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Brian Burrow, Dude, this book makes me so happy, like like I love reading it.

I'm not done with it, I'm halfway through it.

I love reading it.

Well, I'm happy for you.

It is how you could have so much fun reading about so many people getting shot.

Well, that was the primary challenge of the book.

Sure is how to convey one's enthusiasm for a pastime and get people to keep reading a book that is, you know, averages three or four dead people every page or so.

Yeah, it's incredible.

A lot of the reading I do, I have to read stuff just because I'm reading it for work research stuff.

Right, this is my this is me.

Like when I want to have fun, I work on reading your book.

It's not work.

I just I love the book.

Well, thank you, I as you can probably tell love to doing it.

Yeah, you know, I've kind of reached the age I'm sixty three where I stop doing stuff I don't want to do, OK, And I just want to pursue projects that I really want to go disappear into a room and learn about for five, six, seven years.

This we took seven and dude, I've been reading about gunfighters since sixth grade, since I was eleven.

This is a book I'm wanted to do for like fifty years.

You're from Texas, A Yeah, and as you point out, we'll get into it.

Texas is like.

Just kind of is a force that pushes gun fighters out into the American West.

It's probably the most important of the number sources.

Yeah, I think that's fair to say.

Yeah, you got a bunch of you got a bunch of books.

I'm gonna tell people about your books because they might recognize some of them.

Barbarians at the Gate.

You have eight books, four New York Times bestsellers, Public Enemies, America's greatest crime wave, in the Birth of the FBI nineteen thirty three to thirty four, The Big Rich, The Rise and Fall of the greatest Texas oil families.

Forget the Alamo, the rise and fall of an American myth.

When you talk about that for a second, I haven't read that one.

And we're here now to discuss the gunfighters.

How Texas made the Wild West?

Can we touch on the Alimal?

Yeah?

What am I saying?

How Texas made the West wild?

I don't have my glasses on two ws.

I get it well.

Not only that it's Krin put it in italics?

Which one?

You're as you as you age.

As you age and you.

Start losing your ability to see letters up close, italics is becomes your worst enemy.

Metallics as hell, Yeah, it becomes.

Your worst You just leave your glasses on at all times.

Yeah, I could leave mine name, but then this would be clear and you'd get blurry.

It's like a real time.

Drop them down.

Is that what you're doing right now?

I thought you just did that to look pretentious.

That's what happens when you get old.

Because no matter what, if you got a hoodie and a hat on, I don't care what you do with your glasses, you're not gonna look.

I just's if I put doctor in my there's a certain.

Feeling when someone looks at you over the top of their glasses.

It makes me think that I did something like get authoritative.

Yeah, it's a power move.

I feel like, what's your take do you think?

Do you think uh see, you're from Texas.

I don't know if you're not gonna give a straight answer, because Texas get prickly about this subject.

Do you think Crockett, uh Crocketts they caught him alive?

Or do you think that Crockett got killed in action?

The versions that we have from people on the ground, which are Mexican soldiers, but just let's face it, all the Americans died.

There are multiple versions that say that he was captured and executed.

Yeah, so you believe that.

I don't have any reason not to.

I mean, it's the only non fiction based source for Crockett information.

Most of kind of the famous stuff about him swinging Old Betsy is kind of neo fiction.

Yeah, so, no source.

It's a good point you're saying, the only.

Sources that could have described what happened at the end of the battle would be Mexican soldiers, right, And there's no source that ever came forward to say, oh no, Crockett went down swinging his rifle.

The problem is, for years that just made sense, right.

We didn't really have much information until decades after the battle about that some people might be captured.

For the longest time, it was just assumed that everybody died because ultimately they died.

The idea that some of them were executed after being captured is in an idea that really didn't start popping up till maybe fifty years after the battle.

Got it?

Got it?

What's your primary argument in the book?

Like I said, I haven't read it.

I'd like to, but why I forget the Alamo?

Well, we at Texans have put are enormously proud of our creation and should be.

But you know, we wrote the book with a sense that we love history.

We love the accurate stories of history.

We don't believe that the accurate stories of history make Texas any less special.

I think the argument that got people most irked was when you go back and you read Steven F.

Austin and the Father of Texans memoirs.

When you go back and read a lot of people, do you realize that the primary driver that split Texas from Mexico was the Texans insistence that they could only live there if they were to use slaves to bring in their cotton, because that's why they came.

