
a lot of these guys, Like how are they paying
the bills?

Speaker 4 (45:51):
Like gambling.

Speaker 5 (45:52):
I mean some were robbing.

Speaker 4 (45:53):
People, obviously, but think of think of the jobs on
the old Frontier. I mean, school teacher, cowboy, a bar keep.
None of these people are getting rich. Those people are
getting rich by in larger absentee mine owners and such cattlemen.
And gambling filled two holes there, one in a landscape

(46:17):
that didn't have video games or internet or board games
or much of anything. Primarily it was entertainment, but also
it became kind of the omnipressent gigwork of the Frontier. Everybody,
if you're making eighty percent of what you should make,
I mean, you're gonna try to make extra And the
easiest way to do that on the Frontier was was gambling.

(46:39):
And so you see almost all the major gamblers, and
I think like almost all the men on the Frontier
moonlight as gamblers. I mean, the IRPs were quasi professional.
They would occasionally set up shop in a casino, and
then you had the professionals. Doc Holliday Luke short Ben Thompson,
who became frankly more more famous as gunfighters fighting off

(47:03):
challengers as they were as gambler.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
But these were guys that were that were like making
their living playing cards.

Speaker 4 (47:11):
Yes, they would typically take Doc Holliday. He had come
west from Georgia because of his tuberculosis. Was thought dryer
air was good for him. Tried to be a dentist,
and he was a dentist, and he tried to open
a practice in Dallas. Unfortunately, tuberculosis, the cough and dentistry
don't exactly need so so you know, he starts, He

(47:31):
gets a buck board and uh a girlfriend slash lady
of the night named Big Nose Kate, and begins basically
touring the west. And he would go from the Rio
Grande to Montana, stay as long as he felt that
there was still suckers to be flee store until he
irked someone so bad he needed to leave town. And
it was a thing. It was a type of job.

(47:53):
Gamblers actually talked of a circuit being up here in
the mining towns, maybe in the in the winter, being
in the Kansas cowtowns, or in Texas itself in the summer.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
And they would go to towns where there was a
lot of money flowing.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
Well, it was easier to make money in those places
than in poor towns.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yes, yeah, like like gold rush gold like they would
kind of follow mining mining booms and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 (48:19):
Or you know the Kansas cowtowns with all the money
coming in from Texas cowboys during the eighteen seventies. Any
place there was any type of boom, whether it was
around minerals or cattle, you would find prostitution gamblers because
that's where the money was.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
Yeah, you're gonna see my knowledge of your bookstarts to
fade pretty soon because I'm only halfway through, so you'll.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
Have to help me.

Speaker 4 (48:43):
It's all right, I'll just talk more.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
Yeah, please, but you lay out this deal that, like
tell the story of the Longhorns, because it just winds
up had a big part of the book is does
that there's a kind of a collapse or a lull
and cattle activity, right, and then there's a great spike
in cattle activity and that pushes out a lot of

(49:07):
that That pushes out a lot of gunfighters to the north.

Speaker 4 (49:10):
Well, the eating of beef wasn't a huge thing in
the Antebellum years before before the war, and of the
beef cattle in the country were in South Texas and
the plains on those ranches, famously King Ranch south of
San Antonio. And it was during the war that trade

(49:32):
just stopped because you couldn't anymore get you couldn't drive
to New Orleans to market. There was no more money,
not enough money in Texas for people to be having
beef dinner. So essentially that trade frozen amber And so
you know, cattle did what cattle do for about five
years during the war. They made little cattle, and by
the time the war was over, there was something older

(49:53):
of five million cattle roaming free in South Texas.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Unowned.

Speaker 4 (49:59):
No, they were owned, oh were they just weren't. Barboar
wasn't a thing, so this was open range.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
So someone would have claimed ownership of them, whatever level
of control they had over brand.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
I see.

Speaker 4 (50:10):
So you would brand your cow and then allow them
to run free, and then when it was time to
go to market wherever they might be, you had to
go out and round and round them up.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
I see. So during those years, just they weren't there
was nowhere to send them.

Speaker 4 (50:21):
That's exactly.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
So your herd just built to build.

Speaker 4 (50:23):
What happened immediately after the war in eighteen sixty five
eighteen sixty six was Northerners wanted those They started to
open the first ever stockyards in Chicago, and they needed
those cows to get north. Unfortunately, there were no railroads
in Texas to get them up there. If so fact,
the cattle drives the nearest railroad railroads to Texas were
in Kansas, Abilene, Wichton, ultimately Dodd City. And so the

(50:45):
way that Texans and Texas longhorn cattle, and I've argued
kind of this hyper violent ethos of Texas gunmen, the
way that began to spread across the frontier was first
up the Chisholm Trail to.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
Kansas, and they would come, they they would establish a
point of sale, and then you'd have all these dudes
a lot of money, real violent, tearing up the town.
And you explain how the towns would sour on this right.

Speaker 4 (51:12):
There were five principal Kansas cattle town from eighteen sixty
nine to eighteen seventy nine, beginning with Applene, then wichital
Than Ellsworth, ultimately ending in Dodge City. And the Texas
cowboys would drive large herds up there to each of
each of these towns, they kind of handed it off
being the place like a baton because the Texans were

(51:34):
so violent and so aparisk, and the murder rates would
go so sky high that each of the towns, you know,
one after another, was like, Clint, that's it, We're done.
You know, you know which stall you take these guys,
Dodd City, you take them. And that's really where the
first nationally famous gunfights occurred, the first ones that we
still ride about today. We know gunfights happened before that,

(51:56):
but this was now in the north. This was within
range northern newspapers that suddenly we're like, wait, Texans are
up here doing what? And you know, I argue in
the book that you know this was this kind of
made these Kansas cowtowns the Madison Square Garden of the
gunfighter era. It's the first place you hear of so
many of these police people from wide are up on down.

