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
If you think of the classic Old West shootout, you know, two guys squared off in the middle of a dusty street, there's maybe a dozen like that I can cite from history.
But as to the bigger question around the validity of so much of this violence, well that turns out to be a lot closer to history than probably anyone at the time imagined.
So real quick, let me address this here, because you may be wondering this already.
Was the Old West really as violent as you so often see it portrayed in movies?
Beginning in the 60s, when so much accepted history began to be challenged by long-haired young professors, it became fashionable to say it wasn't, that all those gunfights were wildly overblown.
There's a whole academic debate around all this I'll spare you here.
The skepticism began to fall away in the 2000s when modern academics using big data systems began to examine frontier murder rates.
Long story short, a rate of nine murders per 100,000 deaths is considered high.
Researchers at Ohio State, examining those Kansas cowtowns like Abilene and Dodge City, came to the startling conclusion that they harbored murder rates between 53 and an astonishing 317.
Which is why we can say today with confidence that no, gunfighters didn't square off in the streets of Dodge City and Abilene every Saturday afternoon at four, these and many other frontier towns.
were in fact extraordinarily violent.
In other ways, though, the research that began during the 60s has produced all sorts of insights.
For all the time he was a lawman we now know, White Earp was actually also an escaped federal prisoner.
That's right, an escaped prisoner.
Arrested as a horse thief, he'd been thrown into jail in Arkansas and broke out with a bunch of other guys.
Two years later, he turns up as a deputy in Kansas.
The second deadliest of the many Texas gunfighters, a rough type known as Wild Bill Longley, you can hear his story in its own episode later, turns out to have been pretty much a complete fraud.
Arrested for a murder in central Texas, he spun out this incredible tale of roaming the West, killing people, like 40 people.
Before they hung him, he got a lot of press, and later a few books, and even a television series, before an intrepid modern
Modern-day researcher figured out it was all a bunch of bull.
Showing 521–540 of 583 · page 27 of 30
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