That's the only way they knew to raise cotton.

And so for that first ten years, from eighteen twenty to eighteen thirty, that was primarily what they were arguing about.

And there's ample evidence of that.

Got it, got it, And you dig into that in the story.

Oh yeah, yeah, uh, I got a bone to pick with you about this one here.

Okay, yeah, I.

Don't really get a thing you did.

So everyone that reviewed your book.

I read a bunch of reviews of your book, which are all good.

I haven't found any bad ones yet, and they're all like, all the reviewers get a kick out of you saying that Hitcock was a Titanic fraud.

Okay, yes, the Hitcock was a fraud.

Hitcock wasn't a badass.

He wasn't the ultimate gunfighter like people think he might have been.

I argue that he was came into view as a Titanic fraud.

No, you say he was a Titanic fraud.

Well, and then you go on to totally contradict yourself at that point, he was a tight because you're blaming you're blaming Hitcock.

So Hitcock, just a refresh, you could tell the story.

I'm just gonna give a little quick outline just so you understand my gripe.

Some journalists early on in Hitcock's life, some journalists or some you know what passed for a journalists in those days, interviews Hitcock or whatever and comes out saying, oh, Hitcock killed one hundred men with his pistol, and all Hitcock Hitcock doesn't contradict him.

Hitcock's like he wants to say that that's fine, and then goes on to shoot all kinds of people.

And you're saying he's a Titanic fraud.

But it's not his fault.

He couldn't control what the guy said.

And we don't.

I don't argue that it was his fault.

No reason, The same reason, the same reason with Johnny Ringo.

Johnny Ringo is a Titanic fraud and he never once made a claim.

They were all made years after his death.

With Hiccock, yeah he was the only reason you know his name is that article by oh yeah, you never know of him otherwise.

But you start the book with him shooting a guy.

Yes, but that does not make you some notable gunfighter, that you shot one guy.

What makes you the nation's first gunfighter is to claim that you shot a hundred guys when the actual number at that point would appear to be like two.

That's how you build a reputation, I know.

But I just think Titanic fraud.

I was thinking when I said that when I read that in the reviews, I don't want to start out negative here.

When I read that in the reviews, I thought, Okay, he's going to dismantle Hickcock.

But then I'm reading the book and I'm like, the one hundred that notwithstanding that hundred thing, he still was kind of a remarkable gunfighter.

I yes, but when he first became known, he became known for what I think was a fraud fact that he killed over one hundred people.

I think it's notable about him is that after that you can argue, as I think you're trying to, that he grew, that he grew into his legend, that he became a notable lawman and became a notable gunfighter.

But I'm sorry, when it was first written in eighteen sixty seven, he wasn't okay.

Like I say, you win, but lay out the premise of the book, like how you lay it out in the beginning.

You know, you kind of fine, first, you kind of go like what is a gunfighter?

Like what is and you kind of you kick around different people that carried pistols and different Western icons, and then you settle at when I say a gunfighter, here's what I mean.

Yeah, the first thing to do is to define our terms.

A gunfighter is generally acknowledged as someone who was involved in exchanges of gunfire among civilians on the on the old Western frontier, so not involving soldiers military of any kind, and not involving Native Americans generally speaking.

What I set out to do was I identified, you know what, what do all these guys that have in common, from wide Europe to Hiccock to Jesse James.

The only thing they really had in common is a they got famous shooting people, mostly for shooting people.

And it all happened during a period from eighteen sixty five till I ended at nineteen oh one.

So I've grandly dubbed this the gunfighter Era.

And I set out to tell a narrative history of those thirty six years.

And you set out explaining, uh, sort of asking this question, why is it, why does it seemed to be Texans?

Well, that was one of the first things you notice if you read, if you immerse yourself in this literature, is that if you look at what I call the Marquee gunfights, that is the famous ones, the ones that made the newspapers in the history books, a startling thing leaps out at you almost immediately, and that's the sheer number of Texans who were involved in these gunfights.

I would argue someplay, if you totted them up, I would say between fifty and seventy percent of these gun of these famous gunfights from Kansas to Texas to New Mexico, Wyoming and Arizona involved Texans.

At first, that didn't make a lot of sense because not to get all into it here.

But I only discovered late brogan to understood how there was this Tayek, this Texas diaspora, this spread of Texans across the frontier that came with the spread of longhorn cattle.

