September 15, 2025 • 50 mins
We’ve heard from my buddy Bryan Burrough before for one of his Audible books based on a true crime story. His new book is very different. It’s called The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. Enough said.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You know, many of them, I have to say, are
given that their reason for fame is killing other people.
Are not exactly you know, people that you want babysitting
your thirteen year olds, you probably not want to have
them over to the barbecue.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. We've heard from my buddy
Brian Burrow before for one of his audible books based
(01:14):
on a true crime story. His new book is very different.
It's called The Gunfighters, How Texas Made the Wild West.
I remember when you were saying to me, I'm gonna
write this book with two other authors, which already I
was like, whoa, Okay, I.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Don't know that's gonna work out.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
But then on top of that, you know, you said
with Forget the Alamo, this is just gonna be a
Father's Day coffee table book and that's it. Which it
turned into a huge thing because it was myth busting,
which is not dissimilar to what you did in this
latest book.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Everybody wants to say the latest book is myth busting.
I think it's more myth confirmation. But that's just me. Okay, Yeah,
Forget the Alamo was a strange one, you notice, just
to go off and write a book with two pals,
and it was supposed to be kind of something we
did in our spare time, kind of a fun, you know,
essay length you know, new look at the Birth of Texas,
(02:12):
which hereabouts is sacrosanct. And it obviously became a type
of book that kind of took over our lives for
a couple of years, and we put it out to
very nice notice. And then you may remember our big
publicity event was canceled by the Lieutenant Governor at the
State History Museum, and the controversy over that catapulted us
(02:34):
into the New York Times Top ten, So we got
very lucky there. You know, that was a kind of
a one off, interesting book for me. But Gunfighters just
kind of returning to as I can hear you say,
my brand meaning my books.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I think it does. So let's get started with that story.
You know, where do you begun? Because there's a lot
of ground to cover with what you're specifically talking about.
Did you pick a decade or an era to tackle this?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
What was the initial pitch?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
The initial pitch failed. This was twenty years ago. In
two thousand and four. I wrote a book called Public
Enemies that I think most people that they're aware of
it may remember it as a pretty decent Johnny Depp
Christian Bale movie in two thousand and nine or ten.
That book looked at depression, areat bank rubbers like baby
Face Nelson and John Dillinger and told all their story
(03:24):
as part of a single narrative. And when I got done,
the book was the success. And when I got done,
if you've already gone back one hundred some odd years
to look at the depression, the natural place for me
to go was to the one place in American history
before that, where people had gotten famous for being criminals
and for shooting people, and that was the Old West.
(03:46):
And I thought that the broadest possible way I could
do that would be to look at gunfighters as opposed
to outlaws or you know, some type of gunfighter. So
I went to my luckily I've had the same editor
now for twenty six and said, hey, this is what
I'm going to do next. He's like, yeah, I'm not
feeling it. And the problem was up until that point was,
(04:07):
you know, if you look at the realm of Old
West gunfighters, there is no single story. There's just a
bunch of guys with different careers, many of them are unrelated.
And he you know, books that had been written about
gunfighters back in the day were typically seventeen chapters about
seventeen gunfighters. And I can't do an episodic book, in
part because I mean, just to be honest, you're just
(04:29):
not going to get paid what I want to be
paid for that type of book. You need to find
a fresh way to tell this whole story of all
these gunfighters as one. Well, that seemed impossible, and in
the end I went off to do something else, and
it took me twelve years to stumble upon or to
work upon a theme that would allow me to tell
the story of this era as a single narrative.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So how did you do that? When as a writer,
where do you start? Do you pick? Well, like I'll
tell you.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
For American Sherlock, which I was trying to cover, you know,
a ten year p period with one forensic investigator with
a bunch of crimes. I told the archivist because we
had a huge file, just a huge collection, and I said,
pick the nine most violent, thickest files because that would
have the most information for me.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
So how do you narrow it down? Or am I
being naive? And there aren't that many gunfighters out there
in history?
Speaker 2 (05:22):
No, there's hundreds. But yeah, we faced much the same situation.
You knew the subject, which was that guy, and and
so your problem was, well, how do I make it
into something that's a page turner as opposed to just
another biography and every twenty five pages is the new case.
And you succeeded. For me, it was a much bigger problem.
(05:44):
And that is all I knew was I had a subject, right,
but how do you make that into a single story?
First thing I did was I thought what are these
people have in common? The one thing they all have
in common, other than the fact that they got famous
for killing people, is the time period all of them
rose and fell, basically between eighteen sixty five and nineteen
oh one. Eighteen sixty five being the moment of the
(06:06):
first nationally recognized Old West style gunfight involving while Bill
Hiccock until nineteen oh one, when Butch and Sundance famously
got on the freighter that took them away from the
United States to South America, and everybody that I wanted
to write about, from John Wesley Harden to Billy the Kid,
to Why They're to you know, a dozen or more
(06:27):
guys you've never heard of Rosenfeld during that period. So
then the question became, Okay, now I'm going and I
named it the gunfighter era, and that sounded so important,
and it sounded like, Okay, now I've got a time period.
I'm going to tell the story of that time period.
So that next question naturally became, well, where did this
behavior come from? These people seemingly came out of nowhere.
(06:48):
We had no famous gunfighters before them. Where did this
whole phenomena come from? Well, revolvers which is what gunfighters
mostly use, had only been popularized in eighteen forty four years,
and not surprising that nobody got particularly famous in that
period up to the war. But I just felt sure
(07:08):
that the behavior had to come from someplace. And frankly,
when you look at American history, there's only one group
of people before the Old West who got famous for
shooting each other, and that was duellists, people who engaged
in duels, which was a phenomenon that was prominent between
the seventeen eighties and roughly the eighteen forties, and it famously,
(07:31):
you know, was most famous in the South. So I
began doing research on duellists in the Antebellum South and
realized I was onto something not so much in the
structure of things, because duels did not last until the
Old West. They were mostly gone by the eighteen fifties,
but in the reasons behind the duel, the reasons that
(07:55):
men got so mad at each other they had shoot
each other. And I found the roots of that in
what they call the old Southern honor system, the way
that Southerners kept score on themselves by kind of an
honor code, which basically, you know, said that you had
to be honest and fair. But if if your honor
(08:17):
was impugned, if I said, you know your ugly, your
wife is ugly, your kid is ugly, you had the
opportunity and in most cases, the obligation to respond with violence,
even deadly violence. And that seemed to be an awful
lot of what propelled the violence in the Old West.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
So you have this time period down, so you're getting closer,
but you still have how many really or is it
a couple of hundred that you're considering?
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And how do you narrow it down?
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Let's say there's one hundred. Yeah. Once I determined that
Antebellum duelists and behavior male behaviors in the Animelum South
more important to something that happened twenty years later on
the frontier, the question becomes, how could that possibly be
pal You know, how does such behaviors move because they
didn't move into the North. What I came up with
(09:08):
that was the crucial fulcrim in all this, and that
ultimately informed the university of gunfighters that I would look
at was Texas that a lot of the behavior, in fact,
all the behaviors that I saw in the Annebellum South
gravitated to Texas, which was every inch a southern state,
you know, forty percent of its early settlers just from
(09:28):
Alabama and Tennessee. And what you saw and what kind
of supercharged this phenomena, what made it explosive was the
decade after the Civil War in Texas, which underwent a
spasm of civilian on civilian violence that some academics still
say was the single most violent period in American history.
(09:51):
And that violence came in two waves, the first wave
basically being a rebellion that the state and many of
its inhabitants all you know, rebelled against the occupation by
Union soldiers, especially those of color. And so for about
five years there, much of Texas, especially North and East Texas,
was engulfed in a series of the worst feuds in
(10:12):
American history, just impossibly violent stuff. And around eighteen seventy
a second wave of violence entirely unrelated developed around the
state's dominant industry, which was open range cattle ranching. And
if you know anything about cattle ranching, back in the
days when there were no fences, when there was no
(10:32):
barbed wire, the main thing that cattlemen were concerned with
was cattle. Theft, cattle rustling, and as that business grew
from its origins in South Texas below San Antonio up
into Central Texas where people didn't know not to mess
with cattleman, it became spectacularly violent, also breaking out in
(10:54):
a series of feuds in and around Austin, such that
you know, a lot of it was you know, seven
bodies on a tree, lamb, But a lot of it
was just this new cattle industry sense of justice. Some
people call it the Code of the West, where they
basically if you were suspected of stealing a cow, you
were dispatched with a single bullet, far from a courtroom.
(11:16):
And this type of behavior perhaps the most the most violent,
Central Texas being the most violent, among the most violent
places that we've seen in the lower forty eight, you know,
could have been chalked off of kind of interesting Texas history,
except the violence I argue in the book didn't stay there.
As the Texas cattle business erupted and spread across the
(11:39):
frontier in the mid seventies, it spread everywhere, first to Kansas,
then into New Mexico and Arizona. As Texas cattleman and
Texans all but colonized those territories we forget that, you know,
to the extent that cattle and cattle ranching spread all
across the old Western frontier, it all came from Texas,
(11:59):
I mean of it. We had all the cows, and
we certainly had all the cowboys. So that's what I argue,
you know, spread an awful lot of the extra traditional
violence was you know, a group of Texans several thousand
strong that fanned out across the West. Many were called cowboys,
but other were called outlaws and all sorts of things.
(12:21):
But I'm telling you, Kate, if you go back and
you look at kind of the most famous gunfights of
the Old West, let's say four hundred of them, I'm
telling you easily half of them, if not sixty percent,
featured to Texan, not just the ones in Texas, but everywhere.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Well, what do we start with.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
You've mentioned some names that sound like real touchstones in
this history, and then you know when we start with
one and then tell me how you're making this connective
tissue to make this kind of one big narrative rather than,
like you said, chapter to chapter.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So who do you start with.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
The first place that you started Texas? And what happened
in Texas during that spasm of violence. But if you're
going to then tackle the rest of the Old West,
as you have to, you have to talk about the
spread of that in the first place where this type
of new hyper violent ethos that I argue was born
in Texas, The first place where it really hit the
(13:18):
rest of the world was in Kansas, going up what
some people may remember dimly from high school, the Chisholm
Trail and a bunch of cattle trails. Texas had to
move their cattle north because they did not have at
the time railroads that were connected to the North. If
they wanted to sell their cattle to the new slaughterhouses
in Chicago and Omaha and New York, they had to
(13:39):
get them up to the railheads in Kansas. So that
began in like eighteen sixty eight, eighteen sixty nine, and
there were five cattle towns in Kansas, beginning with Abilene
famously in eighteen seventy one and ending with Dodge City
in the late eighteen seventies, and collectively these five cattle
towns became kind of the birth of the gunfighter era.
