Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 4d ago
Bryan Burrough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The wearing of guns was much more common on the southern frontier, the honor code a little more intense.
Dueling turned to killing a little more easily.
The writer William Oliver Stevens put it like this in a history of dueling from nineteen forty.
So I gotta tell you about two of these guys who kind of illustrate this transitional period.
The most infamous is probably Alexander Keith McClung, who was known as the Black Knight of the South, which you just have to love.
He was raised in Kentucky, and I think I can safely say the man had issues.
He was from a prominent family, the nephew of a Supreme Court justice.
McClung first joined the Navy, but was tossed out after he injured a man, you guessed it, in a duel.
So he went home.
There he killed a cousin of his in a duel.
At that point he had to leave home and so set up shop in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which was a hotbed of frontier duels.
That's where McClung made his reputation.
He became a lawyer and an editor, known for his flamboyant look, he liked to dress in a cape, and for his fits of rage.
Of his many duels, the most famous was the one in 1834, when he shot another lawyer in the mouth from over a hundred feet away, at the time an informal distance record.
McClung went on to serve in the Mexican War, then was appointed to a diplomatic post in Bolivia, dueling all the way until he committed suicide in 1855.
I imagine if he'd lived a little longer and moved a few states to the west, he'd easily have been known as one of the first gunfighters.
Another I'll put into this category is Jim Bowie, the Texas hero who died at the Alamo.
Bowie is the epitome of the many violent, honor sensitive southerners who moved west to the frontier.
In his early days, he was a slave trader who, along with his brothers, they ran a swindle involving bogus land claims in Louisiana and Arkansas.
Bowie first became famous in an 1827 duel they called the Sandbar Fight on a little island in the Mississippi River.
Showing 221–240 of 583 · page 12 of 30
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