If you look at the great cattle ranches, the great cattle herds from Montana all the way down to Arizona, ninety percent of them came from one place.

They came from Texas, and they came with.

Texas, and they came with pistols.

They sure as I did.

Look, Look, I would never argue that Texans created the gunfighter archetype or certainly created gun gun violence in the West.

They didn't.

I wouldn't want to overstate this.

But what I'm saying is that Texans had an impact on what we remember that's far more or significant than we remember.

And you get into it in the beginning of the book.

You get into this, this this idea of that people wanted to would defend their honor at all costs, and you kind of talk about how they had these that at that time it seemed that people had like somewhat fragile egos.

Well, that's one way to see, that's one way to see.

That's not your word when you look.

At their behavior, that's the way it seems to us.

I think another way to interpret this is that during the nineteenth century, at the eighteen hundreds, at a time where we didn't have a whole lot of university degrees or financial statements for ordinary men and women to brag about, what emerged, especially in the South, that I'm arguing gravitated out onto the Western Frontier was a male honor system that well, it's a little it's almost hard to explain it, but it's a little like pornography.

I know it when I see it.

You know, when I have attacked your honor, maybe I call you ugly, or your wife or your dog.

The thing about the Southern honor system, or really you could argue the American honor system in those days, is if you felt your honor had been impugned, if you've been insulted, you had an opportunity and in many cases, an obligation to respond with violence, even deadly violence.

You know that famously.

I mean, I argue in the book that the genesis of all this gunfighter behavior was duels.

Duels back in the Old South.

That's really the only place you can point to American men shooting each other in kind of structured contest with guns before this.

You know, that's the thing that people talk about, how caustic American politics has become.

Artstick to myself, not like then, dude, I mean like people, you'd have.

An election, the election would be resolved, and it'd be like it'd be like Biden, It'd be like Biden and Trump would the election to be over Trump's like, I don't you know, there's a fishiness to the results.

They'd be like, okay, let's have a duel and well at noon.

Whoever, that'll wind up being like that, that'll wind up being the final say.

The voters, in fact, have not spoken.

In the years leading up to the war, there were fist fights and worse on the floor of Congress, as well as any number of duels involving politicians.

Andrew Jackson, as you know, was involved in one, Abraham Lincoln almost was until he talked his way out of it.

And our great Texas President Sam Houston was involved in one which he aimed a little low and ended up shooting the other gentleman in the crotch.

You know, what was that role you explained?

It's not ever heard of it before.

What was that role in a duel?

Like where you bring like your second Yeah, you bring like an advocate?

Explain that?

Can you explain that duel?

In the formal duel as laid out in rules written by the Governor of South Carolina in eighteen thirty seven, you were you know, it laid out exactly how this is supposed to happen.

Now, how often people went by the former rules.

I can't argue.

But one of the things you did see in many, if not most duels, is the you would bring a buddy who was officially called your second, and they would you know, kind of argue for the reasons that they should have a duel and should not have a duel, and you know, often people went ahead with it.

But the main place where you where the duel where the second could come in is if one of you broke the rules.

Let's say I fired at you and then fired again before anyone was allowed, the second could take a shot at you.

And so there were all sorts of famous duels where like joke, there are all sorts of duels where like Joe and Jim would go out to an island in the Mississippi, they would shoot at each other from from ten paces and then miss.

And the famous one of these involved the Texas yer, old Jim Bowie, who was a second, and both men were so angry and their seconds were so angry they just a melee, you know, broke out and they started shooting each other.

And Bowie had this, you know, six foot short sort of a nice knife, the famous Bowie knife.

So I almost don't want to emphasize the formal rules of duels too much because I think there were many more that were informal.

But the fact that there were formal rules speaks to how prevalent it was and widely accepted.

Yeah, you know, the funny thing you saw in the South from the high water mark of duels, which is say the seventeen nineties in the eighteen thirties, which I know overlaps with some of your work, is a sense that everybody said, you weren't supposed to do it.

The preachers want women's associations.

Formerly, you weren't supposed to do it.

But everybody was like, wink, wink, this is the greatest things that slice bread.

I mean, nobody ever got no sheriff ever walked out into the middle of a field yelling stop, you're all under arrest.

And they'd have like towns that have a a formal maybe not formal, but they would have a they would have a what you well understood to be the dueling grounds.