(14:00):
That really the first place where journalists, especially northern journals,
were just stunned at who are these Texans and why
are they coming up here and causing all their trouble
and getting into all these gunfights. You know, those five towns,
I argue, are kind of the Madison Square Garden of
the gunfighter era. That there really where the whole phenomena started.
They're really were the first marquee gunfights began.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I mean, just in its simplest form, what would start these?
Is it over cattle? Or is it over insults? Or
is it over women? Or are they guns for hire?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
It's everything that men could get angry about. Oh gosh,
it's as bad as you envision a saloon full of
fraternity guys. Now you know, do that times twenty five.
A lot of the Texans, who were already climatized to
awful lot of violence went north with a chip on
their shoulder about Yankees and Yankee sheriffs. But a gunfight,
(14:55):
and let's, by the way, let's define our terms a
gunfight as it's used by those write about gunfighters is
we're talking specifically about extra judicial violence among civilians. So
nothing involving Native Americans, nothing involving soldiers. This has to
be private citizens on their own as it were, the
really the first theater of all this begins in Abilene
(15:20):
in eighteen seventy one. That these are the special conditions
that really got the rest of the country to go
what And you know, it's Abiliene in eighteen seventy one
that is uniformly preserved as kind of the first great theater.
And there's two specific reasons for one happened. The reason
it happened is because in eighteen seventy one, the marshall
of Abilene, Kansas was someone named wild Bill Hiccock, who
(15:42):
we mentioned a moment ago. While Bill Hiccock was made
famous by a single magazine article in eighteen sixty seven
in Harper's Weekly that wrote about that first gunfight that
I talked about in Springfilm, Missouri in eighteen sixty five,
and further went and positive that wild Bill Hiccock had
killed eave over one hundred white men over the course
of his career as a gunfighter. Didn't use the word.
(16:04):
The word didn't come into wide use until after eighteen
seventy four. The exact number appears not to be over
one hundred, but the exact number would seem to be two.
The magazine writer in the magazine article were wildly fanciful,
but overnight it created this notion of people running around
what people were realizing is the old West Frontier shooting people.
(16:28):
In other words, wild Kikcock made it a thing. So
when he shows up as a marshal of his first
major town in eighteen seventy one and starts getting into
gunfighters with Texans, Kansas newspapers first and then Northern newspapers
began to take notice. And the gunfighter who most personifies
(16:49):
this kind of homicidal, incredibly hyper sensitive, hyper violent young
cowboy is a young man named John Wesley Harden. And
it's the face off between Hickock and Harden in Abilene
in eighteen seventy one that really create the foundation of
this whole gunfighter era.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Now you say the face offs, you can survive one
of these, I mean, wouldn't you think one of these
guys would have been killed instead of being able to
see each other multiple times like this?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
You would have thought. We know that Harden was in
Kansas on a cattle drive for about three and a
half four months. The most conservative, I would say, estimate
of the number of people he killed in those four
months would appear to be eight. He killed them in
a number of ways, including a big battle out in
the middle of the prairie with a bunch of Mexican
(17:39):
VAK heroes, and he appeared to have killed four or
five there, and then famously at the end. In fact,
it was the most famous shooting he was involved with,
killed another Texas cattleman through the wall of a hotel
at four in the morning. And the story that's always
gone down about that, which is nobody has ever believed,
is that he did it for snoring. And Kate, I'm sorry,
if you shoot somebody through a hotel room walle at
(18:01):
four in the morning, it's because they were making racket
or they disted you or something. And so I actually
kind of believe snoring. But Harden was kind of the
archetypal not only gunfighter of his ear because he wandered
around just getting into all these gunfighters. I mean, this
is a young man who killed between twenty six and
forty two people by the time he was twenty one,
(18:23):
and he killed most of them before he was eighteen,
when he made a ruckus in a bowling alley. Yes,
they had bowling alleys on the frontier there in Abilene
in June. Hickock, who knew he was in town and
knew that he was wanted by the law for some
killings in Texas, didn't do much about it. Let him
wear his guns. But when he started getting into a
ruckus in this bowling alley, he did come in, drew
(18:46):
a gun and said he called him Little Arkansas. That
was his nickname that summer for obscure reasons. And he
demanded Harden's gun. And Harden had two, and he pulled
them and he handed them toward Hiccock butt first, and
then as Hiccock went to take them, spun them in
a maneuver called the road agent's spin, so that the
(19:07):
barrels were now pointed directly at Hickock's chest, at which
Hiccock had to basically put up his hands and say
you got me, at which point Harden yelled to his buddies,
nobody draw. You know, if anybody's gonna shoot, I'm gonna
do it. And what you see here is John Wesley.
Harden was a young man about nineteen years old. He
was among the ultimate hotheads of American history. Hickock was older, quieter, smarter,
(19:32):
and he basically said, hey, dude, chill, we don't need
to be doing this. Let's just go talk it Let's
go talk it off, and you get this. Since Harden
was so startled, he didn't know how to escalate, and
so he did. And so it became one of the
great non gunfights of Old West history because here were
if you have a top five, a big five I
(19:55):
sometimes call them of Old West gunfighters. Here were two
of them, and yet they both walked away alive.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Did they talk or was it just like see you later,
just you stay in your corner, Eill, stay in mine.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
It was that it was see you later. I mean,
we already know that Hickock was treating Harden with kid gloves.
You were not supposed to as in most Old West towns,
you were not supposed to wear your guns. There was
no open carry. Generally speaking, you were supposed to check them.
We believe from what from reading between the lines that though,
(20:28):
that even in places like Tombstone which had such raw laws,
they were seldom enforced until a sheriff or marshall thought
that somebody was getting in trouble. And so for the
rest of that summer, Hickock continued to allow Harden to
wear his guns. And he ended up and let me
see one, two, three more shooting scrapes, including the gentleman
(20:50):
that he shot, I believe for snoring.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Now I have just sort of fundamental questions of being
a gunfighter. How do you recruit? Are you paying these people?
Are you looting things? I mean, what is the motivation
for a young man? And I don't want to hear
the answer. Young men have pisson vinegar and are happy
to shoot other people for free?
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Or is that it?
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Well, there were many types of gunfighters, so, I mean,
a gunfighter could be a cattleman. He could be an outlaw,
he could be a lawman. He could be a feudest,
he could be that rarest a gun for hire. So
there are a lot of reasons why people shot each
other in the Old West. I've noticed in going through
all the old stuff that the dumbest reasons seem to
(21:35):
occur in the first half of this forty year period,
this thirty five year period, in other words, before the
West grows up, before law enforcement becomes more prevalent, a
period that really begins in the mid seventies with the
rise of the Texas Rangers. At people like whyat Earth
who are professional. You saw even more of kind of
knuckleheaded gun violence. One of the ones at Abilene, Harden
(21:58):
bumped into a guy who looked around him and cursed
him as a Texan, and the guy and Harden said
something back. The guy pulled his gun. He shot and missed,
Hardened fired and shot this guy in the face and
then ended up with teeth all over the sidewalk. That's
the type of idiocy that you see a lot before.
You see more widespread law enforcement in the latter half
(22:20):
of this period, from like eighteen eighty to nineteen hundred.
I note that more of the gunfights tend to be
about something as opposed to being about nothing, typically about resources,
whether about land or livestock, and you know, on a
frontier that had fewer and fewer resources to share. So
you know, I think that the things that drove a
(22:42):
lot of these gunfights were all over the map. But
the most common thing you see is, you know, young
men insulted in some way. Certainly, if you go back
and read the minute by minute accounts of the violence
that took place in Tombstone in the most famous gunfight
of them all, the gunfight beside the Okay corn Well,
you can see that insult to a man's honor explains
(23:06):
ninety nine percent of it. And I think to the
extent that Texans brought a lot of that into the
Old West. It's almost not surprising that their presence in
so many of the famous gunfights. It just it surprised
me so much when I realized I was going to
try to argue it in a book, because you know,
(23:26):
you feel like you're going on a limb when you
start saying crazy stuff like this, and I think I
defended it. I think I've made the case.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I can make the case now.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
One of the reviews that I read about the book was,
which I found to be true, is you know, one
minute you've got a villain. In the next minute that
same gunfighter as a you know, our hero or a victim.
Did you have to I mean that must have been
actually nice to have somebody who is undefined and you
can kind of change things around depending on what role
(23:55):
they're playing.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Did that make it harder or easier for you?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Oh? No, it makes that because look, while I can
generalize about the types of behaviors that led to gunfights,
the individual gunfighters themselves are so different and so I mean,
each has his own fascinating story. There's no stereotypical gunfighter,
at least of of let's say, the Big twenty five.
Those that lasted, you know, many of them, I have
(24:21):
to say, are given that their reason for fame is
killing other people, are not exactly you know, people that
you want babysitting your thirteen year olds, you probably not
want to have them over to the barbecue. And so
when you find people like White Herb, who, to my mind,
is all that was right and good about the law
(24:41):
in those days until famously he decided to go outside
the law to find his own justice when his brothers
were attacked at Tombstone. You know, that's a great American story,
and he in some ways is kind of the moral
center of this universe because around him, you know, orbit
an awful lot of people like John Way Lesley Harden.
Who are I mean John Wesley Harden. There's an awful
(25:03):
lot of Texans who still kind of love his legend.
