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 only thing missing from the classic duel structure were seconds.
The historian Dick Stewart has written that, quote, no Western figure better epitomized the transition from duelist to gunslinger than Wild Bill Hickok.
The fight, he wrote, marked the transition from the code duello to a new and far more lethal form of personalized combat.
Duels actually weren't that common in the Old West.
Even then, Westerners had little patience for rules and formalities.
What the Frontier had a lot of, though, and this is really a kind of casual duel, were disagreements or arguments that escalated into something more, often after what sounded like a throwaway line, but was actually effectively an invitation to duel.
It often used the word outside, as in, let's take this outside, or I'll see you outside.
You see a lot of that in the literature.
It wasn't the rules of the duel that flowed from the Old South to the Western frontier.
It was the causes.
The heart of so many gunfights, just like duels, was so often about settling a challenge to a man's honor.
You'll remember it was the necessity of defending his honor that Hickok cited for his gunfight in Springfield.
In the 1800s, thousands of Southerners went west.
Many of them didn't have much, but they did have their honor codes, and they had the understanding they'd grown up with that lawless violence was a permissible, even acceptable way to resolve their disputes.
On its way to the cow towns of Kansas and the mesas of New Mexico, this mindset hardened in a particularly violent place that produced so many of the gunfighters of the Old West.
That place was Texas.
Thanks for dropping in.
I'm Brian Burrah, and this has been episode two of the Gunfighters.
In the next episode, we'll take you into the dark days of Texas after the Civil War, where much of the Old West penchant for gunfighting was really boring.
Davis Tutt staggered forward, shouted, Boys, I'm killed, and keeled over dead.
Showing 261–280 of 583 · page 14 of 30
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