Speaker 6 (52:21):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Brodie had a question about mercenaries.

Speaker 7 (52:23):
Oh well yeah, I mean it might even relate to
like the cattle drives, like like in Western movies a
lot you see where like someone hires the gang, right,
Like was that a thing where these guys will get
hired to do some kind of mercenary work for good
or bad reasons.

Speaker 4 (52:44):
It happened, but I would argue it didn't happen as
much as the movies, right suggests the most famous incident
of that. Well, first, there's two things we're talking about here.
Individual gunmen who were hired as assassins is what would
not call hitmen. Right, that was a thing. You may
dimly remember a pretty good Steve Men movie from the
seventies called Tom Horn. Oh yeah, oh, I forget where

(53:04):
I am.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
The last man legally hung in Wyoming.

Speaker 4 (53:08):
And Tom Horn was pretty clearly a hired killer, the
most stockman.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
He's a stock, he's a stock detective.

Speaker 4 (53:15):
But I think most people, at least in Tom Horn's case,
knew what he was doing. But then there were others
like Deacon Jim Miller in Texan, who, when he was
strung up, his last words were, let the record show
I have killed fifty one men, now hiring an entire
group of hired killers. And I can think of any
number of movies where that happened. Yeah, it happened. The

(53:37):
most famous one was in Wyoming Johnson during the Johnson
County War in eighteen ninety two, in which the Wyoming
Stockman's Association basically judged that Johnson County was allowing rustlers
to run free and wouldn't convict them even when they
were indicted, and so the the Wyoming Cattleman decided that

(53:58):
they were going to invade Johnson came kill all the
public officials, the newspaper editors, and the wrestlers. For this,
they dispatched a man to wait for it, Texas. We're
in Dallas. He hired and brought north twenty one hired
Texas Gunman. You probably know the end of that story
did not end well for the Texas Gunman.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
Can I tell you funny Tom Horn story?

Speaker 4 (54:19):
Please?

Speaker 2 (54:20):
We used to hunt this dude's place named Tom Horn,
and uh, he was a rancher and I would when
I would go in and we'd shoot the breeze with him,
and I always be like does he always be like
does he know about Tom Horn? And one day if
Tom not, kiddy, man, I'm talking to him, was like don't.
We'd hunt rabbits in his place. So as a joke,

(54:43):
one day we get him a carrot cake. Okay, we
give a carrot cake and it's got like little rabbits
and carrots on top of it, decorated, and we go on.
We give him the carrot cake, and I'm trying to
ascertain if he like is getting the joke, Like he
gave us rabbit hunting permissions, so here's a carrot cake.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
And I'm also I'm wondering, like does he know about
Tom Horn?

Speaker 2 (55:02):
And I'm looking through him and like right off of
his right ear, I realized on his shelf as a
book is Tom Horn's book. I'm like, oh good, he
doesn't get the carrocake joke, but he does at least
know that there's that there's another very famous Tom Horn
h When you say it doesn't go well, explain what

(55:23):
happened doesn't go well for the Texas Gunman.

Speaker 4 (55:25):
The Texas Gunman, you know, they come in to shine
and they start riding up to Johnson County, and at
one point, when they're just on the edge of the county,
a scout comes in and says, wait, wait, the King
of the Rustlers and a couple of other three bad
guys are nearby on this ranch. Let's go over and
get them first. Big argument breaks out. The Texans go
over and get this guy. They surround this cabin. I

(55:45):
think two of the bad guys get away and two
of them are killed. One of them the so called
king of the Rustlers. At this time, and it speaks
to the pervasiveness of Texans even in Wyoming was a
Texan named Nate Champion, who you know, wrote in a
journal as they were, you know, shooting into the cabin
and then starting to burn the cabin down. He ultimately

(56:06):
ran out into their pistols a lah butch cassidy and
was killed. But that gave the locals time to raise
super posse, which was about twice the size of the
incoming invaders. The incoming invaders withdrew to a ranch called
to the governor for help. He was in on it.
The governor called to the White House, who called in
the seventh Cavalry, who rescued the poor Texas invaders. About

(56:30):
three days later they all went away to nice Wyoming
prisons and were quietly allowed to go on their way.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
You know who, in reading and reading your book, you
get into Billy the Kid, and throughout the book, oh
at least a half I'm reading, I'm reading little bits
and I'm like, this is kind of like from Young Guns.
But the movie Young Guns. They make a real pole
prix out of a ton of different shit. Yes, like,

(56:58):
what are they even talking about that movie?

Speaker 4 (57:01):
Look, I would argue that as bad.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
He's familiar with this movie, the Young Guns.

Speaker 4 (57:05):
I've been the sequel, I've seen it twice.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Now looks like talking about ship from all over the
west Man.

Speaker 4 (57:14):
Well, that is kind of what Hollywood does. They take
the best look Young Guns. He is not awful. There
are worse, including too, It's much worse.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
I got Young Guns too. Well, the beginning was pretty sweet.

Speaker 4 (57:29):
That it's not think I'm not judging it on entertainment value.

Speaker 5 (57:35):
But actual there was some real history in there.

Speaker 3 (57:39):
Yeah, Young Guns, like Don Jovie was not there?