I'm sorry, the guy's a maniac. He wasn't a serial killer,
but he was a serial killer. If you know, there
were years where he shot or killed you know, one
person every month of the year, there's so many individuals
that I was fascinated with. One of the next tier gunfighters,
(25:25):
whose name will probably not ring a bell for a
lot of people, was a gambler, a Texas gambler named
Ben Thompson, who later became famous as the marshall in
the city where you and I are sitting, Austin, Texas.
And he had a particularly incredible flame out of drinking
too much, attacking people on trains, and picking fights. It
(25:47):
was just nuts. He had been a gentleman until that point,
and I wonder aloud in the book if some of
his behavior could be explained by PTSD, because like a
lot of these gentlemen, he had some tough times in
the war. However, as much historians have just started to
get into PTSD after the Civil War, and it's it's
(26:11):
kind of an obvious thing to speculate about. We don't
we don't have a lot of hard evidence that we
can put that on. The one thing where you can
say that the West that the war clearly had an
influence was in the one point three million sight arms
that the federal government gave away or auctioned off in
eighteen sixty five and eighteen sixty six. I mean, you
can actually go back and find memoirs going, well, nobody's
(26:33):
fighting with their fists anymore. You know, these things are
much deadly and much faster than they ever used to be.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
If we're going through wild Bill and John Wesley Harden
in their relationship, do you go to the very end
of it and kind of explain what happens to these
guys or are they a through line that go throughout
your book?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
There are through lines Hardened, I think I tell history
in three places, because he does have a long career
wider of course, rose in Kansas and ultimately ends in Arizona,
so he is also through line. But hiccock, you're right,
ends up because the rest of his career is not
nearly as interesting as it's the first five or six years,
I go ahead and wrap him up right there. So
(27:14):
the story as I tell it proceeds chronologically from Kansas.
And then once Kansas begins to calm, as Texans and
Texas cattleman move on to other states, a lot of
the people who had been involved in gun violence in
Kansas begin to There is a mass movement of them
(27:35):
into New Mexico and Arizona, which is where you know,
you know, both of these territories are all but colonized
by Texas cattleman, and so that type of behavior that
we saw most prevalent in Kansas, it continues to spread
across New Mexico and Arizona into the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
It was interesting I was doing on my other show.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
We were doing a story about brothers who were serial
ki Espinoza's were very famous. We were talking about the
racial dynamics of changing boundaries, state boundaries, and it was,
you know, they were in the eighteen hundreds where you
had in New Mexico all of these you know, people
from Mexico who were settled in the white people around
(28:18):
them were relatively supportive. They had their villages together, and
then the United States changes the boundary and they become Colorado,
and it's a completely different dynamic where you know, they
are disenfranchised and you have like these gold diggers coming
in who are white, and it's just it's a really
interesting just by changing this boundary and the state government,
(28:38):
it really it really changed the dynamic of the racial
tension between So I'm picturing like, as the United States
moves further to the west, the gunfighters just sort of
follow behind and take advantage of whatever is happening.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
That's exactly what happened, and in this case it was
Texas cattleman moving into New Mexico. When you look at
the first great moments of extra judicial to violence in
New Mexico killings of five and seven and nine people,
it's all involving these incoming Texas cattlemen and you're right
on the other side, all too oftener latinos. That was
(29:13):
the backdrop on which any number of kind of Texas
families and groups moved in and experienced that. And it's
the backdrop very much of Billy the Kid, whose career
is built around two stages. One is a fight for
control of New Mexico's largest county, Lincoln County, and that's
all about who's going to control the legitimate and the
(29:35):
illegitimate business of cattle. And then after he was on
the losing side of that feud, Billy the Kid goes
out to become an outlaw, which is a high falutin
word for what he actually was, which was a cattle
wrestler stealing cattle out of the Texas Panhandle and selling
them across New Mexico and it's only then as a
cattle thief, a thief of Texas cattle, that Billy the
(29:57):
Kid became famous. His the narrative is thronged with Texans,
including he, his right hand man, and all three of
the guys who ultimately brought him in, including Pat Garrett,
had all come out of Texas. So I mean New Mexico.
Everything you read about in New Mexico in the eighteen
seventies and eighties, in terms of extra judicial violence, it
has a very strong Texas dynamic.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Now when we talk about, you know, the violence is
this generally men versus men. Are women ever drawn into
this in any way as collateral damage?
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Almost never? I get That's the one story I've gotten
off after ever appearance. Was any such thing as a
female gunfighter? Not really. The closest you could probably come
is an Oklahoma horse thief named Bell Star. But no,
women with guns pretty much was not a thing.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Were they collateral damage at any point?
Speaker 2 (30:49):
You know, I'm trying to think of one where I
could say a woman was killed. Certainly there were a
lot of women, especially women of color, killed during the
feuds in Texas. But when you look at kind of
the classic old West stuff. The one dead woman that
I can remember was in Dodge City, where a drunken,
a rich drunken Texas cowboy got in a fight with
(31:12):
the mayor of Dodge City, and so at two thirty
one morning, he appeared outside the guy's house and opened
fire shot into the bedroom. Turn out, the mayor wasn't
at home, but two show girls from downtown were, and
one of them ended up dead. And that ended up
being one of wide Eerp's storied manhunts to bring this
guy in.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
So I am not an expert on gunfights. I have
not dealt very much into Texas history in relative to
true crime. Maybe because I'm here and I'm supposed I
feel like I'm surrounded by Texas history, and I want
to branch out the one name besides of course, Billy
the kid that I really do recognize as Jesse James.
So does Jesse James show up in this book?
Speaker 2 (31:51):
He must, yes, And this is my unhappy voice, Oh no,
because I didn't want to write about Jesse James. Jesse James,
if you know any thing about him, you know he
was not an Old West gunfighter. He was a Midwestern
bank and train robber. He never committed a single crime,
much less kill de man. So far as we know
west of the Missouri Kansas line. When he went into hiding,
(32:14):
he didn't go hide in some canyon or you know, mesa.
He went to a horse farm in Tennessee. But I
end up telling Jesse James story because I kind of
feel like that's a technicality because his career is at
least gunfighter adjacent and candidly because readers are expecting it.
Like if you pick up a book that purports to
(32:35):
be the definitive new History of Gunfighters and it's Jesse
James is in it. I can hear phone calls, I
can hear you know, guy's going Jimmy. Jesse James isn't
even in this book. How reputable can this guy Burrow be?
So it's in there. But kind of, let's just say
I was deeply ambivalent about Jesse James, although he does
(32:56):
have a great he does have a great narrative, and
I do end up at the end kind of saying,
you know, he did kill five or six people, and
not a single one of them was in anything like
a gunfight. Most of them were killed by placing his
gun against their head because they hadn't done what he
wanted during a robbery. I mean, you cannot call Jesse
(33:16):
James a gunfighter. He was just a.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Murderer, slash bank robber, slash train robber and all of that.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yes, all right, So we know that Texas was hell
on wheels for gunfighters, and it sounded like a really
dangerous place.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
So do we have these gunfighters.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
I know we'd have him traveling, but there are a
lot of famous incidents.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
It sounds like outside of Texas. Do you have a
couple of those in those stories?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Well, I mean Texas were so prevalent on the rest
of the frontier in those years. Just to pick one example,
Whyder did battle against what was probably the Old West's
largest single outlaw gang there in southeast Arizona around Tombstone
and above the border, that gang was known as the Cowboys,
(34:04):
But below the border, where they did much of their
theft from Mexican ranchers, they were known as the Tehanos.
Because so many of them were from Texas. The type
of story that you get about these kind of roaming
Texans or as part of this Texas diaspora, some of
them are so batshit crazy. I will give you my
favorite one, which is it happened in October eighteen eighty
(34:29):
four in what's today the town of Reserve, New Mexico,
over on the Arizona border, and it was at it's
at altitude, it's pretty high up. I've been there. It's
pretty small these days. Latinos had moved in in the
eighteen sixties and had moved into the area. And then
after then Texas cattleman came in and least all the
land outside the towns for cattle, and they were rambunctious.
(34:49):
And there was a kid in one of those towns
named El Fago Baca Baca, and he fancied himself a
law and order advocate. He ordered a a badge from
a mail order company. And one night he saw one
of these Texas cowboys riding around in the streets of
the town, firing his gun in the air, and he
(35:11):
said to somebody, why is it. Anybody do anything about it?
And the elderly Mexican gentleman said, because we're too scared
of the Texans. They'll they'll kill somebody. And El fag
Obaco famously said, well, I'll show him that one. There's
at least one Mexican in this town that's not scared
of him. So he went up to the cowboy and
put his gun in his ear and put him under arrest.
The jail was closed, so he took him to a
(35:33):
house and held him overnight. In the middle of the night,
several of his Texas friends show up and demand that
they turned the Texas Cowboy over. El Fay go Obaco
walks out and he says, I won't be doing that
at the but I'll give you till the account of three,
and then I'm opening fire. And so he yells, and
there's four cowboys and he yells one, and they all
kind of look each other, like really and after and
(35:54):
then he goes two and they're like he wouldn't really,
And at three he opened fire. He kills one of
them's another one through the knee. The next morning he
takes his cowboy in to the Justice of the Peace,
where the cowboys find all of five dollars, at which
point El Fa go Obaca comes out of the courthouse
and there in the town square are eighty eight zero
(36:17):
angry Texas cowboys. We know this from court testimony. Somebody
began yelling unfortunate ethnic names. As you can imagine El
Fa go Oobaco lights out down a lane and at
the edge of town. It's a tiny town. He spies
a lonely little adobe hut and he goes up and
he yells, vamos to the lady and the two kids
that are in there. You've got to get out. They'll
(36:37):
kill you. He runs in. The Texans are right after him.
They bang on the door and yell for him to
come out, and he responds with a gunshot, killing another one,
at which point the eighty cowboys surround this little adobe hut.
And this was on the morning of October tenth, eighteen
eighty four, around ten am. They open fire. It's like
(36:58):
Bonnie and Clyde, like the last shot bound Clyde. Just
finally after following they shoot it. They shoot this house
full of holds for five minutes and then they stop
and El fay go Obaca opens fire at them again
and he kills another one, so they fire again and
fire again. Five more minutes of this and he's still alive.
