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Speaker 1: What’s long been considered the very first gunfight of the old western frontier took place three months after Appomattox, that is, three months after the end of the Civil War, on July 21, 1865. It happened in the scraggly village of Springfield, Missouri, down toward the state’s southwest corner, just before 6 o’clock at the beginning of a warm Friday evening. Around the town square, a crowd had formed. As everyone watched, two men stepped out into the open Both were gamblers in town. They had argued over a pocket watch one of them seized from the other to satisfy a poker debt. The man who took the watch was a tough character named Davis Tut. The other gentleman, the one who wanted his watch back, had greasy, shoulder-length hair and a nose so long it almost reached his upper lip. His name was James Hickok. Later, once he got famous, he acquired the nickname you might know him by, Wild Bill, Wild Bill Hickok. They stood maybe 75 yards apart. Hickok hollered for Tut to return his watch. History doesn’t record Tut’s reply, but the watch, shall we say, was not forthcoming. The two men, both wearing holstered pistols, Tut in a leather duster, stood frozen for a long moment. Suddenly, without a further word or exchange between them, both threw their guns and fired. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tecova’s. Good boats for good times. My name is Brian Burra, and I’ll tell you how this all ended in just a second. But first, I want to introduce myself and try and explain what we’re up to here. I’m the author of eight books, and I’ve been a writer at places like the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and Texas Monthly for going on 40 years now. I’ve been fascinated by the gunfighters of the Old West since I was in sixth grade, when I was like 11. What started it for me was a bunch of movies I saw around then. This would be in the early 1970s. The most important being Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In 1969’s very popular, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I thought it was a super film, and believe me, it holds up well. Give it a shot. It’s Redford at his best. But what preoccupied me, really what fascinated me, was the question of how much of it could possibly be true. My little 11-year-old’s world was full of rules, you know. When to eat, when to study, when to throw my paper out. Was there really a time when grown men seemed to run around with like almost no rules at all? Shooting and robbing banks and trains seemingly at their leisure? It wasn’t that I wanted to be an outlaw or a criminal. I was just startled that parts of America could have been that different, and not so long before. Anyway, I had to know. I had been to the library in my Texas hometown many times by then, but this began a period where I pretty much lived there, at least after school was out, reading everything I could find on Butch and Sundance and other frontier gunfighters. Once the librarians began ordering books from other libraries for me, I began showing up with real anticipation to see if I had a new book to read. I guess I was pretty surprised how much of that movie ended up being true. All except the most famous parts, which totally weren’t. I’ll tell you more about that when we get to the episode on Butch. What really changed everything for me was understanding what the frontier, what 19th century America, was actually like. The way men back then were expected to behave. The way life, yeah, was maybe a little cheaper back then. The time when people didn’t live as long as we do now? Plus, living in a world where so many things could kill you? From Butch and Sundance, I plunged into the stories you’d expect. Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, all the big names. And then in time, I began digging down into the careers of gunfighters I’d never heard of. Maybe you haven’t either. Men who were every bit as deadly as, say, Billy the Kid. but just never got a lot of love or newspaper coverage, which is how you became famous, or didn’t, I’ll tell you stories in this podcast about all sorts of dimly remembered men, from the Texas rancher Pink Higgins to characters like mysterious Dave Mather, who killed several men in and around Dodge City before, poof, disappearing into the ether. Once you understand the context and the background of all this, so many of these stories are even wilder than what you see in the movies. I’ve known for at least 20 years that I wanted to write a book about these gunfighters. But it needed to be a single story, not like 18 chapters on 18 different gunfighters. I mean, that’s pretty lame. It took me 13 years to figure out how to do it. So in 2018, I began the actual research. It took seven more years to finish. When it finally came out in 2025, the gunfighters was, well, I don’t want to brag. Too much, let’s just say the sales and reception were pretty generous. The folks at MeatEater thought enough of the book to suggest we try and make a podcast of it. That’s what you’re listening to now. So, why do this now? Why delve into all this again after 150 years? Well, candidly, while there have been good books published on gunfighters this century, especially on Wyatt Earp, a lot of this literature simply hadn’t been updated for a good 50 years. And I thought it was just way past time to do it. I mean, so