Yeah.

Every southern statey not just some every single one.

I can't you know.

Saint Louis had an island out I think they call it Bloody Island.

Out in the Mississippi.

Uh.

The famous one, the most famous one was you could still go there in the Oaks and underneath the Oaks and City Park in New Orleans at the end of vestipl In made.

And you know, there were so many duels there during the eighteen thirties, you practically have to make an appointment.

There were some Sundays right right, because there would be ten or twelve duels on a single afternoon.

Now the big asterisk there is in New Orleans.

Duels were almost always done with swords rather than guns, and typically those duels ended when one man drew blood.

That's the French connection exactly.

He talked about too, a style of duel where you take like you and me bind are.

Left hands, right, and then you get a knife.

Dude, that's a wicked google right there.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like me and Randall, we bouting on them.

Me and Randall clasp our hands left our class, our.

Left hands, and they bind them, tie them.

Yeah, what if you're a lefty, that's what.

That's my mold.

Right.

Then you complain, Yeah, your second has got to make a case for you.

Yeah, and then you then you're like on the counter three, and you each got a knife and your hands are tied and on the counter three.

Go go stab you in this fight wherever fight.

Yeah, it was a you know, a structured knife fight from a distance of about two and a half feet.

The only problem with that is I, at least I was unable to find a single one in the non fiction annals of history.

It remains popular in some movies.

If you remember the Long Riders nineteen eighty Walter Hill movie of the James Gang, there was a beautiful one involving Cole Younger and Sam Starr.

The problem is we just can't find any that you know, actually actually happened.

We run into that a lot with our audio projects.

There's just stories that you hear about the mountain men did this, or the mountain men did that, and then you spend months reading every mountain man account you can find, and it just seems to be an invention of later authors.

Or I prefer to call it folklore, folk suggesting that they're probably and I suspect this did this practice that we're talking about now did not arise out of nowhere.

It came from something.

But the thing is they didn't have Harvard professors with them in Wyoming in eighteen thirty one, and a lot of those guys didn't live to author memoirs.

So I don't doubt that there were incidents where men tied their hands together and went after the wind knives.

I just think that a lot of documentation about that stuff in the early especially in the earlier Frontier, is pretty pre sparse.

I'm from Michigan.

Do you think that I could pull like if you saw me running around?

I keep thinking about switching to those shirts you got on, but I feel like it'd be like, uh, you know what I mean, might not be cool if I switched to a Yavar being from Michigan.

What would you think.

I think you can pull it off?

Really?

Oh yeah, now, I mean if you're I think it's a geographic thing.

I think it's harder to pull off north of Texas, north of areas that don't have a large Latino population.

I think he's also age appropriate.

I don't see a ton of twenty five year olds or youngsters your age wearing them.

But once I got to sixty, I.

Was I'm fifty years old.

Okay, well, you're coming up on the age of my body.

Brad from Texas.

He wears the same shirts.

They're the most comfortable thing you can wear.

God, I want to switch bad.

That's close to trying to pull off a cowboy hat.

I'm worried about.

Yeah, it's what I'm worried about.

I want to buy five or six, get rid of all my other shirts and just run.

Why of ours?

I got ten or twelve?

And in Texas we can wear eleven months a year.

And uh, they're just they're just comfortable as I'll get as I'll get out.

He's looking at the writer in that Son of a Bitch.

No, see, I've also been I've also been told I look like a waiter.

No, not to me, man, you look like a Texan and a writer.

Well thank you.

Uh you mentioned James Gang.

Yeah, you are one of the I kind of laughed out loud in your book where you like, I don't want to put Jesse James in my Gunfighter book.

I'm only putting him here because you think he should be in here, it's true, And then you go on to explain at great length why he does not belong your book.

Jesse James killed people with guns, but we are talking about the Old West.

And Jesse James was most certainly not a creature of the Old West.

He was a Midwestern bank and train robber.

He he pulled Johnson, Minnesota in Alabama.

Why do people think he's a Western guy?

Because the dime novels in the pulp fiction that came after him, for some reason, began gravitating his story, which is extensively in Missouri out west, because that's where people expected bang bang and gunfighters and bank robbers and all that.

Yeah, you even explained in that chapter people didn't rob banks in the.

West, well, not until the eighteen nineties.

It was all but unheard of because there's no money.

