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
In fact, it took a long time for the Old West gunfighter to really connect with the American imagination.
I mean, all through the 1860s and 70s, shootings on the frontier got the kind of press coverage you'd pretty much expect.
The most obscure ones, especially those that happened away from population centers, were often ignored or never heard about at all.
Those that happened in and around towns tended to draw the most newspaper.
paper attention.
But by and large, these were treated the way we treat deadly shootings today as individual crimes.
It took a while for reporters to really catch on to the idea that the men repeatedly involved in these shootings were truly a thing, a gunfighter, someone to be followed, like you would follow a politician or a baseball player.
It really wasn't until the early 1880s, almost twenty years after that first Missouri gunfight, that the gunfighter idea begins to catch on.
It's then, for instance, that when Clay Allison would visit another city on a cattle buying or selling trip, the reporters would clamber up and ask him about killing people.
It's then that the Eastern newspapers first discovered gentleman gunfighters like Ben Thompson of Texas, who would take the time to sit and explain to an Eastern tin horn his rules for honorably killing men.
The word gunfighter first appeared in American newspaper in 1884.
For the longest time, though, the preferred term was gunman or gunman.
Even then, though, gunfighters weren't exactly a source of real fascination.
Just looking at the Dime novels and the pulp fiction of the period, Indian fighters and cowboys and even detectives got a lot more ink than gunfighters.
When Hickok appeared in an old West show back east, he was
Actually, kind of a flop.
I think one of the reasons for this ambivalence is that many people couldn't figure out whether a gunfighter was a good guy or a bad guy.
I mean, it took years to think of gunfighters the way you might think of lawyers.
There were plenty of good ones, plenty of bad ones.
Gunfighters, in fact, didn't really become a thing until the 20th century, when Hollywood films discovered them.
Showing 461–480 of 583 · page 24 of 30
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