many of these guys are just disappearing from the public consciousness. When I was a kid, someone like Bat Masterson was pretty much a household name. He was in movies and on TV. Now, ask 10 friends who Bat Masterson was. I doubt more than one can tell you. I guess I wanted to rescue some of these guys from history’s dustbin. You know, so at this point, if you’re new to all this, you’re probably wondering, what exactly was a gunfighter? Good question. As the term is used these days, it refers to just about any civilian out on the 19th century frontier who was involved in a memorable exchange of gunfire with another civilian. So nothing involving soldiers or Native Americans. That’s considered another kind of Old West violence, which still leaves room for many different flavors of gunfighter. In practice, a gunfighter could work as just about anything. An officer of the law, of course, like Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson, or an outlaw. like Sam Bass or Joaquin Murrieta. Some were gamblers, like Doc Holliday or Ben Thompson. Or cattlemen, like New Mexico’s infamous Clay Allison, a man you didn’t want to get angry. When he went to a dentist and the poor guy pulled the wrong tooth, Allison pinned him down on the floor and yanked out one of his teeth, without Novocaine. And don’t get me started on the time he rode on a horse naked through a tough Texas town. More than a few gunfighters emerged from the great family and political feuds that swept the Old West. Men like Jack Helm and the Texan Bob Lee, who killed so many men they called him the man-eater. And there were even a few, rare, sure, but they did actually exist, who were guns for hire. Here I’m thinking about Wyoming’s notorious Tom Horn, hung for killing a 15-year-old boy, or the man who may have been the deadliest of Old West killers, the Texas assassin Deacon Jim Miller. And then there were the scariest gunfighters of all, those who just killed other men for the heck of it because they got bumped in a bar or cheated at cards or insulted or, this is my all-time favorite, got irked by a man snoring and so shot him at four in the morning through a hotel wall. The first great gunfighter, John Wesley Harden, shot men for all those reasons and more. He killed at least 26 men, before he turned 21 years old. It helped you know that he was pretty much a complete psychopath. In time, we’ll talk about all these characters and many others. But first, let’s get back to Wild Bill Hickok on that hot Friday evening in Missouri. Both Hickok and Davis Tutt, we’re told, drew their pistols at about the same time. But most folks think Tutt fired first. He fired from the hip, after all, drawing his gun and shooting it a split second later. That’s the way most everyone shoots in movies. But in reality, the most accomplished gunfighters thought it was an amateur move. Speed, they sometimes said, wasn’t the crucial thing. The crucial thing was accuracy. So Hickok didn’t fire from the hip. Instead, he drew with his right hand as he extended his left arm forward. He then placed his gun, a Navy Colt revolver, across his left forearm, which allowed him to aim the weapon. The touch shot, unsurprisingly, went wild, probably hitting a 7.11 somewhere down the street. as so many fired from the hip did. A moment later, a red bloom appeared on his chest. Hickok, who took that extra split second to aim, did not miss. Davis Tutts staggered forward, shouted, boys, I’m killed, and keeled over dead. As he did, Hickok whirled around to confront a pack of Tutts’ armed pals. He snarled at them, because this is actually the way people in the Old West sometimes talk, saying, Put up your shootin’ hands, there’ll be more dead men here. And they did. Hickok walked away clean. Alright, so there’s a lot to unpack here. But let’s first deal with the idea that this was the Old West’s first gunfight. I mean, it was, not by a long shot. Revolvers had been in widespread use for 20 years at that point, and lots of people had already been killed by folks using them. What the exchange of gunfire that day actually was, was the first gunfight to come to the nation’s attention after the Civil War. The very first time two men shooting it out in the middle of the street became something more than just another crime story. This happened when a magazine writer from back east somehow heard about it. This guy parachutes in, interviews Hickok, and then publishes this super long article that described the gunfight in detail. But more important, goes on to claim that Hickok had killed many men like this before. Like, a lot of men. Like, more than a hundred. Which, I mean, is nuts. Not counting anyone he might have shot during the war, Because it happened during wartime, that wouldn’t count. The precise number of civilians Hickok had killed to that point would appear to be, you know, like two. Four if you count the two guys he shot that other people finished off. One of them with a garden hoe. It’s a great tale, and I can tell you about it when we get to Hickok’s story. But the truth of the article doesn’t matter. Not really. What matters is that in one fell swoop, this one article created the idea of the Old West gunfighter, a kind of character or archetype that to that point simply didn’t exist in the American imagination. The notion that there were men wandering the American West shooting each other for business and