Speaker 4 (57:42):
Really, No, God, you're crushing me, you know. I thought
Young Guns contribution the original to Billy the Kid was
that I don't think Billy the Kid was the most
stable of and Emilio Estavid did a good job of
jesting there were moments when he wasn't all there and

(58:04):
I that been all there. That spoke to me in
the movie, and the idea that that these was a
small group of gunmen in this feud kind of being
chased and dominated and overwhelmed by an from Lincoln Lincoln
County War eighteen eighty eight, eighteen eighty one. That felt right,
But I mean they started to lose me a little

(58:24):
young Guns during the Great Payote Sequences.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
I mean, you know, but they were kind of mixing
up their landscapes too, right, I.

Speaker 4 (58:31):
Mean, like, remind me, it's been a few years.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Well, so the link where was the Lincoln County War?

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Where did the Lincoln County War occur?

Speaker 4 (58:40):
It's all New Mexico. Billy the Kid is all in
New Mexico.

Speaker 3 (58:42):
Okay, all right?

Speaker 2 (58:43):
So the so that was right because I thought they
were borrowing stuff from the sheep.

Speaker 3 (58:48):
The fence Cutter War is up in Wyoming.

Speaker 4 (58:51):
Well, I can't. I can't speak to that, uh. I
mean the thing about Billy the Kid is.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Let's just talk about the real ability Kid. Tell the
story of the real Billy the Kid, never mind Young Guns.

Speaker 4 (59:01):
Well, the problem with Billy the Kid, if you're an
author or an historian is I can take the accepted
facts of Billy the Kid, and I can write ten
different books that would take that would the book one
would be of him is the worst villain and murderer
you've ever read about all the way to book number ten,
which would be what a sweet misunderstood guy is, because

(59:23):
the elements of this guy's career and his personality could
back up almost anything. You know. From the kind of
the dastardly point of view, he was a murderer and
a cattle rustler. Okay, from the good point of view.
Even then, people admired his daring, his bravery in.

Speaker 5 (59:41):
The news.

Speaker 4 (59:42):
The news the New Mexican newspapers at the time that
he was at the peak of his regional fame for
about a year, were split. Some of them said he
was a demon spawned from hell. Others said, well, you know,
you can understand why he's doing this. He's out numbered
that type of thing. Billy the Kid was an orphan
raised and kind of escaped from Silver City, a town

(01:00:03):
down in southwest New Mexico. He went out into Arizona,
which was remote and undeveloped, and came back having killed
a man who picked on him because he was so small.
He was seventeen at the time, and he was a
small kid. And in the West, by the way, they're
all small and they're all called the kid. Like I
can give you fifteen guys named the kid Harry the Kid.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
I mean, just you know, for some somebody, these guys's
book one hundred and twenty five pounds.

Speaker 4 (01:00:29):
Well, I think that American men were smaller back in
those days. Billy the Kid was what five seven twenty five.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
Something, probably malnourished for a while while he was young.

Speaker 4 (01:00:39):
Maybe Billy the Kid's career is neatly cut into two parts.
The first is as as you mentioned, the Lincoln County War,
where he had gone to work for a cattleman who
got into a big feud with the local members of power,
and Billy the Kid was on the losing side and
hounded out of that after two or three years in
which he killed two or three people. After that he

(01:01:01):
went he moved over up toward Las Vegas in Las Vegas,
New Mexico, northeastern New Mexico, and became the fancy word
for him. People will say he was an outlaw, outlaws
from ount law. He was a cattle wrestler. That's all
he did was beintell cattle and he rose to fame
when New Mexican New Mexico cattleman came after him, and

(01:01:24):
ultimately they much as the governor of Texas in the
nineteen thirties, brought in Frank Hamer to chase down Bonnie
and Clyde, the cattleman of eastern New Mexico, almost all
of whom were originally Texans. Brought in a young fella
named Pat Garrett, who was known. He was little known
for anything beforehand. He'd basically been a bartender, but his

(01:01:48):
one claim to fame seemed.

Speaker 3 (01:01:50):
To be Garrett it's heid hunting.

Speaker 6 (01:01:51):
Yep, he did.

Speaker 4 (01:01:52):
As a matter of fact, he was really tall. He
was sick. At a time I think the average American
male was like five eight five nine, he was six four.

Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
Pat Garrett was symbolic of the changes overgoing frontier law enforcement.
You know, up until those years, in the early years
after the Civil War, you could kill almost indiscriminately. It
was pretty unusual for somebody to get to put away
for murder. But in the eighteen seventies you start to
see lawman like white Ear and Pat Garrett, who are

(01:02:20):
notably more professional. You know, until then you had a
lot of drunks, a lot of corruption, and after that
less and Garrett, you know, famously tracked Billy down to
the town where pretty much everybody knew he was hiding
Fort Sumter, and went in one night with two other
with his two deputies, both Texans, and they surveilled the town.

(01:02:41):
There was nothing going on, so they knew the halfway.
They knew the mayor, and they after midnight, circled around
to his house and while the two deputies sat out
in the yard, Pat Garrett went in through the open door,
sat on his friend's bed and woke him up and
started to ask him, you know, have you seen Billy?
As he ever around? And at that moment, Billy the

(01:03:03):
kid walked over from his mistress's house, which is about
fifty yards away, came into the yard. He had a
butcher knife in his hand and he was gonna cut
a steak off a beef that was hanging from one
of the eaves. When he saw the he saw the
two mens. The mistress happened to be Pat Garrett's sister

(01:03:25):
in law, but that's a that's another story. Well, Billy
walks into the yard and sees these two strangers, and
he's speaking only in Spanish. He demands, who are they?
Who are they? In the Garrett's two deputies are so
stunned They don't even know what to do. They certainly
don't know that this agitated young guy is Billy the Kid.
There's an open door there into the bedroom where Pat
Garrett is sitting in the bed, and Billy has his

(01:03:46):
two pistols out pointed at the deputies. He backs into
the open door into the darkened bedroom where the mayor
is laying there in bed and what oh yeah, and
Gary's sitting on it. Garrett sees the shadowy figure come in.
Billy sees the shadowy figure in the bed. Nobody knows
who anybody is. And that's when the mayor, whose name

(01:04:10):
is escaping me, basically says two words. He says, ls
it's him and Garrett on only that fires two guns
into the shadowy figure. He hears gurgle, gurgle, Fall walks
out to clear the Gunsmolt walks back in and he
realizes he has in fact killed Billy the Kid.

Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
Well he didn't though, he let him go. And that's
young guns too.

Speaker 4 (01:04:37):
You don't understand there are entire towns, including the town
of Haiko in Texas, that have built museums around Billy
the Kid, who the Billy the Kid that actually lived
into the nineteen thirties. We know our uncle.

Speaker 3 (01:04:50):
Jesse was, so you explain, I haven't gotten that far.
In the book.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
You tell that story about caught in the beefsteak and
getting shot by Pat Garrett.

Speaker 4 (01:04:58):
In the book chapter thirteen. God can't wait, it's a
good chapter.

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
That's how that happened.

Speaker 4 (01:05:03):
Am I giving? Am I giving too much away?

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
Oh? Hell no, it's all such thing man.

Speaker 7 (01:05:07):
You you mentioned like Pat Garrett being more of like
whatever kind of a straight lace loman.

Speaker 4 (01:05:14):
Or you know, like better than the one they had
gone before him.

Speaker 7 (01:05:18):
But what like was it also a thing where like
at any given time, some of these gunfighters would be
on one side a lot, like you hear that a lot?

Speaker 3 (01:05:27):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
That's yeah, that's that's the thing that comes out is
kind of weird, is like the fluidity. You even make
jokes like a guy like does all these criminal acts
like and of course his next job wasn't share.

Speaker 4 (01:05:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because in many cases, communities didn't especially
care about your moral character, and they also didn't have
a ton of people willing to take the job. You know,
there weren't a lot of people out I mean a
lot of these places were pretty small, but what they
were looking for. You saw this time and time again.
They were looking for somebody with bravery and a reputation

(01:05:59):
that might swayed criminals and in the in the end,
who knew how to use a gun. So you absolutely
saw people who had been wrestlers or criminals of some
type who would go be a marshall for a season
or two and then go back.

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
You know, I've often argued that Shakespeare stole a lot
of his stuff from the show Three's Company, but uh,
there's a time problem there. I feel like Billy the Kid,
they kind of stole stuff from your book a little
bit because even though that came first, because he even
uses that flip move which you explained in great detail,

(01:06:35):
the border flip.

Speaker 4 (01:06:36):
That's Harden, Harden does it twice.

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
No, no end. Sorry, this is the last mention of
Young Guns in Young Guns.

Speaker 4 (01:06:44):
Oh, you're right, he does it in the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Billy the Kid does that little, a little move where
he's like going to hand a gun handled. Someone's like, hey,
give me your pistol, and he goes to hand it to
him and then flips it on him.

Speaker 4 (01:06:55):
Yeah, we don't know that he ever did that in
real but John Weissey Harden. Yeah, and but twice.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
Yeah, so I'm done talking about young guns. It's it's
it's dumb, it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
It's a movie.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
But in your book you give name to that move
and talk about it's called like the Border Agent or
the border flip or something.

Speaker 4 (01:07:12):
I've heard it seen the border role, I think more
more commonly it's called the road Agent's spin.

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
And and uh, it's a thing. It was a real like.

Speaker 4 (01:07:23):
It was a thing. But one wonders if it was
a thing people bragged about doing more than they actually did.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
Yeah, you explain it, well, you would it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:32):
There were two instances of it in Wes Harden's career,
one where that he told of later and one that
we know actually happened. Uh. The one he told is
the classic one when Hickock went to disarm him at
a bowling alley in Abilee because as we all know,
bowling alley bowling was the sport of the old true

(01:07:52):
you know, Uh, he was causing ruckus for over what
we don't know. Hickock went in with his guns drawn,
knowing full well who he was, and demanded his guns,
and Harden turned around and realized Okay, I'm not gonna
win this. The guy's already got his guns out, so
he said, moving very slowly, pulled both his guns he
wore to and handed them butt forward toward Hiccock. Hitcock

(01:08:13):
then put his guns down and reached for Harden's, at
which point Harden spins them and thus that that the
barrel is now is now pointing forward rather than the
butt and he's got Hiccock, you know, right where he
wants him, at which point you would think gunfight right. No,
now it didn't happen. Harden actually shoot off his buddies

(01:08:34):
and said nobody, nobody shoot shoots this man but me.
And then a strange thing happened. You know, Wes Harden
was seventeen at the time, oh man, Hickock was in
his thirties, and Hiccock, we don't have the exact words,
but clearly said something like dude, chill, come on, let's
go have a lemonade, and basically talked him down a.

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
Little celtz around there.

Speaker 4 (01:09:00):
You get is Harden was so stunned you didn't really
know how to do it.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):
Don't know what to do.

Speaker 4 (01:09:05):
Oh he could have just if you wanted to shoot
while Bill Hiccock. He could have done it right there.
Oh and then he We also know that Harden successfully
used the spin. It's documented in the killing of a
Texas State policeman later that same year.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
M hm hm.

Speaker 3 (01:09:22):
The border agents flip what was it called the.

Speaker 4 (01:09:26):
Border roll or the road agent's spin the border role.
I've never been able to do either.

