Ep. 02: Wait, Gunfighters Came From Where?
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What historical event launches the story of dueling in America?
This is an IHR podcast. Guaranteed human. Meat eater and best-selling author Brian Burrow present Gunfighters, a new podcast series about the American West and the violence that made its most legendary figures infamous.
Davis Tutt staggered forward, shouted, Boys, I'm killed, and keeled over dead.
Listen to Gunfighters starting on September 15th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
At dawn on the morning of july eleventh, eighteen oh four, boats brought two gentlemen through a heavy mist across the Hudson River from Manhattan. On the far shore, the New Jersey shore, in a field beneath a bank of towering bluffs that still line the river today, seven or eight of their friends got to work clearing brush to stage the event they had come for. When they finished, the two gentlemen took positions ten paces from each other. One of these men was Alexander Hamilton, a former Secretary of the US Treasury. The other was Aaron Burr, That morning, as he stood facing Hamilton, Burr was Vice President of the United States. A shiny wooden box was brought forward and opened. From it, Burr and Hamilton lifted out identical English flitlock pistols with nine-inch smoothbore barrels.
Burr didn't own guns. These were being furnished by Hamilton's brother-in-law. The two men intended to fire them at each other. This was to be a duel. Burr and Hamilton had exchanged insults for much of their public lives. He'd finally come to this. Accounts of what happened next vary, but most agree that one of their friends, maybe the young doctor, explained the rules and watched as the two loaded their pistols. Then, once they were ready, he shouted the word present, as in present arms. What happened next was something no one could have expected. He would rock the country and change the history of how Americans handled their disputes. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tacovis, good boats for good times.
Hey y'all, it's Brian again. And today we're going to talk about the origins of Old West gunfighters, which is exactly the kind of nagging mystery that really gets me excited, because it's not at all obvious where these people came from. There were no broadly famous American gunmen or even lawmen before the Old West. There were frontiersmen and a bunch of nasty river pirates out on the Mississippi, but nobody was getting famous for firing guns. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett became famous enough, legends even, but no one ever called either one of them a gunfighter. They killed far more bears and indigenous folks than fellow settlers.
Why did the Hamilton‑Burr duel change American attitudes toward personal violence?
Even after the first revolvers appeared in the 1830s, no one was getting famous for shooting people. I mean seriously, you look at the history, and it seems like gunfighters kind of just came out of nowhere after the Civil War. Suddenly there were just these, you know, guys running around the Western frontier shooting each other. At least at first glance, it wasn't the kind of behavior you saw much of, at least in the newspapers, before the war. So I began to search for a place gunfighters may have come from, and I ended up somewhere I never expected. It's not where any other authors or researchers have gone either. So first off, let's note that this is not a question a lot of people have actually delved into.
Let's face it, serious-minded college professors don't give men like Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holiday a ton of attention. So the question of origins isn't something that's even addressed in most of the gunfighter books you can pick up out there. But if you're trying to take this topic seriously, I think you have to go there. From the beginning, I sensed the answer had to do with the behaviors inherent in gunfighting. I wanted to first understand why the Old West was so incredibly violent. In the last episode, we talked about how modern data techniques have now established beyond any serious debate that the Old West really was as bloody as a lot of people used to think. Once you've proven that, the nagging question becomes, why?
Which takes me to the most basic question you can ask here.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What historical event launches the story of dueling in America?
0:00–3:05
2
Why did the Hamilton‑Burr duel change American attitudes toward personal violence?
3:05–6:43
3
How did Southern honor culture create a fertile ground for dueling?
6:43–12:13
4
What role did immigrants from Britain and Ireland play in spreading dueling in the U.S.?
12:13–17:42
5
How did the Southern dueling tradition evolve into the frontier gunfighter era?
17:42–22:18
6
Why are figures like Alexander Keith McClung and Jim Bowie key to the transition from duels to gunfights?
22:18–27:03
7
What made Wild Bill Hickok’s 1865 showdown the turning point from duels to gunfighting?
27:03–29:01
8
How does the episode conclude on the legacy of gunfighters in the American West?
29:01–29:53
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Gunfighters
Ep. 01: When Gunfighters Stalked the Old West
Introducing: Gunfighters, with Bryan Burrough
Ep. 42: Favorite Films About the West | The American West
Ep. 41: Favorite Books About the West | The American West
Ep. 40: Becoming Natives of Place in the American West | The American West
Ep. 39: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part II | The American West