Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 5d 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
But more important, goes on to claim that Hickok had killed many men like this before, like a lot of men, like m more than a hundred, which I mean is nuts.
Not counting anyone he might have shot during the war, because it happened during wartime, that wouldn't count.
The precise number of civilians Hickok had killed to that point would appear to be, you know, like
Two.
Four if you count the two guys he shot that other people finished off.
One of them with a garden hoe.
It's a great tale, and I can tell you about it when we get to Hickok's story.
But the truth of the article doesn't matter, not really.
What matters is that in one fail swoop, this one article created the idea of the Old West gunfighter, a kind of character or archetype that to that point simply didn't exist in the American imagination.
The notion that there were men wandering the American West shooting each other for business and pleasure, this is the moment when the whole idea of the Old West gunfighter was born.
Every Western gunfight you've ever seen in some movie or TV show, every gunfight maybe you've read about in Louis Lamore or Zane Gray novels.
Every gunfight you've ever heard of.
You can trace it all to that day when Hickok laid a navy colt across his arm and shot Davis Tutt through the heart.
And, Hickok's massive fibs aside, the idea of the gunfighter endured because there was so much truth behind it.
Something new, something never before seen in America, actually was afoot in those first years after the Civil War.
This is the beginning of the period I call the gunfighter era, the years when frontier figures such as Billy the Kid and White Earp and Wild Bill Hickok became famous for shooting other Americans.
It lasted from the moment Hickok took down Davis Tutt in 1865 until 1901, until the last marquee Western outlaws, Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid,
hounded by the Pingertons, boarded a freighter in Brooklyn and sailed down to South America.
It's an arbitrary date to end the story, but I think it works.
Western style gunfights still went on into the 20th century, but the frontier had closed, and with it the gunfighters of the old West began moving from the headlines to the history books.
Showing 401–420 of 583 · page 21 of 30
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