Speaker 3 (01:09:33):
Yeah, I haven't experimented. No me either, journalists. Here's a
part that that's so confused.

Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
I mean, I accept that it's true, but I just
can't picture the sort of thought process. If there's a
guy in one of these towns and he gets in
some skirmishes, he gets in some of these shootouts over
card games and whatnot, and their eyes getting cleared, like oh,
it was so defense, or there's no witness, therefore we're
gonna let you go, or it's unclear what happened, therefore

(01:10:06):
we're gonna let you go. And then journalists want to
come then talk to them and interview them about their disputes,
like again and again and again, and they kind of
like craft these sort of through these articles, craft these personalities.

(01:10:29):
And you talk about a unique aspect of a lot
of these gunfights, is there are many eyewitnesses, so you
can really late in the later years, there's very detailed
descriptions of he said this, he said this, he did that, Yeah,
he did that. At times you find it there's there's
contradicting details, but it's just like, can you address that

(01:10:52):
a little bit that like, how are they sort of
arguing that this was How are journalists arguing that this
was like productive or serving the public good or whatever
to kind of like profile and make heroes out of
people that we would today recognize as just like flat
out murders.

Speaker 4 (01:11:11):
In large part, the press accounts don't rise them up
as heroic as unusual, yes, as in Hickock's thing, but
I don't You don't find a lot of moralistic commentary,
except to the extent that they were saying this is bad,
this is murder. Okay, I will say that to the
extent that you do find just the fact that writing

(01:11:32):
about them at all glorifies them. It reflects a fascination
with them. At the local level. We know that the
first and greatest fans of gunfighters were the people who
lived in their communities. They didn't have a lot else
to talk about. Mark Twain till it's a great story
of going out west, and there was a gunfighter forgetting

(01:11:53):
his name at the moment, who was prevalent in the
Civil War years, and he said, you know, as he
rode out on on the stage coach for Nevada, it
was the only subject that anybody wanted to talk about
was this guy, and he killed somebody recently. There wasn't
a lot of news out there, so gunfighters were news.

(01:12:13):
I think the worst that you could say about the
journalists at coverage is that it ended up being pretty gullible.
I'm thinking of I'm thinking of a character named while
Bill Longley, who was arrested in eighteen seventy seven in
Texas and claimed to kill something on the order of
forty two people. This was like a year or two
after Harden had been arrested and in prison for a

(01:12:36):
murder murdering a ranger. And so this guy Longley went
to the gallows having claimed to kill something like forty
two people, and he got written about by a lot
of journalists, and later in the twentieth century there were
books and even a TV series about this guy. In
the in the nineteen fifties, which was kind of the
high water mark of what a fascination with these type people.

(01:12:57):
And it wasn't until the nineteen nineties when they retired.
Disc attorney in Central Texas set out to write a
new biography that he was unable to uh find evidence
of it maybe five or six of these forty two killings,
all of whom were men shot in the back or
in other words, murdered, rather than any type of contentious

(01:13:19):
gunfighter situation. So there were a number of kind of
bogus counterfeit gunfighters. Longley would be one. Johnny Ringo, who
kind of is often seen as one of the major
guns up against White orp A Tombstone, is often represented,
you know, as one of the great gunfighters. In fact,
he never fired a shot in anger.

Speaker 3 (01:13:39):
Yeah, I haven't gotten there yet, but tell what happened?
Okay Corral? And and and uh why is it still
so debated?

Speaker 4 (01:13:50):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
You know, like every night on some cable network or
is a thing about me and random are joking about this?
You can spend your whole life just watching shows, yes,
arguing about who did what?

Speaker 3 (01:14:02):
OK Corral, you.

Speaker 4 (01:14:03):
Know, OK Corral, which we should, of course, if we
were going to get super accurate here, we need to
be calling this the gunfight beside the OK Corral. It
wasn't It wasn't in the corral. It was then a
vacant lot next to it. Well, I think most people
probably understand if you've ever seen the movie Tombstone the
ninety three Kurt russell I, while it opens with a
fictitious massacre, it's pretty darn close to accurate, as is

(01:14:24):
the Kevin Costro Wider, although from a year before, which
puts me to sleep. Long story short, Wider was an
occasional lawman there. His brother Virgil, who had come to town,
and his brother Morgan were actual lawmen who had come
to town, and they came to Tombstone from various places
in the West to make money in a new boomtown

(01:14:46):
where silver had been found.

Speaker 3 (01:14:48):
They wanted to make money gambling.

Speaker 4 (01:14:50):
They wanted to make money anyway they could. They first
they tried it. They put their initial cout capital into
buying vacant lots and into mining claims. When claims in
vacant lots are not the greatest sources of immediate cash flow.
They all actually had to find jobs, and so they
you know, worked different things at different seasons, typically as lawmen,

(01:15:11):
assistant us Marshalls, saloon keepers and most commonly gamblers. They
then came into conflict of what is now generally acknowledged
to be the largest outlaw gang of the Old West,
more than one hundred strong. Centered there in southeast Arizona,
it did most of its work of stealing cattle in Mexico.

(01:15:32):
Above the border, they were known as the Cowboys, typically
cow hyphen boys, but below the border in Mexico they
were known as the Tejanos because so many of them
came from Texas. And over time the IRPs came into
conflict with this group. And the key thing that happened

(01:15:53):
we now know was Wider wanted to be Marshall. He'd
been a very successful lawman in Kansas and a somewhat
success lawman in Missouri, but he felt like people in
Arizona didn't really know him, so he needed some type
of achievement. There was a there was the Cowboys, from
time to time rob stages, and he thought everybody thought

(01:16:14):
they knew who was behind a big stage rogery, a
big stage robbery, and so Wyat approached the most prominent
of the cowboys, a guy named Ike Clinton, and said,
if you'll set this guy up for me so that
I can arrest him. I'll give you the three hundred
I think I think it was three thousand dollar reward.

