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
Now, though, in the first years after the war, you can find writers and memoirists marveling at how
Sidearms, especially in the south and in rural areas, were becoming a common part of a man's wardrobe.
much like neckties or spectacles.
What that meant, it soon became obvious, was a drastic change in the ways many Americans began to settle their disputes.
Where once a disagreement might have been settled by the era's uncommonly nasty fistfights, some states actually had to make eye gouging a crime.
The emergence of personal sidearms changed everything.
Quote, Fist and Skullfighting has played out here, a Missouri memoirist noted in 1866.
They now do that business in a more prompt manner.
The sudden spread of sidearms, though, was only one of several new phenomena that arose out on the Western frontier in those years, each of which not only fascinated Americans back east, but also contributed to the emergence of gunfighters.
Seven months after the Hickok shootout came the country's first peacetime bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri, pulled off by a gang of former Confederate rebels that probably included a teenager named Jesse James.
A year after that came the first train robbery in Indiana.
And a year after that came what might have been the most important factor in the rise of gunfighters: the first serious cattle drives, hundreds of cows driven up from Texas, hundreds of miles, first to Missouri, later to Kansas.
All these activities created opportunities for gunplay, especially the rise of the ultraviolet cattle industry.
As we'll see, those Kansas cow towns soon emerged.
As the first notable theater of gunfighter-style shootouts, as masses of unruly Texas cowboys first came face to face with northern lawmen who didn't appreciate having their domiciles shot up by drunken drovers.
It's amazing how many talented gunfighters, from Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson to Doc Holliday and Ben Thompson, were first noticed by the press.
In those towns.
For a time, they kind of became the Madison Square Garden of the gunfighter era, a place where all the heavyweights fought.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here, because you're probably thinking that gunfighters, at least after Hickok's first face-off there in Missouri, immediately became a source of public fascination.
They did not.
Showing 441–460 of 583 · page 23 of 30
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