Pistol Duels Existed Across the 19th-Century World, But Only the Chaos of the American West Produced Gunfighters

To understand American history and its deep-seated relationship with violence, we must look to the last three decades of the 1800s in the American West, which had the highest murder rate per capita in American history. And it all boils down to one place: Texas. Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north, and the invention of the Colt revolver only made the area wilder and less orderly. Across the nineteenth-century frontier defending one’s honor and reputation often resulted in duels and bitter feuds. After the cattle business boom, this sensation spilled into the greater West from Arizona to Wyoming to Kansas. The trigger-happy assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen, and their desire to defend their honor caught the eye of newspapers, igniting a firestorm of mythmaking. The word “gun-man” first appears in a newspaper in 1874, followed by an explosion of Western biographies and memoirs in the 1920s. 1940s-1950s Hollywood reimagined these gunfighters as leading men, introducing Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp to a new generation.

Today’s guest is Bryan Burrough, author of “The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild.” We explore how only in the American West could gunfighters exist, and what led to the death of this unique period in time.

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