It's still shooting. This goes on until six thirty at night,
(37:19):
eight and a half hours. The kid somehow survives. The
next morning they show up to begin firing again, and
they smell the odor of coffee and bacon. He's not
only still alive, but he's making he's making breakfast. So
they open fire again for another eight hours, and one
more Texan dies and El fay Obaca. When the law
(37:40):
finally shows up with some of his pals at the
end of the day to say, okay, enough of this.
It's been going on for thirty eight six hours, you know,
he comes out in his underwear, covered with dust, unhit,
and it's only then does everybody realize that he survived
because the floor of the adobe was eighteen inches below
ground and he survived. He survived, was declared innocent at
(38:01):
two different murder trials, one of which the front door
was offered his evidence, and there was something like four
hundred and twenty bullet holes in the front door. This
guy went on to a long career. He killed four Texans.
He lived Kate until nineteen forty five, which is just
amazing to me that a gun some famous gunfighter at
least in New Mexico lived, you know, and died just
(38:22):
within days after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
I was wondering if there was a false floor or
something like that. I was just thinking, what, how was
he able to do? That's amazing?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
So when I tell the story, I've been holding all
false floor till the end because I feel like if
I give it away too soon, the story doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
What about the ending of all this is that Butch Cassidy.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yep, it is, you know, the ear I end the
era And this is necessarily arbitrary, but it feels right
ending it when the last two Marquee outlaws, Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid, you know, basically say there's no
way to be an outlaw anymore. So we're going to
South America. And you know, Castidy somewhat like Jesse Jesse James.
You can't really call him a gunfighter. He was just
(39:04):
a bank robber who shot at people when they shot
at him. And there's no record that he ever killed
anyone to begin with. But again, at that point, he
clearly belongs in this book. That group does. But yeah,
the sunset of all of this is the eighteen nineties,
and that's narratively dominated by several different disparate stories. Butch
(39:24):
Castiy and the Sundance Kid and then the story of
the Dalton gang in Oklahoma, which is another you know,
it's kind of the story of the smartest outlaw gang
in the Old West, that would be Butch Casty, and
the stupidest, which would be the Daltons. Dultons were just
not terribly smart. They were ultimately well, in fact, the
deadliest robbery, and keep in mind, robberies aren't supposed to
(39:48):
be deadly at all when they go, well, they aren't.
Was the end of the Daltons, which in some ways
is kind of the end of the Great Era of gunfights.
It's when they famously, in a bid to be more
famous than Jesse James, who they worshiped. This was what
twenty five years, fifteen years after Jesse Jame was killed,
they went to rob two banks simultaneously in their hometown
(40:13):
in Coffeeville, Kansas, right in the Oklahoma border. And the Daltons,
I think there were eight of them that day, three
of whom were the brothers, as well as five random
kind of henchmen, and two of whom were Texans. And they,
you know, of all the things to get killed for,
you know, of all the stupid things to get killed for,
Like I'd never wanted to die by falling in a
(40:35):
vat of molasses or something. Right, You know, nobody wants
to die in a funny way.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Who would say so?
Speaker 2 (40:40):
So the Daltons basically were all killed because of fake
beards and fake mustaches. They thought, because they were known
in their hometown, they put fake beards and mustaches on.
It appears that they weren't made of hair but of paper,
And amazingly some noticed and open fire, and the gang
(41:04):
actually managed to rob the two banks, but so many
people came out and started shooting that they were, you know,
all all but one in it. The youngest ultimately lived,
but all but one were killed there in the streets
that day, most of them in this alley that you
can still visit, Bloody Alley. I don't end the story there,
but it's pretty near the end.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
And I guess bandanas weren't available for some reason.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
I mean, isn't that what everybody used?
Speaker 2 (41:30):
You know, I never did a study on kind of
the prevalence of bandito facial covering. You're leading me to
believe that I wasn't as thorough as I thought I was.
I was at a gathering the other night somebody asked,
what's the deal with bounty hunters, and I was like, wow,
I didn't answer that either. I have some assassin, some
you know, guns for hire, but bounty hunters and bandanas.
(41:52):
I mean, I guess I'll have to do that in
the next book.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, you have a word limit. I'm pretty sure from
your publisher. Maybe not.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
I was. I was worried. I don't know about you.
What's the most number of words you've ever cut from
a book? I've had two on Public Enemies twenty years ago.
I turned it in and the cuts that he ordered
I ultimately tied it up as twenty three percent of
all the words I'd written I ended up cutting. And
when you think about your time, I figured that was
a year and two months of my life. But hey,
(42:20):
it was a much better book shorter. This was the
rare book that I didn't go along. My editor really
candidly loved it as it was.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Okay, so you end with Butch Cassidy Sundan's kid, you know,
and I know that you publishers are a lot of times,
I think are looking for that. How does this resonate
with a today audience? And I think you might be
one of my friends who said, you know, I don't
really care about that. I just want to tell a
really good story and a little bit about history.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
You know, maybe I would be a bigger name author
if I did care, but I don't. I really am
interested in the nineteenth century frontier, you know. I think
there are probably some lessons here that one, you know,
one could draw. But I mean, look, the one thing
that I always say is I don't know about where
you comed in on this, but I always say my primary,
(43:11):
if not exclusive, goal is to entertain my reader. If
he or she ends up at the end learning something,
and god forbid they learn a lesson, the one thing
you can be sure is I will not tell you
what that is. I just I just don't want to
go there. I don't want to be I want to
tell a good story. That is pretty much it well,
and in almost every case, my definition of a good
(43:34):
story is a story, or at least a version of
the story that hasn't been told before. You know, on
this one, if I can't lay a claim to reinventing
the study of the field of gunfighters, I really can't publish.
And it's up to the reader to see whether I've
done that. But I will say, so far this is
me breaking my arm, patting myself on the back. The
(43:56):
reviews have been.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
Generous, well good, and I don't want to make a
big calment on mail fragility, but you seem to be
heading down that road too with this book. I mean
a little bit about how these sort of these these
gunfights still continued, even though they're not duelists continue to
evolve from just men not figuring out how to communicate
(44:17):
or move on or get over whatever is happening. And
I know that we don't need a contemporary pull for this,
but that was the first thing I thought of. I
did a story to Virginia, stories both involving kind of
ego and including women actually trying to get over ego
that ends in death.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
And you know, I.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
Spoke to somebody at William and Mary who was an
expert at that, at the duels and what it means,
and she said, can you imagine if we had that now?
And with everything that happens on Twitter and Instagram and
all of this, you know, there has to be there had.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
To have been some kind of evolution between then and now.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
You know, there must have been. I'm just happy to
say that that felt like another book, yeah, rather than
the one I was writing, but clearly kind of while honor,
you know, still exists in the world, and I don't
think anybody, at least in the West, sees it as
any type of pressing policy challenge. But you're exactly right.
Can you imagine if people today were as touchy as
(45:17):
they were in the Old West and believed that deadly
violence was justified for everything that was said online? I mean,
think about these people only kill How many people would
you even know or meet in eighteen seventy five in
your life? I don't know three hundred people, because you know,
there's no telephone, there's no computer. I mean, you could
interface with three hundred people in Twitter or on Facebook
(45:38):
in a single night. That's and be insulted, you know,
myriad times. I mean, so, yes, one is glad that
there has been some evolution of the human condition in
those terms.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
But I also think with people in that time period,
in the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, they depended so
much on each other. You still somebody's cattle and they
might starve to death their family, might you know, be
sick if you're doing one or two things like what
was it the theft of a pig is what led
to the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
That's one of the legends.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, yeah, So I don't know.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
There's a lot at stake now, obviously with honor, but
then I think there was just so much when you
have someone else outside interference in your family or you know,
in your livelihood or in your identity as being a Texan,
I see it all sort of being built up and exploding.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
That's a great point, and it immediately it makes me
think of one famous gunfight involving a guy named Harvey Logan,
who was Butch Cassidy's kind of right hand man and
the nastiest gunfighter in that group. Harvey Logan got into
his first gunfight, it said, because he had a ranch
there in Montana, and his neighbor borrowed a plow and
(46:52):
returned it bent or broken or something, and they ended
up in a gunfight in the saloon, in which Harvey
I can kill the guy over essentially a bit plow,
and then a bunch of yelling at each other about
whose fault it was.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
I'm sure I've brought this up several times for my
listeners on both shows, but I am a fan of
fear Thy Neighbor, which is a TV series, and it
is insane to me what people will kill each other over.
I mean property lines and dogs going poop on the
wrong side, and I literally this is what occurs, and
it's built up over time, and it's resentment that you
(47:28):
can't really work out because they're not your family, you're
not married to them, and there's a distance, but it
is so important to you for whatever reason that people
just snap in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
So that's also what it reminds me of.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
There's a lot of that in this book.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Fear Thy Neighbor. So if you're a fan of fear
Thy Neighbor listeners, you should pick up this book because
you'll see I mean, you know, aren't you amazed? I
talked to Paul Holes on my other show about when
people say, oh, he would have never killed her over
three phone calls from a random guy. Well, it doesn't
matter what we think, it matters what the guy thinks
who's pulling the trigger. It's all about perspectives. So these
(48:07):
gunfights were worth dying over for whatever reason. And that's
one of the things I think is fascinating about your book.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
You know, we can you can say honor shouldn't matter.
You know that that was silly, But the fact is,
if everybody is living in that same system, as silly
as it may sound, for Wider not to have killed
the guy Tombstone, you know in the middle of that fight.
You know if he had not, if he had walked away,
his societal standing, perhaps even his employment would have fallen precipitously.
(48:39):
I mean, look, there were a lot of these gunfights
where yes, you can say bent plow, this is just ridiculous,
but there's others when you really realize how important honor
was to those people, and how ignoring it or walking
away from it you pay the price. There were reasons
people fired guns at each other over these things because mattered.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(49:32):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis a Morosi Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is
our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark,
Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
(49:53):
and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at
tenfold More and if you know of a historical crime
that could use some attention from the crew at tenfold
more Wicked, email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com.