pleasure. This is the moment when the whole idea of the Old West gunfighter was born. Every Western gunfight you’ve ever seen in some movie or TV show. Every gunfight maybe you’ve read about in Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey novels. Every gunfight you’ve ever heard of. You can trace it all to that day when Hickok laid a Navy colt across his arm and shot Davis Tut through the heart. And, Hickok’s massive fibs aside, the idea of the gunfighter endured because there was so much truth behind it. something new, something never before seen in America, actually was afoot in those first years after the Civil War. This is the beginning of the period I call the gunfighter era, the years when frontier figures such as Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok became famous for shooting other Americans. It lasted from the moment Hickok took down Davis-Tutton in 1865 until 1901, until the last marquee Western outlaws Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid, hounded by the Pinkertons, boarded a freighter in Brooklyn, and sailed down to South America. It’s an arbitrary date to end the story, but I think it works. Western-style gunfights still went on into the 20th century, but the frontier had closed. And with it, the gunfighters of the Old West began moving from the headlines to the history books. It’s no accident this all started once the Civil War ended. 1865, like 1945, was a year that heralded big changes in the country. The war had lasted five excruciating years. And while, yes, it changed America, what’s more accurate is to say it changed Americans, especially American men. One in four men fought in the war, and the percentage is a lot higher when you count just men under 40, not having television or any recent war to give them context. most men rode off to battle with little sense whatsoever of the horrors they would likely endure there. Historians have only begun studying the impact it had on them in recent years, but it’s assumed that PTSD and similar disorders were pretty bad, especially in an era where mental health challenges commonly went unrecognized and untreated. So it’s hardly a surprise to learn that the first years after the Civil War were a trying time for many veterans. Newspapers across the country fairly exploding with tales of their violence, their drunkenness, and an inability to return to polite society, as it were. While it’s pretty speculative to suggest many gunfighters suffered from something like PTSD, I think it’s safe to assume some must have. Certainly many were veterans. That guy Clay Allison, the naked tooth-pulling guy? He was drummed out of the Confederate Army for intense mood changes, we’re told, most notable when he’d been drinking. The doctor used the word mania to describe them. So yeah, scary guy. What’s not speculative, though, is the tidal wave of handguns that washed over the country in these years. Many were brought home by veterans, but many more, on the order of 1.3 million guns, in fact, were auctioned off by the federal government, which no longer needed them. Wearing a sidearm, typically in a belt holster, sometimes tied tight to a man’s thigh, hadn’t been entirely unknown in America before then. Travelers to the South, especially, had been remarking on open carry for years now, the point being how unusual it was everywhere else. Now, though, in the first years after the war, you can find writers and memoirists marveling at how sidearms, especially in the South and in rural areas, were becoming a common part of a man’s wardrobe, much like neckties or spectacles. What that meant, it soon became obvious, was a drastic change in the ways many Americans began to settle their disputes. Where once a disagreement might have been settled by the era’s uncommonly nasty fistfights, some states actually had to make eye-gouging a crime. The emergence of personal sidearms changed everything. Quote, fist and skull fighting has played out here, a Missouri memoirist noted in 1866. They now do that business in a more prompt manner. The sudden spread of sidearms, though, was only one of several new phenomena that arose out on the western frontier in those years, each of which not only fascinated Americans back east, but also contributed to the emergence of gunfighters. Seven months after the Hickok shootout came the country’s first peacetime bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri, pulled off by a gang of former Confederate rebels that probably included a teenager named Jesse James. A year after that came the first train robbery in Indiana. And a year after that came what might have been the most important factor in the rise of gunfighters, the first serious cattle drives. Hundreds of cows driven up from Texas hundreds of miles, first to Missouri, later to Kansas. All these activities created opportunities for gunplay, especially the rise of the ultraviolet cattle industry. As we’ll see, those Kansas cow towns soon emerged as the first notable theater of gunfighter-style shootouts as masses of unruly Texas cowboys first came face-to-face with northern lawmen who didn’t appreciate having their domiciles shot up by drunken drovers. It’s amazing how many talented gunfighters, from Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson to Doc Holliday and Ben Thompson, were first noticed by the press in those towns. For a time, they kind of became the Madison Square Garden of the gunfighter era. place where all the heavyweights fought. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, because you’re probably thinking that gunfighters, at least after Hickok’s first face-off there in Missouri, immediately became a source of public fascination. They did not. In fact, it took a long time for the old west gunfighter to really connect with the American imagination. I mean, all through the 1860s and 70s, shootings on the frontier got the kind of press coverage you’d pretty much expect. The most obscure ones especially those that happened away from population centers, were often ignored or never heard about at all. Those that happened in and around towns tended to draw the most newspaper attention. But by and large, these were treated the way we treat deadly shootings today, as individual crimes. It took a while for reporters to really catch on to the idea that the men repeatedly involved in these shootings were truly a thing, a gunfighter, someone to be followed like you would follow a politician. or a baseball player. It really wasn’t until the early 1880s, almost 20 years after that first Missouri gunfight, that the gunfighter idea begins to catch on. It’s then, for instance, that when Clay Allison would visit another city on a cattle buying or selling trip, the reporters would clamber up and ask him about killing people. It’s then that the Eastern newspaper’s first discovered gentleman gunfighters like Ben Thompson of Texas, who would take the time to sit and explain to an eastern tin horn his rules for honorably killing men. The word gunfighter first appeared in American newspaper in 1884. For the longest time, though, the preferred term was gunman or gunman. Even then, though, gunfighters weren’t exactly a source of real fascination. Just looking at the dime novels and the pulp fiction of the period Indian fighters and cowboys and even detectives got a lot more ink than gunfighters. When Hickok appeared in an Old West show back east, he was actually kind of a flop. I think one of the reasons for this ambivalence is that many people couldn’t figure out whether a gunfighter was a good guy or a bad guy. I mean, it took years to think of gunfighters the way you might think of lawyers. There were plenty of good ones, plenty of bad ones. Gunfighters, in fact, didn’t really become a thing until the 20th century when Hollywood films discovered them. And the first ones depicted in most of those early movies, by and large, were fictional concoctions. The gunfighters of history were pretty much forgotten, in fact, for a long time. The serious interest in them only kicked off in 1925, when a magazine writer famously began an article with the words, Who remembers Billy the Kid? That led to a slew of best-selling books that introduced a whole new generation of Americans— to all the big names, from Wyatt Earp to the Dalton brothers. This is really where the whole interest in history’s gunfighters began. Seeing it, Hollywood Studios swept in and made scads of mostly awful movies, about almost all of them, more than 40 on Billy the Kid, just during the 1940s. Even then, it took a while for the concept of the gunfighter as this kind of bygone artisan of death to really catch on. The book that popularized the idea that basically anyone who had engaged in gunfire in the Old West was a, quote, gunfighter, whether they worked as a sheriff, an outlaw, a feudist, a cattleman, whatever, didn’t appear until 1934. It was called Trigonometry. Get it? And though not exactly a bestseller, you can still buy it today. I mean, if you have to. I mean, there are better books out there. Like mine, I’m just saying. The reason Trigonometry matters is that a few years later, a Hollywood screenwriter named Andre de Toth took its ideas and applied them to a movie that came out in 1950. They called it, yes, The Gunfighter. It starred Gregory Peck as the kind of protagonist whose sole identity was his history of reluctantly killing other men. Which happens. It introduced all sorts of tropes we kind of take for granted today. The lead character’s loneliness, his honor, his troubled past. The Woman He Left Behind. And weirdly, the movie actually holds up well today. I recommend it. And it proved enormously influential. All through the 1950s, Hollywood studios cranked out dozens of westerns much like it, from highbrow fare like High Noon and Shane to dozens of minor films best forgotten. But the movie’s real impact was on the new medium of television. Westerns could be shot on a back lot for not a lot of money, and during the 50s, TV produced them left and right, 92 of them in all in just 10 years, and on just the three networks, 38 of which, by my count, were built around a gunfighter. The television gunfighter was typically a good-hearted sheriff, defending his town from assorted bad guys, as in Gunsmoke, or just as often, a wandering sort who prowled the West righting wrongs, like in Have Gun, Will Travel and Cheyenne and several more. More than a dozen of history’s gunfighters got their own shows, too. From Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson to total imposters. And yes, I’ll explain these guys in time. Imposters, like Wild Bill Longley and Tombstone’s Johnny Ringo. All of which finally made the Old West gunfighter a real cultural touchstone in America. A newish figure popping up in dozens of movies and TV shows. which