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.
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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
Which takes me to the most basic question you can ask here.
Why shoot a man in the first place?
And why did it happen so often on the old frontier?
Historians have actually been debating this for years, and at a glance it would seem easy to explain.
Wide open, unsettled spaces usually means less law enforcement, so there are fewer consequences for any kind of violence.
Worse, frontiers all over the world have always tended to draw restless, unstable young men who are inclined to alleviate the boredom of undeveloped space with alcohol, which has to explain.
a lot of it, right?
But as I first mentioned in my book, The Gunfighters, How Texas Made the West Wild, too few sheriffs and too much booze doesn't explain why people shoot each other.
Has to be a reason, even a stupid one.
Was there a distinct reason so many men shot each other in the Old West?
Was there something unique about the time and place?
Because the phenomena of the gunfighter didn't happen everywhere, not in Canada or China or Scadz.
other frontiers.
What was it about the Old West in the late 1800s?
I came to believe the gunfighter era was the product of an unusual intersection of new technology, commerce, and American culture.
Culture, I think, is the underexplored variable here.
A gunfight, after all, was a product of certain human behaviors, mostly the whys and whens of personal violence during the 1800s.
Today, when we have a dispute, we turn to the police or a lawsuit or the internet.
In the old west, yeah, not really.
In the old West, I came to believe, customs revolved around the best ways to settle disputes.
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