We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for
Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You know, many of them, I have to say, are
given that their reason for fame is killing other people.
Are not exactly you know, people that you want babysitting
your thirteen year olds, you probably not want to have
them over to the barbecue.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. We've heard from my buddy
Brian Burrow before for one of his audible books based
(01:14):
on a true crime story. His new book is very different.
It's called The Gunfighters, How Texas Made the Wild West.
I remember when you were saying to me, I'm gonna
write this book with two other authors, which already I
was like, whoa, Okay, I.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Don't know that's gonna work out.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
But then on top of that, you know, you said
with Forget the Alamo, this is just gonna be a
Father's Day coffee table book and that's it. Which it
turned into a huge thing because it was myth busting,
which is not dissimilar to what you did in this
latest book.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Everybody wants to say the latest book is myth busting.
I think it's more myth confirmation. But that's just me. Okay, Yeah,
Forget the Alamo was a strange one, you notice, just
to go off and write a book with two pals,
and it was supposed to be kind of something we
did in our spare time, kind of a fun, you know,
essay length you know, new look at the Birth of Texas,
(02:12):
which hereabouts is sacrosanct. And it obviously became a type
of book that kind of took over our lives for
a couple of years, and we put it out to
very nice notice. And then you may remember our big
publicity event was canceled by the Lieutenant Governor at the
State History Museum, and the controversy over that catapulted us
(02:34):
into the New York Times Top ten, So we got
very lucky there. You know, that was a kind of
a one off, interesting book for me. But Gunfighters just
kind of returning to as I can hear you say,
my brand meaning my books.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I think it does. So let's get started with that story.
You know, where do you begun? Because there's a lot
of ground to cover with what you're specifically talking about.
Did you pick a decade or an era to tackle this?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
What was the initial pitch?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
The initial pitch failed. This was twenty years ago. In
two thousand and four. I wrote a book called Public
Enemies that I think most people that they're aware of
it may remember it as a pretty decent Johnny Depp
Christian Bale movie in two thousand and nine or ten.
That book looked at depression, areat bank rubbers like baby
Face Nelson and John Dillinger and told all their story
(03:24):
as part of a single narrative. And when I got done,
the book was the success. And when I got done,
if you've already gone back one hundred some odd years
to look at the depression, the natural place for me
to go was to the one place in American history
before that, where people had gotten famous for being criminals
and for shooting people, and that was the Old West.
(03:46):
And I thought that the broadest possible way I could
do that would be to look at gunfighters as opposed
to outlaws or you know, some type of gunfighter. So
I went to my luckily I've had the same editor
now for twenty six and said, hey, this is what
I'm going to do next. He's like, yeah, I'm not
feeling it. And the problem was up until that point was,
(04:07):
you know, if you look at the realm of Old
West gunfighters, there is no single story. There's just a
bunch of guys with different careers, many of them are unrelated.
And he you know, books that had been written about
gunfighters back in the day were typically seventeen chapters about
seventeen gunfighters. And I can't do an episodic book, in
part because I mean, just to be honest, you're just
(04:29):
not going to get paid what I want to be
paid for that type of book. You need to find
a fresh way to tell this whole story of all
these gunfighters as one. Well, that seemed impossible, and in
the end I went off to do something else, and
it took me twelve years to stumble upon or to
work upon a theme that would allow me to tell
the story of this era as a single narrative.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So how did you do that? When as a writer,
where do you start? Do you pick? Well, like I'll
tell you.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
For American Sherlock, which I was trying to cover, you know,
a ten year p period with one forensic investigator with
a bunch of crimes. I told the archivist because we
had a huge file, just a huge collection, and I said,
pick the nine most violent, thickest files because that would
have the most information for me.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
So how do you narrow it down? Or am I
being naive? And there aren't that many gunfighters out there
in history?
Speaker 2 (05:22):
No, there's hundreds. But yeah, we faced much the same situation.
You knew the subject, which was that guy, and and
so your problem was, well, how do I make it
into something that's a page turner as opposed to just
another biography and every twenty five pages is the new case.
And you succeeded. For me, it was a much bigger problem.
(05:44):
And that is all I knew was I had a subject, right,
but how do you make that into a single story?
First thing I did was I thought what are these
people have in common? The one thing they all have
in common, other than the fact that they got famous
for killing people, is the time period all of them
rose and fell, basically between eighteen sixty five and nineteen
oh one. Eighteen sixty five being the moment of the
(06:06):
first nationally recognized Old West style gunfight involving while Bill
Hiccock until nineteen oh one, when Butch and Sundance famously
got on the freighter that took them away from the
United States to South America, and everybody that I wanted
to write about, from John Wesley Harden to Billy the Kid,
to Why They're to you know, a dozen or more
(06:27):
guys you've never heard of Rosenfeld during that period. So
then the question became, Okay, now I'm going and I
named it the gunfighter era, and that sounded so important,
and it sounded like, Okay, now I've got a time period.
I'm going to tell the story of that time period.
So that next question naturally became, well, where did this
behavior come from? These people seemingly came out of nowhere.
(06:48):
We had no famous gunfighters before them. Where did this
whole phenomena come from? Well, revolvers which is what gunfighters
mostly use, had only been popularized in eighteen forty four years,
and not surprising that nobody got particularly famous in that
period up to the war. But I just felt sure
(07:08):
that the behavior had to come from someplace. And frankly,
when you look at American history, there's only one group
of people before the Old West who got famous for
shooting each other, and that was duellists, people who engaged
in duels, which was a phenomenon that was prominent between
the seventeen eighties and roughly the eighteen forties, and it famously,
(07:31):
you know, was most famous in the South. So I
began doing research on duellists in the Antebellum South and
realized I was onto something not so much in the
structure of things, because duels did not last until the
Old West. They were mostly gone by the eighteen fifties,
but in the reasons behind the duel, the reasons that
(07:55):
men got so mad at each other they had shoot
each other. And I found the roots of that in
what they call the old Southern honor system, the way
that Southerners kept score on themselves by kind of an
honor code, which basically, you know, said that you had
to be honest and fair. But if if your honor
(08:17):
was impugned, if I said, you know your ugly, your
wife is ugly, your kid is ugly, you had the
opportunity and in most cases, the obligation to respond with violence,
even deadly violence. And that seemed to be an awful
lot of what propelled the violence in the Old West.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
So you have this time period down, so you're getting closer,
but you still have how many really or is it
a couple of hundred that you're considering?
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And how do you narrow it down?
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Let's say there's one hundred. Yeah. Once I determined that
Antebellum duelists and behavior male behaviors in the Animelum South
more important to something that happened twenty years later on
the frontier, the question becomes, how could that possibly be
pal You know, how does such behaviors move because they
didn't move into the North. What I came up with
(09:08):
that was the crucial fulcrim in all this, and that
ultimately informed the university of gunfighters that I would look
at was Texas that a lot of the behavior, in fact,
all the behaviors that I saw in the Annebellum South
gravitated to Texas, which was every inch a southern state,
you know, forty percent of its early settlers just from
(09:28):
Alabama and Tennessee. And what you saw and what kind
of supercharged this phenomena, what made it explosive was the
decade after the Civil War in Texas, which underwent a
spasm of civilian on civilian violence that some academics still
say was the single most violent period in American history.
(09:51):
And that violence came in two waves, the first wave
basically being a rebellion that the state and many of
its inhabitants all you know, rebelled against the occupation by
Union soldiers, especially those of color. And so for about
five years there, much of Texas, especially North and East Texas,
was engulfed in a series of the worst feuds in
(10:12):
American history, just impossibly violent stuff. And around eighteen seventy
a second wave of violence entirely unrelated developed around the
state's dominant industry, which was open range cattle ranching. And
if you know anything about cattle ranching, back in the
days when there were no fences, when there was no
(10:32):
barbed wire, the main thing that cattlemen were concerned with
was cattle. Theft, cattle rustling, and as that business grew
from its origins in South Texas below San Antonio up
into Central Texas where people didn't know not to mess
with cattleman, it became spectacularly violent, also breaking out in
(10:54):
a series of feuds in and around Austin, such that
you know, a lot of it was you know, seven
bodies on a tree, lamb, But a lot of it
was just this new cattle industry sense of justice. Some
people call it the Code of the West, where they
basically if you were suspected of stealing a cow, you
were dispatched with a single bullet, far from a courtroom.
(11:16):
And this type of behavior perhaps the most the most violent,
Central Texas being the most violent, among the most violent
places that we've seen in the lower forty eight, you know,
could have been chalked off of kind of interesting Texas history,
except the violence I argue in the book didn't stay there.
As the Texas cattle business erupted and spread across the
(11:39):
frontier in the mid seventies, it spread everywhere, first to Kansas,
then into New Mexico and Arizona. As Texas cattleman and
Texans all but colonized those territories we forget that, you know,
to the extent that cattle and cattle ranching spread all
across the old Western frontier, it all came from Texas,
(11:59):
I mean of it. We had all the cows, and
we certainly had all the cowboys. So that's what I argue,
you know, spread an awful lot of the extra traditional
violence was you know, a group of Texans several thousand
strong that fanned out across the West. Many were called cowboys,
but other were called outlaws and all sorts of things.
(12:21):
But I'm telling you, Kate, if you go back and
you look at kind of the most famous gunfights of
the Old West, let's say four hundred of them, I'm
telling you easily half of them, if not sixty percent,
featured to Texan, not just the ones in Texas, but everywhere.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Well, what do we start with.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
You've mentioned some names that sound like real touchstones in
this history, and then you know when we start with
one and then tell me how you're making this connective
tissue to make this kind of one big narrative rather than,
like you said, chapter to chapter.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So who do you start with.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
The first place that you started Texas? And what happened
in Texas during that spasm of violence. But if you're
going to then tackle the rest of the Old West,
as you have to, you have to talk about the
spread of that in the first place where this type
of new hyper violent ethos that I argue was born
in Texas, The first place where it really hit the
(13:18):
rest of the world was in Kansas, going up what
some people may remember dimly from high school, the Chisholm
Trail and a bunch of cattle trails. Texas had to
move their cattle north because they did not have at
the time railroads that were connected to the North. If
they wanted to sell their cattle to the new slaughterhouses
in Chicago and Omaha and New York, they had to
(13:39):
get them up to the railheads in Kansas. So that
began in like eighteen sixty eight, eighteen sixty nine, and
there were five cattle towns in Kansas, beginning with Abilene
famously in eighteen seventy one and ending with Dodge City
in the late eighteen seventies, and collectively these five cattle
towns became kind of the birth of the gunfighter era.