(01:16:36):
H and Ike agreed to do this. Unfortunately, the guy
that they sought was killed in the interim. And afterwards
I realized he was in serious of trouble because if
whyerp or any of his buddies spread the word that
Ike Clinton was going to rat out and set up
one of his criminal brethren, Ike Clinton's life span could

(01:16:58):
be measured in days and so that that's what happened
that windy day in October, Ike and two several other
cowboys came into town. They accused Wyatt and his brother
Virgil and Doc Holliday, their friend, of starting to spread
this story, which was a true story, that he was
a rat, And it went on most of the night
and it didn't get bad it meaning Ike's behavior didn't

(01:17:20):
get bad until after dawn that next morning, by which
point all the IRPs and other and everybody else involved
had been up all night playing cards. They were all
out going having naps that morning when I Clanton started
going saloon to saloon casino casino there in Tombstone, saying
that the next up that any of the cowboys saw

(01:17:42):
in the street was going to be killed. And he
didn't announce why, he just said, you know, they were
skunks and bad guys and such, and so what happened
was everybody then rushes to each of the irp's homes
and wakes him up by noon and like, you got
to stop this. Something bad is going to happen. And Joel,
who was the marshal at the point, realized he had

(01:18:02):
to go disarm them. Uh, there was a as in
Dodge City as in Abelee, there was some municipal orients
against open carry, and Ike and the cowboys were seen
carrying their guns, and so Virgil and Morgan and why
it all all woke. And there's this wonderful moment where
they're standing at the edge of a saloon about to
go down to this vacant lot to disarm the cowboys,

(01:18:25):
when out of nowhere, Doc Holliday walks up and says,
what's going on. He'd been asleep, he didn't know of
any of this, And White said, we're getting ready for
a fight. They used the word fight to call a
for gunfight, as if by then there was no other
other kind. If I said, I'm going to fight you.
It was understood it would be guns. And Doc Holliday,
who kind of worshiped, whyet that part of the movies

(01:18:45):
is pretty close to accurate, I'd say. He says, well,
I'm offended that you it was a Southern I'm gonna
put on my face Southern accent. Well, I'm offended. I'm offended.
Why would you Why would you not be asking me
to help out? And whites are well, it's going to
be a tough one. And Doc Holliday actually said, well,
those are the kind I like the most. And so
the four of them actually like a Western. It's you know,

(01:19:08):
we have eyewitness account begin walking shoulder to shoulder to shoulder,
four guys straight across down to this vacant lot where
I Klanton and five of the other cowboys were waiting,
uh and had been overheard cursing and threatening the herbs.
Long story short, all four of them walk down there,
they come up. They come up to this vacant lot
and it's small. It's the size of, you know, a

(01:19:31):
big living room. It's like seventeen feet across. There's six
cowboys attending two horses, and there's three rps and Doc Holliday.
They come up four against six. All that happens, the
only thing that happens that triggers it is Virgil or
Seeds that they're they're carrying their guns and calls for
them to disarm, to give up their guns. And the

(01:19:53):
cowboys that were that were present, it was almost like
they didn't hear hear the worst. They just saw herps
guns and they pulled and they drew. Three of the
cowboys did not. They backed off, hands up like we
don't want to want any of this. So they immediately
lose the numbers games. So suddenly you now have four
ERPs and Holiday against three bad guys, and two of

(01:20:16):
the bad guys are holding horses which immediately start to
buck at the first the first gunshots. What we know
is it lasted about thirty seconds at the end of
which and I could take you through the second my second. Unfortunately,
this is what I get paid to do. All all
three cowboys were dead or dying. Virgil had a bad

(01:20:36):
uh had been shot in the in the calf of
his right leg. Morgan had been shot badly through a
bullet went in his right shoulder and went across his back.
Doc had been grazed and White Rope was the only
one that was. Yeah. Well, but anyway you talked about
the controversy, the controversy is not about Okay Corral. That

(01:20:58):
Buy and Large is considered by observers and by newspapers
at the time have been a pretty fierce fight. I mean,
after all, the cowboys shot first, shooting, as we know
from the hip stupid. The controversy becomes after in the
months that follow Phantom unidentified gun men badly wound Virgil
and kill Morgan, and it's then that something inside Wider

(01:21:23):
breaks like he'd always been a pretty much buy the
numbers lawmen, certainly by old West standards, but by then,
you know, after Morgan's death, Morgan died in his arms,
shot in the back at a pool hall. It was
he was shooting. As he was shooting pool That Whyatt
said he was going to go get him, and he did.
He's that's what started what's classically called the Vendetta Ride.

(01:21:46):
It lasted well, I want to say, three or four days,
in which why it put together a group of five
or six other writers and they went out and they
killed three or four of the cowboys, including their acknowledge
Lee or curdly Bill Brochs, at which point they they
they washed their hands of tombstone and they they wrote off,

(01:22:07):
never to return. But you know, they left a big
controversy and an American legend in their ways.

Speaker 3 (01:22:13):
So how's your book end?

Speaker 4 (01:22:16):
Literally, how does it end?

Speaker 3 (01:22:17):
Yeah? What happens in the end of the book?

