THE GUNFIGHTERS

A rootin’-tootin’ history of the Wild West’s legacy of cold steel.

There’s something about Texas that makes a person reach for his gun. So hazards Texas historian Burrough, who finds in the Lone Star State a culture of both frontier violence and the social obsessions of the Old South, with a code that “in general required a man to be honest, courteous, brave, and prepared to use violence, even deadly violence, to defend his honor.” The first post–Civil War shootout was fought in Missouri between a Confederate and a Union veteran, the latter none other than Wild Bill Hickok; Hickok would of course meet his fate in South Dakota, but just about every other gunfighter—notably the “psychopath” John Wesley Hardin—cycled through Texas on the way to someplace else. Most fought in the Civil War, and while Burrough notes that gunfights were a fixture of the California Gold Rush, he puts the “Gunfighter Era” as taking place from 1865 to 1901. The big names are there, from Wyatt Earp to Butch Cassidy, but just as interesting are lesser-known figures such as the Texas rancher Clay Allison, “who may have been the frontier’s most feared gunfighter in the late 1870s and was likely the most unstable” but managed to avoid being gunned down by the brothers Earp in Dodge City. The Earps moved on to Tombstone, Arizona, a town full of Texas bad guys, and there engaged in the most famous gunfighter episode ever, the 30-second shootout at the O.K. Corral, most famous because best documented thanks to a remarkably comprehensive inquest. Along the way, Burrough writes of the mythmaking machinery of the pulps and Hollywood, the source of a flood of falsities, but he concludes—and this book helps in the task—that “the truth…tends to win in the end.”

A treat for Western history buffs who don’t mind plenty of debunking along the way.