There just wasn't enough hard currency.

The one place where you could rob something making serious money was trains, and even that was pretty rare.

Yeah, the banks, like oh sorry, oh no, sorry.

I was just the other point that you made in there that I appreciated was there's people shooting each other in Eastern cities all the time, and they're not Obviously there is a higher rate of violence in the West and in Texas, but you're like, no one's writing, you know, folklore about somebody shooting someone on the streets of Brooklyn or anything like that.

But there's this whole cultural.

Now there's a whole genre of music about that called gangster rep Yeah.

Well, I mean it's a similar thing, like there's certain parts of the country that you associate with violence, but there's violence ever where it's only what the.

Culture chooses to focus fixate on.

Right.

Well, that was one of the first things that I had to confront is, Hey, let's face it, gunfighters do not seem to be a hugely important aspect of our history.

There's no political or sociological impact in nothing that would justify putting them in a history book, a textbook.

So I had to figure out why is it we're still talking about them one hundred and fifty years And obviously where I came down is that they are important culturally for America.

We have decided that there is something in these exploits that connects with us.

There's a reason that gunfighters became an aspect of twentieth century, especially entertainments of movies and literature.

And I don't spend a lot of time trying to get all academic about why they were important, but I do think I had to address at least address why you know this the only gunfighters that anybody remembers rose in America on the frontier in that thirty five year old in that thirty five year period, I.

Want to ask you a question that's like a twenty first twentieth century, twenty first century gun control spin.

On that era.

Would that gunfighter era have occurred without the proliferation of six shooters, like after the Civil War?

Like when that technology part.

Of the book?

Yeah, Yeah, I think you have to argue they were.

I mean, what made the gunfighter era possible?

What made all these famous shootings possible was the invention of the revolver by Samuel Colt in the lighteen eighteen thirties and its adoption and thus popularization by the Texas Rangers in the eighteen forties.

When you talk about the phenomenon that we call today open car Carrie, it was not unknown before the revolver.

You can find memoirists who toured southern areas and rural areas that are like, gosh, I saw a guy carrying a gun this in Arkansas in eighteen thirty seven.

But after the war, especially after in eighteen sixty five and eighteen sixty six, the federal government auctioned off or gave away something the order of one point three million dollars one point three million side arms.

I think you have to acknowledge that open carry became not only prevalent but accepted.

There you can find memoirs writing about at the time who were like, good lord, can you believe men are wearing guns like they used to wear bow ties?

And I think I think that these gun fights, what you needed for them to happen were revolvers, something where you can fire a lot so cause a lot of mayhem.

You don't really have gun fights pre war.

Back in the day with a primary handgun was a single shot.

Short gun fight.

Yeah, you know, the typical duel be bang bang, and then everybody takes ten minutes to reload.

Yeap oh, And there's a very similar phenomena.

I mean, I'm not just vaguely.

The Tommy gun arrived too late on the scene in World War One to really be issued to troops, so they sold all of those after the war, like in hardware stores, right, And that's the rise of okid of the nineteen twenties gangster.

I would I wrote an entire book that that that argued, in part I knew.

You could speak that, which is why I brought up my face.

Either spread of surplus Tommy guns in the twenties did as much to create al caponent as anything else, because suddenly if you could shoot hundred rounds a minute or whatever it was some sheriff named Goober out in Iowa was just you know, he he's not gonna be able to face off with you.

Yeah, you know, uh, you know, I want to I want to talk about the Colt Pistol, but I want to back up to Mint, to the man that doesn't belong in the book, but he's in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, can you explain to folks like who was Jesse James?

Like, like, what did that world that he came out of?

Right?

Because that winds up having a little bit of an impact on a number of these people, it does.

Yeah, that's some of the goings ons in the Civil War shaped a lot of these individuals.

One of the things that a number of the early gunfighters, those who kind of began their careers in the late eighteen sixties have in common is a number of them, from Jesse James to John Wesley Harden of Texas to Doc Holliday, were inveterate and angry Southerners.

Jesse James was the biggest one in terms of his fame.

He was a teenage boy during the Civil War whose brother Frank was out there fighting at a time that the warfare in Missouri was much less about the movement of armies and much more about rural gorillas descending on farms and burning up farms and such.

Frank was into that Jesse joined him.

Jesse was shot twice in the chest during the war, survived, and then goes utterly black for four years.