(14:00):
That really the first place where journalists, especially northern journals,
were just stunned at who are these Texans and why
are they coming up here and causing all their trouble
and getting into all these gunfights. You know, those five towns,
I argue, are kind of the Madison Square Garden of
the gunfighter era. That there really where the whole phenomena started.
They're really were the first marquee gunfights began.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I mean, just in its simplest form, what would start these?
Is it over cattle? Or is it over insults? Or
is it over women? Or are they guns for hire?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
It's everything that men could get angry about. Oh gosh,
it's as bad as you envision a saloon full of
fraternity guys. Now you know, do that times twenty five.
A lot of the Texans, who were already climatized to
awful lot of violence went north with a chip on
their shoulder about Yankees and Yankee sheriffs. But a gunfight,
(14:55):
and let's, by the way, let's define our terms a
gunfight as it's used by those write about gunfighters is
we're talking specifically about extra judicial violence among civilians. So
nothing involving Native Americans, nothing involving soldiers. This has to
be private citizens on their own as it were, the
really the first theater of all this begins in Abilene
(15:20):
in eighteen seventy one. That these are the special conditions
that really got the rest of the country to go
what And you know, it's Abiliene in eighteen seventy one
that is uniformly preserved as kind of the first great theater.
And there's two specific reasons for one happened. The reason
it happened is because in eighteen seventy one, the marshall
of Abilene, Kansas was someone named wild Bill Hiccock, who
(15:42):
we mentioned a moment ago. While Bill Hiccock was made
famous by a single magazine article in eighteen sixty seven
in Harper's Weekly that wrote about that first gunfight that
I talked about in Springfilm, Missouri in eighteen sixty five,
and further went and positive that wild Bill Hiccock had
killed eave over one hundred white men over the course
of his career as a gunfighter. Didn't use the word.
(16:04):
The word didn't come into wide use until after eighteen
seventy four. The exact number appears not to be over
one hundred, but the exact number would seem to be two.
The magazine writer in the magazine article were wildly fanciful,
but overnight it created this notion of people running around
what people were realizing is the old West Frontier shooting people.
(16:28):
In other words, wild Kikcock made it a thing. So
when he shows up as a marshal of his first
major town in eighteen seventy one and starts getting into
gunfighters with Texans, Kansas newspapers first and then Northern newspapers
began to take notice. And the gunfighter who most personifies
(16:49):
this kind of homicidal, incredibly hyper sensitive, hyper violent young
cowboy is a young man named John Wesley Harden. And
it's the face off between Hickock and Harden in Abilene
in eighteen seventy one that really create the foundation of
this whole gunfighter era.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Now you say the face offs, you can survive one
of these, I mean, wouldn't you think one of these
guys would have been killed instead of being able to
see each other multiple times like this?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
You would have thought. We know that Harden was in
Kansas on a cattle drive for about three and a
half four months. The most conservative, I would say, estimate
of the number of people he killed in those four
months would appear to be eight. He killed them in
a number of ways, including a big battle out in
the middle of the prairie with a bunch of Mexican
(17:39):
VAK heroes, and he appeared to have killed four or
five there, and then famously at the end. In fact,
it was the most famous shooting he was involved with,
killed another Texas cattleman through the wall of a hotel
at four in the morning. And the story that's always
gone down about that, which is nobody has ever believed,
is that he did it for snoring. And Kate, I'm sorry,
if you shoot somebody through a hotel room walle at
(18:01):
four in the morning, it's because they were making racket
or they disted you or something. And so I actually
kind of believe snoring. But Harden was kind of the
archetypal not only gunfighter of his ear because he wandered
around just getting into all these gunfighters. I mean, this
is a young man who killed between twenty six and
forty two people by the time he was twenty one,
(18:23):
and he killed most of them before he was eighteen,
when he made a ruckus in a bowling alley. Yes,
they had bowling alleys on the frontier there in Abilene
in June. Hickock, who knew he was in town and
knew that he was wanted by the law for some
killings in Texas, didn't do much about it. Let him
wear his guns. But when he started getting into a
ruckus in this bowling alley, he did come in, drew
(18:46):
a gun and said he called him Little Arkansas. That
was his nickname that summer for obscure reasons. And he
demanded Harden's gun. And Harden had two, and he pulled
them and he handed them toward Hiccock butt first, and
then as Hiccock went to take them, spun them in
a maneuver called the road agent's spin, so that the
(19:07):
barrels were now pointed directly at Hickock's chest, at which
Hiccock had to basically put up his hands and say
you got me, at which point Harden yelled to his buddies,
nobody draw. You know, if anybody's gonna shoot, I'm gonna
do it. And what you see here is John Wesley.
Harden was a young man about nineteen years old. He
was among the ultimate hotheads of American history. Hickock was older, quieter, smarter,
(19:32):
and he basically said, hey, dude, chill, we don't need
to be doing this. Let's just go talk it Let's
go talk it off, and you get this. Since Harden
was so startled, he didn't know how to escalate, and
so he did. And so it became one of the
great non gunfights of Old West history because here were
if you have a top five, a big five I
(19:55):
sometimes call them of Old West gunfighters. Here were two
of them, and yet they both walked away alive.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Did they talk or was it just like see you later,
just you stay in your corner, Eill, stay in mine.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
It was that it was see you later. I mean,
we already know that Hickock was treating Harden with kid gloves.
You were not supposed to as in most Old West towns,
you were not supposed to wear your guns. There was
no open carry. Generally speaking, you were supposed to check them.
We believe from what from reading between the lines that though,
(20:28):
that even in places like Tombstone which had such raw laws,
they were seldom enforced until a sheriff or marshall thought
that somebody was getting in trouble. And so for the
rest of that summer, Hickock continued to allow Harden to
wear his guns. And he ended up and let me
see one, two, three more shooting scrapes, including the gentleman
(20:50):
that he shot, I believe for snoring.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Now I have just sort of fundamental questions of being
a gunfighter. How do you recruit? Are you paying these people?
Are you looting things? I mean, what is the motivation
for a young man? And I don't want to hear
the answer. Young men have pisson vinegar and are happy
to shoot other people for free?
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Or is that it?
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Well, there were many types of gunfighters, so, I mean,
a gunfighter could be a cattleman. He could be an outlaw,
he could be a lawman. He could be a feudest,
he could be that rarest a gun for hire. So
there are a lot of reasons why people shot each
other in the Old West. I've noticed in going through
all the old stuff that the dumbest reasons seem to
(21:35):
occur in the first half of this forty year period,
this thirty five year period, in other words, before the
West grows up, before law enforcement becomes more prevalent, a
period that really begins in the mid seventies with the
rise of the Texas Rangers. At people like whyat Earth
who are professional. You saw even more of kind of
knuckleheaded gun violence. One of the ones at Abilene, Harden
(21:58):
bumped into a guy who looked around him and cursed
him as a Texan, and the guy and Harden said
something back. The guy pulled his gun. He shot and missed,
Hardened fired and shot this guy in the face and
then ended up with teeth all over the sidewalk. That's
the type of idiocy that you see a lot before.
You see more widespread law enforcement in the latter half
(22:20):
of this period, from like eighteen eighty to nineteen hundred.
I note that more of the gunfights tend to be
about something as opposed to being about nothing, typically about resources,
whether about land or livestock, and you know, on a
frontier that had fewer and fewer resources to share. So
you know, I think that the things that drove a
(22:42):
lot of these gunfights were all over the map. But
the most common thing you see is, you know, young
men insulted in some way. Certainly, if you go back
and read the minute by minute accounts of the violence
that took place in Tombstone in the most famous gunfight
of them all, the gunfight beside the Okay corn Well,
you can see that insult to a man's honor explains
(23:06):
ninety nine percent of it. And I think to the
extent that Texans brought a lot of that into the
Old West. It's almost not surprising that their presence in
so many of the famous gunfights. It just it surprised
me so much when I realized I was going to
try to argue it in a book, because you know,
(23:26):
you feel like you're going on a limb when you
start saying crazy stuff like this, and I think I
defended it. I think I've made the case.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I can make the case now.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
One of the reviews that I read about the book was,
which I found to be true, is you know, one
minute you've got a villain. In the next minute that
same gunfighter as a you know, our hero or a victim.
Did you have to I mean that must have been
actually nice to have somebody who is undefined and you
can kind of change things around depending on what role
(23:55):
they're playing.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Did that make it harder or easier for you?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Oh? No, it makes that because look, while I can
generalize about the types of behaviors that led to gunfights,
the individual gunfighters themselves are so different and so I mean,
each has his own fascinating story. There's no stereotypical gunfighter,
at least of of let's say, the Big twenty five.
Those that lasted, you know, many of them, I have
(24:21):
to say, are given that their reason for fame is
killing other people, are not exactly you know, people that
you want babysitting your thirteen year olds, you probably not
want to have them over to the barbecue. And so
when you find people like White Herb, who, to my mind,
is all that was right and good about the law
(24:41):
in those days until famously he decided to go outside
the law to find his own justice when his brothers
were attacked at Tombstone. You know, that's a great American story,
and he in some ways is kind of the moral
center of this universe because around him, you know, orbit
an awful lot of people like John Way Lesley Harden.
Who are I mean John Wesley Harden. There's an awful
(25:03):
lot of Texans who still kind of love his legend.
