THE GUNFIGHTERS: How Texas Made the West Wild, by Bryan Burrough
In the John Ford film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” Maxwell Scott, the editor of The Shinbone Star, hears the U.S. senator Ransom Stoddard confess that he was not the man who shot the villainous Valance. The editor spikes the story, explaining to a surprised Stoddard, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
In “The Gunfighters,” a lively chronicle of the way real-life cowboys and their high-noon duels captured American attention in the late 1800s, the journalist Bryan Burrough — best known for “Barbarians at the Gate,” his classic exploration of the wild, wild east of 1980s Wall Street — prints the facts, the legends, the whole shootin’ match.
These pages read more like a movie script than a history book. Between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the 20th century, social order in the American West straddled the rule of law and the grip of a gun. Roles on the frontier shifted constantly: Gunfighters became marshals, cowboys became killers, pimps became lawmen.
And many gangsters of the prairie became heroes, celebrated in a way that murderers in Boston or Baltimore could only envy. Why? Blame it on Texas, Burrough argues. Texans had ongoing, bloody face-offs with Mexicans to their south, and Comanches in their midst. Violence was to be expected; even insisted upon. Moreover, while a cop on the corner could protect your store in New York, vigilante violence was probably the only way to secure “millions of cattle roaming free across millions of acres” out West. Add to that a media eager to romanticize Texans’ perverse Southern sense of “honor,” whereby “gentlemen” avenged the mildest slight by dueling. There was money to be made peddling lies about swashbuckling frontier gunfighters across hundreds of miles of telegraph wires to clerks in cities around the country.
Burrough follows the winding facts wherever they lead. At times I felt like I was reading a Russian novel as so many characters crisscrossed and double-crossed: one day a villain, the next a victim. But it’s also satisfying to watch Burrough explode the legends of the late frontier the way Butch Cassidy dynamited safes. Wild Bill Hickok, to start with, “was a titanic fraud” and “the fake patient zero of the gunfighter myth.” A former Union scout turned lawman, Hickok allegedly killed hundreds, but the real number, off the battlefield, was probably fewer than 10.
The Texan outlaw John Wesley Hardin, on the other hand, was no fabulist. Burrough reveals the hero of Bob Dylan’s 1967 ballad to be a psychopath. “Literally,” Burrough writes, “a serial killer.” He shot Black men for little or no reason (even by the standards of the time, Hardin was a vicious, violent racist) and seems to have killed a man for snoring. He had already murdered as many as 24 people by his 18th birthday.
The one gunfighter whose real life lives up to the legend, Burrough believes, is Wyatt Earp. Although an escaped federal prisoner and a sometime pimp, Earp preferred to use his pistol to “buffalo” an opponent, braining him over the head rather than shooting him.
Earp roams through Wichita, Dodge City and Tombstone with an all-star cast: Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday as well as Wyatt’s brothers, Virgil and Morgan Earp. Wyatt’s cool head and deadly accuracy as bullets whizzed by at the OK Corral in 1881 were the 30-second apex of the Gunfighter Era. (The nadir had come a decade earlier when Jesse James, a pathetic marksman and a Reconstruction hater who slaughtered unarmed Union sympathizers, was lauded by the pro-treason press as a valorous Southern knight, deserving a seat beside “Arthur at the Round Table.”)
One of the most amusing aspects of Burrough’s book is his faithful recording of nicknames. We meet “Hoodoo Brown,” a much more interesting moniker than his given name: Hyman G. Neill. The origin of “Six-Fingered” Pete seems obvious, but why “Man-Eater” Bob Lee? Meanwhile, some insecure dude decided to face-shame “Big-Nose Kate” Horony, the hard-drinking, hotheaded Hungarian prostitute who hung out with Holliday. “Arkansas Tom” Daugherty’s real first name was Roy and his home state was Missouri. And one hopes Dan “Dynamite Dick” Clifton had something to do with incendiary devices.
Then there’s William “Big-Foot” Wallace, a proud Texas Ranger whose sobriquet, at least to our modern eyes, befitted his tendency to offer Eastern reporters what Burrough calls “the cornpone anecdotes they craved, going on about tarantulas so big they killed cows.”
As an expatriate Texan whose longhorn cattle are grazing 50 yards from me as I write this, I was taught Old West myths concocted by the likes of Big-Foot. “The Gunfighters” seeks to rectify that. Burrough scrapes off more than a century of dust and dried blood to give us a work that is part history, part biography, part sociology. In his hands, printing the facts makes for one hell of a good read.
THE GUNFIGHTERS: How Texas Made the West Wild | By Bryan Burrough | Penguin Press | 430 pp. | $35
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