Rejebian Series Presents Bryan Burrough: "The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild"

The Wild West gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it as a mere product of dime novels and B movies. As Bryan Burrough shows us, there’s much more below the surface. 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 reason behind this boils 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 northern occupiers turned the heat up further.

The explosion in the postwar cattle business took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across 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 veritable blood meridian. “The Gunfighters” brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.

About Bryan Burrough
Bryan Burrough is the author or coauthor of eight books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including the Wall Street classic “Barbarians at the Gate” and “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.” A longtime correspondent at Vanity Fair and now editor at large at Texas Monthly, he lives in Austin.