I'm sorry, the guy's a maniac. He wasn't a serial killer,
but he was a serial killer. If you know, there
were years where he shot or killed you know, one
person every month of the year, there's so many individuals
that I was fascinated with. One of the next tier gunfighters,
(25:25):
whose name will probably not ring a bell for a
lot of people, was a gambler, a Texas gambler named
Ben Thompson, who later became famous as the marshall in
the city where you and I are sitting, Austin, Texas.
And he had a particularly incredible flame out of drinking
too much, attacking people on trains, and picking fights. It
(25:47):
was just nuts. He had been a gentleman until that point,
and I wonder aloud in the book if some of
his behavior could be explained by PTSD, because like a
lot of these gentlemen, he had some tough times in
the war. However, as much historians have just started to
get into PTSD after the Civil War, and it's it's
(26:11):
kind of an obvious thing to speculate about. We don't
we don't have a lot of hard evidence that we
can put that on. The one thing where you can
say that the West that the war clearly had an
influence was in the one point three million sight arms
that the federal government gave away or auctioned off in
eighteen sixty five and eighteen sixty six. I mean, you
can actually go back and find memoirs going, well, nobody's
(26:33):
fighting with their fists anymore. You know, these things are
much deadly and much faster than they ever used to be.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
If we're going through wild Bill and John Wesley Harden
in their relationship, do you go to the very end
of it and kind of explain what happens to these
guys or are they a through line that go throughout
your book?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
There are through lines Hardened, I think I tell history
in three places, because he does have a long career
wider of course, rose in Kansas and ultimately ends in Arizona,
so he is also through line. But hiccock, you're right,
ends up because the rest of his career is not
nearly as interesting as it's the first five or six years,
I go ahead and wrap him up right there. So
(27:14):
the story as I tell it proceeds chronologically from Kansas.
And then once Kansas begins to calm, as Texans and
Texas cattleman move on to other states, a lot of
the people who had been involved in gun violence in
Kansas begin to There is a mass movement of them
(27:35):
into New Mexico and Arizona, which is where you know,
you know, both of these territories are all but colonized
by Texas cattleman, and so that type of behavior that
we saw most prevalent in Kansas, it continues to spread
across New Mexico and Arizona into the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
It was interesting I was doing on my other show.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
We were doing a story about brothers who were serial
ki Espinoza's were very famous. We were talking about the
racial dynamics of changing boundaries, state boundaries, and it was,
you know, they were in the eighteen hundreds where you
had in New Mexico all of these you know, people
from Mexico who were settled in the white people around
(28:18):
them were relatively supportive. They had their villages together, and
then the United States changes the boundary and they become Colorado,
and it's a completely different dynamic where you know, they
are disenfranchised and you have like these gold diggers coming
in who are white, and it's just it's a really
interesting just by changing this boundary and the state government,
(28:38):
it really it really changed the dynamic of the racial
tension between So I'm picturing like, as the United States
moves further to the west, the gunfighters just sort of
follow behind and take advantage of whatever is happening.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
That's exactly what happened, and in this case it was
Texas cattleman moving into New Mexico. When you look at
the first great moments of extra judicial to violence in
New Mexico killings of five and seven and nine people,
it's all involving these incoming Texas cattlemen and you're right
on the other side, all too oftener latinos. That was
(29:13):
the backdrop on which any number of kind of Texas
families and groups moved in and experienced that. And it's
the backdrop very much of Billy the Kid, whose career
is built around two stages. One is a fight for
control of New Mexico's largest county, Lincoln County, and that's
all about who's going to control the legitimate and the
(29:35):
illegitimate business of cattle. And then after he was on
the losing side of that feud, Billy the Kid goes
out to become an outlaw, which is a high falutin
word for what he actually was, which was a cattle
wrestler stealing cattle out of the Texas Panhandle and selling
them across New Mexico and it's only then as a
cattle thief, a thief of Texas cattle, that Billy the
(29:57):
Kid became famous. His the narrative is thronged with Texans,
including he, his right hand man, and all three of
the guys who ultimately brought him in, including Pat Garrett,
had all come out of Texas. So I mean New Mexico.
Everything you read about in New Mexico in the eighteen
seventies and eighties, in terms of extra judicial violence, it
has a very strong Texas dynamic.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Now when we talk about, you know, the violence is
this generally men versus men. Are women ever drawn into
this in any way as collateral damage?
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Almost never? I get That's the one story I've gotten
off after ever appearance. Was any such thing as a
female gunfighter? Not really. The closest you could probably come
is an Oklahoma horse thief named Bell Star. But no,
women with guns pretty much was not a thing.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Were they collateral damage at any point?
Speaker 2 (30:49):
You know, I'm trying to think of one where I
could say a woman was killed. Certainly there were a
lot of women, especially women of color, killed during the
feuds in Texas. But when you look at kind of
the classic old West stuff. The one dead woman that
I can remember was in Dodge City, where a drunken,
a rich drunken Texas cowboy got in a fight with
(31:12):
the mayor of Dodge City, and so at two thirty
one morning, he appeared outside the guy's house and opened
fire shot into the bedroom. Turn out, the mayor wasn't
at home, but two show girls from downtown were, and
one of them ended up dead. And that ended up
being one of wide Eerp's storied manhunts to bring this
guy in.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
So I am not an expert on gunfights. I have
not dealt very much into Texas history in relative to
true crime. Maybe because I'm here and I'm supposed I
feel like I'm surrounded by Texas history, and I want
to branch out the one name besides of course, Billy
the kid that I really do recognize as Jesse James.
So does Jesse James show up in this book?
Speaker 2 (31:51):
He must, yes, And this is my unhappy voice, Oh no,
because I didn't want to write about Jesse James. Jesse James,
if you know any thing about him, you know he
was not an Old West gunfighter. He was a Midwestern
bank and train robber. He never committed a single crime,
much less kill de man. So far as we know
west of the Missouri Kansas line. When he went into hiding,
(32:14):
he didn't go hide in some canyon or you know, mesa.
He went to a horse farm in Tennessee. But I
end up telling Jesse James story because I kind of
feel like that's a technicality because his career is at
least gunfighter adjacent and candidly because readers are expecting it.
Like if you pick up a book that purports to
(32:35):
be the definitive new History of Gunfighters and it's Jesse
James is in it. I can hear phone calls, I
can hear you know, guy's going Jimmy. Jesse James isn't
even in this book. How reputable can this guy Burrow be?
So it's in there. But kind of, let's just say
I was deeply ambivalent about Jesse James, although he does
(32:56):
have a great he does have a great narrative, and
I do end up at the end kind of saying,
you know, he did kill five or six people, and
not a single one of them was in anything like
a gunfight. Most of them were killed by placing his
gun against their head because they hadn't done what he
wanted during a robbery. I mean, you cannot call Jesse
(33:16):
James a gunfighter. He was just a.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Murderer, slash bank robber, slash train robber and all of that.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yes, all right, So we know that Texas was hell
on wheels for gunfighters, and it sounded like a really
dangerous place.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
So do we have these gunfighters.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
I know we'd have him traveling, but there are a
lot of famous incidents.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
It sounds like outside of Texas. Do you have a
couple of those in those stories?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Well, I mean Texas were so prevalent on the rest
of the frontier in those years. Just to pick one example,
Whyder did battle against what was probably the Old West's
largest single outlaw gang there in southeast Arizona around Tombstone
and above the border, that gang was known as the Cowboys,
(34:04):
But below the border, where they did much of their
theft from Mexican ranchers, they were known as the Tehanos.
Because so many of them were from Texas. The type
of story that you get about these kind of roaming
Texans or as part of this Texas diaspora, some of
them are so batshit crazy. I will give you my
favorite one, which is it happened in October eighteen eighty
(34:29):
four in what's today the town of Reserve, New Mexico,
over on the Arizona border, and it was at it's
at altitude, it's pretty high up. I've been there. It's
pretty small these days. Latinos had moved in in the
eighteen sixties and had moved into the area. And then
after then Texas cattleman came in and least all the
land outside the towns for cattle, and they were rambunctious.
(34:49):
And there was a kid in one of those towns
named El Fago Baca Baca, and he fancied himself a
law and order advocate. He ordered a a badge from
a mail order company. And one night he saw one
of these Texas cowboys riding around in the streets of
the town, firing his gun in the air, and he
(35:11):
said to somebody, why is it. Anybody do anything about it?
And the elderly Mexican gentleman said, because we're too scared
of the Texans. They'll they'll kill somebody. And El fag
Obaco famously said, well, I'll show him that one. There's
at least one Mexican in this town that's not scared
of him. So he went up to the cowboy and
put his gun in his ear and put him under arrest.
The jail was closed, so he took him to a
(35:33):
house and held him overnight. In the middle of the night,
several of his Texas friends show up and demand that
they turned the Texas Cowboy over. El Fay go Obaco
walks out and he says, I won't be doing that
at the but I'll give you till the account of three,
and then I'm opening fire. And so he yells, and
there's four cowboys and he yells one, and they all
kind of look each other, like really and after and
(35:54):
then he goes two and they're like he wouldn't really,
And at three he opened fire. He kills one of
them's another one through the knee. The next morning he
takes his cowboy in to the Justice of the Peace,
where the cowboys find all of five dollars, at which
point El Fa go Obaca comes out of the courthouse
and there in the town square are eighty eight zero
(36:17):
angry Texas cowboys. We know this from court testimony. Somebody
began yelling unfortunate ethnic names. As you can imagine El
Fa go Oobaco lights out down a lane and at
the edge of town. It's a tiny town. He spies
a lonely little adobe hut and he goes up and
he yells, vamos to the lady and the two kids
that are in there. You've got to get out. They'll
(36:37):
kill you. He runs in. The Texans are right after him.
They bang on the door and yell for him to
come out, and he responds with a gunshot, killing another one,
at which point the eighty cowboys surround this little adobe hut.
And this was on the morning of October tenth, eighteen
eighty four, around ten am. They open fire. It's like
(36:58):
Bonnie and Clyde, like the last shot bound Clyde. Just
finally after following they shoot it. They shoot this house
full of holds for five minutes and then they stop
and El fay go Obaca opens fire at them again
and he kills another one, so they fire again and
fire again. Five more minutes of this and he's still alive.