We don't know much about him, but we do know that many of the Confederate guerrillas known as bushwhackers did begin to engage in crime in Missouri in the late eighteen sixties.

And the first time we see Jesse and Frank, the first time they walk out onto the pages of history, is eighteen sixty nine and Gallatin, Missouri, far north.

They walk into a bank ostensively to rob it, but you learn immediately that robbery was just second.

They go up to a gentleman who's sitting at a desk, and they call him by a name, let's say Burluson, whatever it was, and shoot him in the hat.

They thought he had this guy had killed one of their commanding officers.

They were there to exactly they were wrong and they killed the wrong guy.

That led to Jesse and Frank forming a group that two years later began robbing banks and continued very successful for ten years.

Jesse James in his career as a bank and train robber.

What's important, what's important for people to understand is what a unicorn he was.

There was nobody like this in the country that was doing this, that was doing it this much or making this money.

And when you look at the entirety of this period from eighteen sixty five and nineteen oh one, there's nobody else that comes closed.

I mean, if you wanted to say who is the second most successful outlaw of the Old West, if you put Jesse James at the top, you'd probably say Butch cast was a distant second.

But Jesse James was the first household name criminal in American history.

But he was not, as you point out, he was not a gunfighter.

You say he was just a murderer.

Well, he never actually even did anything that we can figure out west of the Missouri Kansas line, which is kind of the beginning of the Old West.

When you look at the people that Jesse James shot five or six.

Everyone was essentially executed with a shot to the head because he did something that pissed Jesse off during a robbery.

Yeah, it wasn't like going out into the street and being like draw.

It was he was a shoot.

He to shoot people.

The only time we knew Jesse James was in a legitimately contentious gunfight situation.

A detective out of Saint Louis somehow stumbled upon him and one of his cousins on a wooded road in Missouri in the eighteen seventies and the detective came right up to him and there was an exchange of gunfire.

All three guys missed at a distance of like fifteen feet.

Like you can look at some of these gunfighters.

Hitcock, Ben Thompson, the Texan, Butch Cassidy, who did an awful lot of practicing.

Billy the Kid practiced daily, as did Hitcock.

There's not a single story that I could find in any of the ten Jesse James biographies I read that showed Jesse James ever practiced with a gun, And I think it shows.

He's the kind of guy that would go out and buy one box am when it would last ten hunting seasons.

Yeah, like when I was a kid.

If you own a box amb, well yeah, it's good for like twenty shells.

You're like, oh, that would be good for fifteen sixteen deer every few years.

I'll make sure it's my gun still accurate.

Well.

The thing to remember about Jesse James is if he's in a gunfight, he's failed.

You know, he wants to be able to walk into a bank point a gun, maybe shoot a single shot into the ceiling, and get out with the money before anybody notices him.

So there's a reason that he probably didn't hone his gun skills.

Who wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford?

It was.

He's a real good writer, Robert Hanson.

Was Hanson.

Someone type that didn't read the book.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford?

It was made Ron Ron Hanson, Ron Hanson.

That's the hell of a book.

Are you?

Are you much so?

So?

Robert Ford kills James.

Robert Ford kills Jesse James.

Yes, Bob Ford kills Jesse James.

Do you haven't read much about the guy that then killed Bob Ford.

No, I put it in a footnote.

I know that he was killed by a guy that basically walked into a bar he owned or was working in.

Ten fifteen years later.

Many different versions of what happened, it's agreed upon that he shot him with a double barreled shotgun.

Well, you know, there is there is a there's a fence around this book.

There there are places that I kind of go up to the fence and going okay, that's probably a footnote.

I'm not going to read through three more books.

Hanson, Ron Hanson, that was his name, Ron Hanson.

Robert Hanson, the FBI All of a sudden.

The Ron Hanson's the author with author, So he writes a novel.

But it's like very informed.

Right in there he has his detail that the guy kills Robert Ford has a coach gun, has a shotgun, and he took a bunch of pipe, cut the pipe and little teeny discs, and then took a hammer and chisel and cut those diss into little shards, and then took a funnel and funneled the shards down into the shotgun.

Because when you're reading about the guy that when you're reading about the guy that killed Bob Ford.

Everybody talks about he was nearly cutting half.

Some say cutting half at the way, some say cutting half at the jaw, but it's agreed upon that he was very shot up.