of course prompted a lot of obvious questions. I mean, I wasn’t the only curious 11-year-old out there. How much of all this shooting and riding around in face-offs in tense little towns, how much of this could possibly be real? Beginning in the 60s, a stream of new gunfighter books attempted to answer such questions. One of the first, which suggests how iffy the concept remained, came out in 1967. Written by Joseph Rosa, it was called The Gunfighter. Man or myth? The upshot of this and other books was that, yes, a lot of the shootouts you saw on television were pretty much nonsense. If you think of the classic Old West shootout, you know, two guys squared off in the middle of a dusty street, there’s maybe a dozen like that I can cite from history. But as to the bigger question around the validity of so much of this violence, well, that turns out to be a lot closer to history than probably anyone at the time imagined. So real quick, let me address this here, because you may be wondering this already. was the Old West really as violent as you so often see it portrayed in movies? Beginning in the 60s, when so much accepted history began to be challenged by long-haired young professors, it became fashionable to say it wasn’t, that all those gunfights were wildly overblown. There’s a whole academic debate around all this, I’ll spare you here. The skepticism began to fall away in the 2000s, when modern academics using big data systems began to examine frontier murder rates. Long story short, a rate of nine murders per 100,000 deaths is considered high. Researchers at Ohio State, examining those Kansas cow towns like Abilene and Dodge City, came to the startling conclusion that they harbored murder rates between 53 and an astonishing 317, which is why we can say today with confidence that no, gunfighters didn’t square off in the streets of Dodge City and Abilene every Saturday afternoon at four. These and many other frontier towns were, in fact, extraordinarily violent. In other ways, though, the research that began during the 60s has produced all sorts of insights. For all the time he was a lawman, we now know, Wyatt Earp was actually also an escaped federal prisoner. That’s right, an escaped prisoner. Arrested as a horse thief, he’d been thrown into jail in Arkansas and broke out with a bunch of other guys. Two years later, he turns up as a deputy in Kansas. The second deadliest of the many Texas gunfighters, a rough type known as Wild Bill Longley, you can hear his story in its own episode later, turns out to have been pretty much a complete fraud. Arrested for a murder in Central Texas, he spun out this incredible tale of roaming the West killing people, like 40 people. Before they hung him, he got a lot of press and later a few books and even a television series before an intrepid modern-day researcher figured out it was all a bunch of bull. And believe me, Longley and Hickok aren’t the only ones who blatantly inflated their adventures for the entertainment of Eastern audiences. I’m excited about this podcast. There’s 26 episodes in all. you can partake of it a couple of ways. Taken as a whole, it’s a new narrative history of the gunfighter era and the men who drove it, from Hickok at the beginning all the way to Butch and Sundance at the end. If you’re not into the whole story, cool. You can take in any of the individual episodes just by themselves. You won’t be missing any major plot points. Each episode stands as its own story. Well, a couple, three of the bigger stories, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, we’ve stretched over two or three episodes. There is one overarching theme you might keep in mind. I talk a lot about this in the first three or four episodes and touch on it from time to time later. And that’s the why of it all. Why did gunfighters emerge in this place in time? And why does it seem they were always shooting people? The more I learned about frontier gunfights, in fact, the more curious I became about their causes. Over time, I began to sense some commonality in a lot of these things. It started with something Hickok mentioned in Passing, as he prepared to meet Davis Tutton. A friend asked why he was doing it. Hickok explained about the watch, but he then went on to say, and I quote, you don’t… You don’t want me to give him my honor, do you? No, Bill. You must keep your honor. For Hickok, then, that gunfight wasn’t primarily about his lost watch. It was about the risk of losing his honor. That rang a bell for me. I knew I’d heard similar explanations before, And it rang another kind of bell for me, probably because my people were from all over the Old South. Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, now Texas. That Missouri gunfight reminded me a lot of an old-style duel, something generations of American men had used to settle matters of honor. In time, I developed a theory about the role of male honor on the 19th century frontier. I was surprised this emphasis on honor seemed to come from a place I’d never considered. I mean, think of it. Killing to defend your honor? Duels? Feuds? It all began to feel, to me at least, a little Southern. We’ll talk about the unusual origins of American gunfights in our next episode. Thanks for dropping in. I’m Brian Burra, and this has been Episode 1 of The Gunfighters. Hope we’ll see you next time.
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