It's still shooting. This goes on until six thirty at night,
(37:19):
eight and a half hours. The kid somehow survives. The
next morning they show up to begin firing again, and
they smell the odor of coffee and bacon. He's not
only still alive, but he's making he's making breakfast. So
they open fire again for another eight hours, and one
more Texan dies and El fay Obaca. When the law
(37:40):
finally shows up with some of his pals at the
end of the day to say, okay, enough of this.
It's been going on for thirty eight six hours, you know,
he comes out in his underwear, covered with dust, unhit,
and it's only then does everybody realize that he survived
because the floor of the adobe was eighteen inches below
ground and he survived. He survived, was declared innocent at
(38:01):
two different murder trials, one of which the front door
was offered his evidence, and there was something like four
hundred and twenty bullet holes in the front door. This
guy went on to a long career. He killed four Texans.
He lived Kate until nineteen forty five, which is just
amazing to me that a gun some famous gunfighter at
least in New Mexico lived, you know, and died just
(38:22):
within days after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
I was wondering if there was a false floor or
something like that. I was just thinking, what, how was
he able to do? That's amazing?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
So when I tell the story, I've been holding all
false floor till the end because I feel like if
I give it away too soon, the story doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
What about the ending of all this is that Butch Cassidy.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yep, it is, you know, the ear I end the
era And this is necessarily arbitrary, but it feels right
ending it when the last two Marquee outlaws, Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid, you know, basically say there's no
way to be an outlaw anymore. So we're going to
South America. And you know, Castidy somewhat like Jesse Jesse James.
You can't really call him a gunfighter. He was just
(39:04):
a bank robber who shot at people when they shot
at him. And there's no record that he ever killed
anyone to begin with. But again, at that point, he
clearly belongs in this book. That group does. But yeah,
the sunset of all of this is the eighteen nineties,
and that's narratively dominated by several different disparate stories. Butch
(39:24):
Castiy and the Sundance Kid and then the story of
the Dalton gang in Oklahoma, which is another you know,
it's kind of the story of the smartest outlaw gang
in the Old West, that would be Butch Casty, and
the stupidest, which would be the Daltons. Dultons were just
not terribly smart. They were ultimately well, in fact, the
deadliest robbery, and keep in mind, robberies aren't supposed to
(39:48):
be deadly at all when they go, well, they aren't.
Was the end of the Daltons, which in some ways
is kind of the end of the Great Era of gunfights.
It's when they famously, in a bid to be more
famous than Jesse James, who they worshiped. This was what
twenty five years, fifteen years after Jesse Jame was killed,
they went to rob two banks simultaneously in their hometown
(40:13):
in Coffeeville, Kansas, right in the Oklahoma border. And the Daltons,
I think there were eight of them that day, three
of whom were the brothers, as well as five random
kind of henchmen, and two of whom were Texans. And they,
you know, of all the things to get killed for,
you know, of all the stupid things to get killed for,
Like I'd never wanted to die by falling in a
(40:35):
vat of molasses or something. Right, You know, nobody wants
to die in a funny way.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Who would say so?
Speaker 2 (40:40):
So the Daltons basically were all killed because of fake
beards and fake mustaches. They thought, because they were known
in their hometown, they put fake beards and mustaches on.
It appears that they weren't made of hair but of paper,
And amazingly some noticed and open fire, and the gang
(41:04):
actually managed to rob the two banks, but so many
people came out and started shooting that they were, you know,
all all but one in it. The youngest ultimately lived,
but all but one were killed there in the streets
that day, most of them in this alley that you
can still visit, Bloody Alley. I don't end the story there,
but it's pretty near the end.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
And I guess bandanas weren't available for some reason.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
I mean, isn't that what everybody used?
Speaker 2 (41:30):
You know, I never did a study on kind of
the prevalence of bandito facial covering. You're leading me to
believe that I wasn't as thorough as I thought I was.
I was at a gathering the other night somebody asked,
what's the deal with bounty hunters, and I was like, wow,
I didn't answer that either. I have some assassin, some
you know, guns for hire, but bounty hunters and bandanas.
(41:52):
I mean, I guess I'll have to do that in
the next book.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, you have a word limit. I'm pretty sure from
your publisher. Maybe not.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
I was. I was worried. I don't know about you.
What's the most number of words you've ever cut from
a book? I've had two on Public Enemies twenty years ago.
I turned it in and the cuts that he ordered
I ultimately tied it up as twenty three percent of
all the words I'd written I ended up cutting. And
when you think about your time, I figured that was
a year and two months of my life. But hey,
(42:20):
it was a much better book shorter. This was the
rare book that I didn't go along. My editor really
candidly loved it as it was.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Okay, so you end with Butch Cassidy Sundan's kid, you know,
and I know that you publishers are a lot of times,
I think are looking for that. How does this resonate
with a today audience? And I think you might be
one of my friends who said, you know, I don't
really care about that. I just want to tell a
really good story and a little bit about history.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
You know, maybe I would be a bigger name author
if I did care, but I don't. I really am
interested in the nineteenth century frontier, you know. I think
there are probably some lessons here that one, you know,
one could draw. But I mean, look, the one thing
that I always say is I don't know about where
you comed in on this, but I always say my primary,
(43:11):
if not exclusive, goal is to entertain my reader. If
he or she ends up at the end learning something,
and god forbid they learn a lesson, the one thing
you can be sure is I will not tell you
what that is. I just I just don't want to
go there. I don't want to be I want to
tell a good story. That is pretty much it well,
and in almost every case, my definition of a good
(43:34):
story is a story, or at least a version of
the story that hasn't been told before. You know, on
this one, if I can't lay a claim to reinventing
the study of the field of gunfighters, I really can't publish.
And it's up to the reader to see whether I've
done that. But I will say, so far this is
me breaking my arm, patting myself on the back. The
(43:56):
reviews have been.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
Generous, well good, and I don't want to make a
big calment on mail fragility, but you seem to be
heading down that road too with this book. I mean
a little bit about how these sort of these these
gunfights still continued, even though they're not duelists continue to
evolve from just men not figuring out how to communicate
(44:17):
or move on or get over whatever is happening. And
I know that we don't need a contemporary pull for this,
but that was the first thing I thought of. I
did a story to Virginia, stories both involving kind of
ego and including women actually trying to get over ego
that ends in death.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
And you know, I.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
Spoke to somebody at William and Mary who was an
expert at that, at the duels and what it means,
and she said, can you imagine if we had that now?
And with everything that happens on Twitter and Instagram and
all of this, you know, there has to be there had.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
To have been some kind of evolution between then and now.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
You know, there must have been. I'm just happy to
say that that felt like another book, yeah, rather than
the one I was writing, but clearly kind of while honor,
you know, still exists in the world, and I don't
think anybody, at least in the West, sees it as
any type of pressing policy challenge. But you're exactly right.
Can you imagine if people today were as touchy as
(45:17):
they were in the Old West and believed that deadly
violence was justified for everything that was said online? I mean,
think about these people only kill How many people would
you even know or meet in eighteen seventy five in
your life? I don't know three hundred people, because you know,
there's no telephone, there's no computer. I mean, you could
interface with three hundred people in Twitter or on Facebook
(45:38):
in a single night. That's and be insulted, you know,
myriad times. I mean, so, yes, one is glad that
there has been some evolution of the human condition in
those terms.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
But I also think with people in that time period,
in the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, they depended so
much on each other. You still somebody's cattle and they
might starve to death their family, might you know, be
sick if you're doing one or two things like what
was it the theft of a pig is what led
to the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
That's one of the legends.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, yeah, So I don't know.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
There's a lot at stake now, obviously with honor, but
then I think there was just so much when you
have someone else outside interference in your family or you know,
in your livelihood or in your identity as being a Texan,
I see it all sort of being built up and exploding.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
That's a great point, and it immediately it makes me
think of one famous gunfight involving a guy named Harvey Logan,
who was Butch Cassidy's kind of right hand man and
the nastiest gunfighter in that group. Harvey Logan got into
his first gunfight, it said, because he had a ranch
there in Montana, and his neighbor borrowed a plow and
(46:52):
returned it bent or broken or something, and they ended
up in a gunfight in the saloon, in which Harvey
I can kill the guy over essentially a bit plow,
and then a bunch of yelling at each other about
whose fault it was.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
I'm sure I've brought this up several times for my
listeners on both shows, but I am a fan of
fear Thy Neighbor, which is a TV series, and it
is insane to me what people will kill each other over.
I mean property lines and dogs going poop on the
wrong side, and I literally this is what occurs, and
it's built up over time, and it's resentment that you
(47:28):
can't really work out because they're not your family, you're
not married to them, and there's a distance, but it
is so important to you for whatever reason that people
just snap in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
So that's also what it reminds me of.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
There's a lot of that in this book.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Fear Thy Neighbor. So if you're a fan of fear
Thy Neighbor listeners, you should pick up this book because
you'll see I mean, you know, aren't you amazed? I
talked to Paul Holes on my other show about when
people say, oh, he would have never killed her over
three phone calls from a random guy. Well, it doesn't
matter what we think, it matters what the guy thinks
who's pulling the trigger. It's all about perspectives. So these
(48:07):
gunfights were worth dying over for whatever reason. And that's
one of the things I think is fascinating about your book.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
You know, we can you can say honor shouldn't matter.
You know that that was silly, But the fact is,
if everybody is living in that same system, as silly
as it may sound, for Wider not to have killed
the guy Tombstone, you know in the middle of that fight.
You know if he had not, if he had walked away,
his societal standing, perhaps even his employment would have fallen precipitously.
(48:39):
I mean, look, there were a lot of these gunfights
where yes, you can say bent plow, this is just ridiculous,
but there's others when you really realize how important honor
was to those people, and how ignoring it or walking
away from it you pay the price. There were reasons
people fired guns at each other over these things because mattered.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(49:32):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis a Morosi Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is
our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark,
Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
(49:53):
and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at
tenfold More and if you know of a historical crime
that could use some attention from the crew at tenfold
more Wicked, email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com.
We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for
Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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