And I was wondering if you knew about that detail that's true or not about filling that gun full of pipe shavings, which is a dirty deed.

I don't, and I feel like a personal failure that I can't address that for him.

But you know what, here's what, here's where you can find cover for yourself.

You argue that he shouldn't even be in your book.

So the last thing you need to do is spend a whole bunch of time talking about the guy that.

Was out and then the guy that killed him.

It's just getting very removed story.

At some point, you got to realize people probably are not going to read the eight hundred page version of this, So I do have to make I have to make a.

Lot of calls gunfighters speed versus accuracy.

You know, that was the thing that would debate.

It was typically journalists that would ask them, and we don't have a ton of those interviews and exchanges, but of those we do.

Arp was weighed in on this, as did Hitcock.

Those men who lived long enough to tell the story argued strongly in favor of accuracy.

That the dumb ass thing to do, and you see people doing it repeatedly through the in this book, is to draw and shoot from the hip.

Just as as as a question of accuracy, especially at distance, that's pretty questionable.

In the in the in the gunfight that opens the book, in which while Bill Hiccock kills this fellow, Davis Tutt at seventy five.

Yards the Titanic fraud, while Bill Hiccock kills a man at seventy five yards because that's right.

Uh, you know, Tut fired from the hit Hitcock famously had a Navy colt.

He thrust his left arm forward, placed the barrel of the Navy colt across his forearm, took what a millisecond longer than the other guy, and shot him in the chest.

Yeah, there you have it.

I did the same thing an you know, any number of people he shot in the OK Corral fight.

You know, I forget the guy's name.

Shot made the mistake of shooting from the.

Hip, yep, And he would draw a bead on him, Yes, Uh, the Colt pistol.

It didn't take I couldn't believe when I was reading this that it wasn't immediately popular.

It was the Colt Revolver like people didn't want it.

No, the original was introduced in like I was say, eighteen thirty seven, about a year after the Alma, and it was large, and it was unwieldy, and it could take five six minutes to to mean you practically had to dismantle it to reload it.

So while Colt was able to unload some of these onto the federal government and was used were told during the Florida's Seminole War in the early eighteen forties, I want to say it was not a big deal.

In fact, by the time a group of Texas Rangers stumbled upon some of these pistols in eighteen forty four, seven years later, Colt had gone out of business.

And it was only when the rangers began using them in firefights against the Comanche and then later in the Mexican War that one of them, one of the rangers who used it, a fellow named Samuel Walker, went back east and said, Colt, this would be a great gun if you could just lighten it up and make the reload a little bit easier.

And working together, Walker and Colt created the gun that created the gunfighter era.

At the original six shoot of the Walker Colt.

And some of these dudes.

I always thought it was like from just a joke from Westerns.

But some of these dudes you talked about, what actually they would wear two of them and they would rig them for crossdraw.

But that's real.

That was news to me.

I always thought that was like a just goofy.

When I read that detail, I had to figure how that was faster me too.

I mean, I think the idea is like you swing it and you're aiming it in one motion rather than drawing and just and bring it up.

But well, let's define our terms real quick.

Most people who wore a gun or a single pistol low on the right hip or low on their shooting hip.

It was somewhat rare to wear two guns.

We know John Harden Wesley Harden did it.

We know Hiccock did it.

But now what we're talking about is the way Hiccock and certain others Jim Courtney, the Marshallo fort Orth did it as well.

They wore the They wore their holsters high on their hip, so practically, you know, with the holster, the northern end of the holster in their stomach.

And their argument was that if you are pulling from low on your hip, you've got to pull up and then point.

With a crossdraw, you pull out and and and the barrel is already pointed the way it should go.

Yep.

So they would argue, and I am not a shooter, and I've never crossed, and I've never used a crossdraw.

That it costs.

The crossdraw worked because it required one less motion.

Yeah.

I was doing this in bed the other night.

I put my I put my kindle down, and I was reaching across to this side and.

Told your wife go stand across drawing at the ceiling.

I was going to say that was the excuse for all those movements when your wife walked into the room.

Yeah.

Yeah, everybody had been asleep for hours.

Uh.

The dogs.

The guy that kills Buster Scrugs and the very excellent battle to Buster Scrugs, he's rigged high for crossdraw m and Buster Scruggs I think carries on his hip.

Yeah.