Speaker 4 (01:22:19):
Well, the last chapter of action has to be the
last marquee outlaws of the Old West. That's Butch and Sundance.
So the narrative of the book before an epilogue, the
narrative of the book book begins with these guys saying
it's no good being an outlaw anymore. The lawmen are
out there and the Pinkertons are everywhere, and so Butch

(01:22:42):
gets this idea that he's going to go to Argentina
and and and set up a cattle ranch. He does
the famous thing.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
That I've been a bunch of those little sites down there. Yeah,
every place claims to be some Butch Cassidy things great.

Speaker 4 (01:22:54):
He was down there for seven years until they finally
got him. And then there's an epilogue that basically goes,
whatever happened to everybody? What their graves are like now?
I take I take readers on a little tour of
Dodge City and Tombstone and Lincoln, Uh, just to get
a sense what that what that world was like these days.

Speaker 3 (01:23:11):
Yeah, so the last gun Fighters.

Speaker 2 (01:23:13):
As I'm reading along, I'm going to find that a
case to be made that that Broiche Cassidy, according to
your definition, is the last of the gunfighters.

Speaker 3 (01:23:25):
Is that true?

Speaker 4 (01:23:25):
I would say he's the last of the prominent ones. Look,
nobody would ever argue that gunfighting or criminality beget law,
you know, ended in the Old West in nineteen oh one.
But I do think it's that moment that a lot
of those activities started moving from the headlines into history. Yeah,
so I thought, you know, you've got to end it somewhere,
and that that felt that felt fair to me. The

(01:23:47):
penultimate chapter, the one before that, would be a much
more deadly group of fellas the Dalton Gang in Oklahoma.

Speaker 2 (01:23:56):
Oh okay, I know that name, but I'm excited to
read about those guys.

Speaker 4 (01:24:00):
It's a pretty good story.

Speaker 3 (01:24:01):
I'm going to keep reading this book. E'ven though already
talked to you.

Speaker 4 (01:24:04):
Well, I was one of my best friends who is
kind of a pacifist guy, doesn't like guns. He said, well,
I'm going to try to read this, and he liked.
My wife got exactly halfway through the book, about ten
eleven chapters, he had to put it on.

Speaker 3 (01:24:20):
He said, that's that problem, my wife, just too much killing.

Speaker 4 (01:24:23):
And he went back. He went back afterwards to read it,
and he said not only did he like it, but
that he thought initially that the story of gunfighters would
just be one of chaos, just people getting drunk and
shooting each other. And there's plenty of that, but he
said he found a real moral component, but real sense
of right and wrong by the time he get done.
He got done. So I'll be deeply curious what you think.

Speaker 3 (01:24:45):
Well, now, what was your wife's scrape with it?

Speaker 4 (01:24:48):
Well, my wife grew up on ranches in West Texas
and she shot her first gear when she was like twelve,
and by fifteen or sixteen she'd had enough and it
just still she's just queasy with killing.

Speaker 3 (01:25:00):
Got it? Got it?

Speaker 4 (01:25:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:25:02):
But you know, I don't know, man, It's like it's
like it's not like a sociology book, but it's like
it just does a great job of explaining like a
period in history. I don't think it's like, I don't
think you have to read it because you want to
celebrate people dying. It's just like it's an explanation of
stuff that happened, right, and like why it happened, well,

(01:25:23):
that's certainly, and why it stopped happening.

Speaker 4 (01:25:25):
Well, that certainly was my point of view. I didn't
write this because wow, it would be great to write
about eleven hundred murders. I wrote about it because it
was fat. I wanted to understand why it happened in
this period of American history. But I can also acknowledge
and appreciate that there are people to whom blooding, gore
and killing is just hard to read about.

Speaker 2 (01:25:44):
Yeah, but you know, you know that whole genre of
telling like doing documentaries whatever about like serial killers, right,
you could try to dress that up as being that
it's something other than just you know, somebody is reveling
in someone's sadistic behavior. Like there's not like it's not history.

(01:26:07):
You know, when I watched those things. I hate watching
the ones I have seen. It's like it's not even
masquerading as like history or sociology, like little serial killer
series like that. They're kind of disgusting, I think. But
this is I mean, this is explaining. It explains like
this really important part of American history, and we tend
to go like, Okay, the Civil War happened and then

(01:26:28):
the Civil War ended and that was it, right, But
this is about well, what of those people, you know,
what of those habits, what of those technologies, and here's
sort of what they did. And then it touches base
with perhaps you've heard of blank, blank and blank. You know,
you've probably heard a Billy of the Kid, You've heard
of Doc Holiday, and people have, but people don't know.

(01:26:51):
I'm saying, like people in general don't know what they
actually did and who they actually worked.

Speaker 4 (01:26:56):
Well, from a purely commercial point of view, if if
I could apologize for this, I thought that would be
one of the appeals of the book is that there's
a lot of people out there these days that didn't
grow up on these stories the way I did fifty
years ago, but know the names. But you're probably not
going to go buy a four hundred and fifty page
book about Billy the Kid and drill that deep in.
But if you want like an introduction to all these guys,

(01:27:18):
and by the way, you know, suggestions of other books
to go read about each of them. This is a
really good place to start.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
Yeah, you're very generous with site putting out source material
and recommendations for further reading.

Speaker 4 (01:27:30):
I just assumed that people were going to want to
know more, and so I take great joy in saying
this is a great book. Go read this, Go read that.
Don't read this.

Speaker 8 (01:27:38):
Your I liked your footnotes because they're very conversational. Well,
I could like get a sense of your personality from
your footnotes.

