Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 2d ago
Bryan Burrough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Hey y'all, it's Brian again.
And today we're going to talk about the origins of Old West gunfighters, which is exactly the kind of nagging mystery that really gets me excited, because it's not at all obvious where these people came from.
There were no broadly famous American gunmen or even lawmen before the Old West.
There were frontiersmen and a bunch of nasty river pirates out on the Mississippi, but nobody was getting famous for firing guns.
Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett became famous enough, legends even, but no one ever called either one of them a gunfighter.
They killed far more bears and indigenous folks than fellow settlers.
Even after the first revolvers appeared in the 1830s, no one was getting famous for shooting people.
I mean seriously, you look at the history, and it seems like gunfighters kind of just came out of nowhere after the Civil War.
Suddenly there were just these, you know, guys running around the Western frontier shooting each other.
At least at first glance, it wasn't the kind of behavior you saw much of, at least in the newspapers, before the war.
So I began to search for a place gunfighters may have come from, and I ended up somewhere I never expected.
It's not where any other authors or researchers have gone either.
So first off, let's note that this is not a question a lot of people have actually delved into.
Let's face it, serious-minded college professors don't give men like Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holiday a ton of attention.
So the question of origins isn't something that's even addressed in most of the gunfighter books you can pick up out there.
But if you're trying to take this topic seriously, I think you have to go there.
From the beginning, I sensed the answer had to do with the behaviors inherent in gunfighting.
I wanted to first understand why the Old West was so incredibly violent.
In the last episode, we talked about how modern data techniques have now established beyond any serious debate that the Old West really was as bloody as a lot of people used to think.
Once you've proven that, the nagging question becomes, why?
Showing 21–40 of 583 · page 2 of 30
← Previous
Next →