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The Gunfighters - How Texas Made the West Wild (Hardcover)
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The Gunfighters - How Texas Made the West Wild (Hardcover)
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The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular
culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of
dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history.
In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new
book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end
of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of
change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history.
The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.
Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and
the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the
Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something
wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the
Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers
turned the heat up further. And the explosion in the cattle business
after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across
the whole of the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it
an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who
carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable
blood meridian. When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered
what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started
spinning. It’s never stopped.
The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both
elements their due. And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the
most unhinged tastes. All the legendary figures are here, and their
escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly. Like all great
stories, this one has a rousing end—as the railroads and the settlers
close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South
America, ending their era in a blaze of glory. Burrough knits these
histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than
simply the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West
is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.
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