Speaker 4 (01:27:46):
I have a lot of challenges and personal problems in life,
but enthusiasm for my material is not one of them.
I as I said at the very beginning, I yeah,
I had a heck of a lot of fun doing this,
and I you know, I mean, the one thing you
worry about, like I really worried about this is Okay,
I'm a sixty three year old white guy writing a

(01:28:08):
book about in which eleven hundred people are killed, and
it's the twenty first century. And oh, by the way,
it's conversational and almost a little humorous in places. What
could go wrong? Yeah, And so I've been you know, obviously,
the reviews. The reception has been very generous, and it's
been one among I thought this was a prime candidate

(01:28:28):
to be canceled.

Speaker 8 (01:28:29):
Well, it's it's I mean, I think there's a lot
of it's.

Speaker 3 (01:28:33):
A new era though, Man, there's been a vibe shift.

Speaker 4 (01:28:36):
You're not the first person just say great time for
this book.

Speaker 6 (01:28:40):
There's like a very simplistic.

Speaker 8 (01:28:43):
Understanding of this era where it's like people move out
beyond the reach of the law, and then the criminals
do what they want, and then there's this class of
heroes that rise up and sort of that's what naturally
happens when people are out in the wilderness, right. And
I think what's what's very what I really appreciate is

(01:29:06):
how you set it up with these cultural undercurrents that
come out of the Civil War and come out of
Southern culture and even come from Europe.

Speaker 6 (01:29:15):
That just adds a texture to it.

Speaker 8 (01:29:18):
But then at the same time, it's very funny and
it's very read like there's a depth, there's a depth
of analysis that's that's very satisfying, but then it's also
very funny.

Speaker 4 (01:29:28):
Well, and and and the thing there is you don't
look I want to I want to give the challenge
for means I want to give the reader kind of
the most up to date academic thinking. But you don't
want to get all fusty and fuddy duddy and academic
about it. So the idea is, yeah, I mean, if
you're going to read one of one of my books,

(01:29:48):
if nothing else, it's I always say, I want I
want it to be an easy read. I want it
to be friendly. And if at the end of it
you look you learn something, okay, that's great. But I'm
not going to tell you what it should be.

Speaker 2 (01:29:59):
Most this academic writing isn't boring because they wanted to
be boring. They're not good enough to make it interesting.
I don't know, but you're like, You're like, it's like
they like they decide, yes, they decide to have it
be unapproachable.

Speaker 4 (01:30:13):
Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a class of
academic that just loves being obscure or difficult to get through.
That's like a point of pride. You know.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
Currant McCarthy wrote a thing about like advice to academic writers.

Speaker 4 (01:30:25):
I didn't know that, but I would. I would go
pick it up. Within twenty minutes of leaving.

Speaker 7 (01:30:31):
I got to ask you one question before we finish up.
Since it's a Texas book and we were talking about
a lot of the bad guys. Did the Texas Rangers
like did they did they earn their reputation as like
someone these guys didn't want to cross.

Speaker 6 (01:30:46):
They have a baseball team.

Speaker 4 (01:30:48):
Texas Rangers existed, they were They existed like three or
four different times during the nineteen hundred, during the eighteen
hundreds and Texas. The chaos in Texas got so bad
after the war that they were reintroduced. And I want
to say eighteen seventy four, and my judgment is, rarely
in American history have we set a more effective introduction

(01:31:10):
of law enforcement entity than the Texas Rangers. When they
came into being, the state was overrun by random bad guys,
a lot of feuds around cattle, just a lot of
violence and that stuff. That stuff just pretty much ends
in four or five years. And I think that, as
much as anything, is a moment where all the frontier

(01:31:33):
begins to realize, hey, we don't have to live with
this level of chaos, this level of criminal Now they
are violence. And you know, Texas was not a perfect
place thereafter, But I think that the worst of the
chaos following the war began to abb with the introduction
of the Rangers. They were the real deal.

Speaker 2 (01:31:50):
He's got There's a quote there from you where he
says something like the Texas Rangers set out to clean
up some town, and then Brian writes, and boy did they?

Speaker 3 (01:32:05):
Yeah, all right, everybody the gunfighters. How Texas Made the
West Wild? By Brian Burrow. Holy smokes, it's a good book.

Speaker 4 (01:32:14):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:32:15):
I've been reading on my phone, but I'm gonna switch
over key signs for me.

Speaker 3 (01:32:19):
Your watch, phill cover this.

Speaker 4 (01:32:22):
We've got it.

Speaker 3 (01:32:24):
Let's do a little lesson.

Speaker 4 (01:32:25):
It's okay to use or somebody got signed.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
I've got it.

Speaker 4 (01:32:28):
I've got a right here. That's what I need.

Speaker 2 (01:32:31):
This is the page you're supposed to sign if you
signed the wrong They used to call this page.

Speaker 3 (01:32:36):
There's one page that they used to call the bastard page.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):
You ever hear this book publishing, there's a page that
doesn't have the publisher and it would call it the
bastard page. Or maybe I'm mixed up. That doesn't have
the author. Like see how here there's a title, but
maybe this is the bastard page. It's a fatherless, bless book.

Speaker 3 (01:32:56):
But then you get to this page title author, publisher, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:33:05):
So sign that page for me, say to the to
my favorite man.

Speaker 5 (01:33:16):
It's the best gun fighter.

Speaker 4 (01:33:17):
I know.

Speaker 3 (01:33:20):
He's going with my favorite man.

Speaker 6 (01:33:22):
Practice practice your border roll.

Speaker 4 (01:33:27):
We should do some kind of video thing where you
practice the moves.

Speaker 3 (01:33:30):
No, well yeah, with one of those five pound pistols.
Up my break, my fingers. Thanks man, thanks for coming
on my pleasure. I hope people check out the book.
I think they'll get a real kick out of it.
Thanks again.