You know, Uh, once these guys got it, they made they kind of made the Rangers kind of made.

It famous in like a particular engagement, right right.

We caught on battle Waller Creek eighteen forty four, the first time the ranger took these revolvers.

And they got them like through army surplus or something.

Right now, it was worse and it was I love telling this story in Texas because the Rangers discovered these pistols unused and left over by the Texas Navy.

Like don't you just love that Texas had a navy when it was an individual country and then they disbanded it, right they did, because guess what, they didn't need a Texas Navy, know what was gonna invade from seaside, So these guns were put I imagined in some type of surplus warehouse where a young ranger named John Jack Hayes found him and took him out.

That day he had a patrol with twenty three rangers and they ran into a group of about one hundred best estimate, about one hundred comanchee out in hill country northwest of San Antonio.

The Comanche withdrew into a wooded hilltop as they often do, and chied it and yelled at the rangers, come on, come on, let's fight.

Well.

For as long as the Rangers had been out fighting Native Americans, the way you charged was you took a single shot with your musket, put it back, put it back in in the whatever you call him, musket holtzer, and then you would take a single shot with your flint, with your your single shot pistol, and then you would go in fighting with kniven sword.

And this was the first time in history where anybody charged a group of Comanche, uh with single shot musket, put it away, and then and then six shot revolver.

The numbers that I recall as one ranger died that day in something like twenty five Comanche.

And the takeaway quote years later from the Comanche chief who've been present that day is I shall never I shall never fight that Jackayes again, for he has a bullet for every finger on his hand.

That's good.

Uh.

Who's the Harden?

Is a guy you spend a lot of time talking about, right, John is John West.

John Wesley Harden.

I call him Wes Harden.

Yeah, you spend a lot of time talking about him.

Like here is a kind of like a maniacal, indisputable unstableble gun.

Yeah gun, Well, Wesley Harden, who was probably one of the big five I would call him, and he's certainly more well known in Texas than he is elsewhere.

He's the bridge from the violence that kind of took over Texas in the decade after the war.

He's the bridge into the more the later area era of gunfighters that we know it was hardened, you know, faced off with with Hiccock and Abilene.

One of the things that's that's startling about John Lesley Harden, if you know nothing about him, is, of course he is credited or with killing between twenty six and forty two people by the time he was twenty one, and most of it when he was eighteen.

He got into trouble at the age of fifteen when he killed a black man who he had wrestled with and they argued afterwards, and then was obliged to become a fugitive when federal troops looked for him.

And so for the next how many years six years he kind of wandered Texas and ultimately a little bit into Kansas.

And the wild thing about his career is we call him my moniacle, but it's hard to point to a heck of a heck of a lot of those shootings that were played, they were almost always because he got into some type of argument.

You remember.

The most famous one, of course, was he shot another Texas cattleman through the wall of his hotel room four in the morning in Abilene, Kansas.

And the story that got told about ten years later is that he did it because the man was snoring.

And for about one hundred years, it's been cool to say, oh, that's a bunch of bs.

Come on, that's just Texans making up this stuff.

But I'm sorry, why else do you shoot someone through a hotel room wall at four in the morning you think he got into an argument with him?

I suspect snoring makes a lot of sense to me.

I always think about opening their throat with a razor blade when I'm sleeping next to a snorer, like dirt, just like just like very delicate, so delicate.

He doesn't even wake up.

First in his throat you met like one of those mouth people.

That's why I always make sure I'm sleeping in a different ten.

I was about to say, can we can we rethink that can't.

I would go up the dirt and I'd be like sleep, sleep, and just like, take a blade and just open up that artery in there.

He's so nice, I think he'd understand.

He wouldn't even be mad.

It's okay, I'm not mad.

It's just I can't handle it.

I just can't handle it anymore.

Uh.

Card games man a lot a lot of bloodshed and gun fighting over playing cards.

Which I didn't understand because on its face, it doesn't make any sense.

If we're playing five card draw.

I throw down my two aces and you throw down your two kings.

What's to argue about, right?

I mean, I just never understood the fact that easily half of the Marquee gunfights that I'm writing about here had something to do with an argument over cards.

And it wasn't until I started reading about the history of gambling that I realized that things changed in the Old West, or in the years leading up to the Old West.

In eighteen forty three, or Riverboat Gambler published a book and then went out on the lecture circuit to explain to Americans how prevalent cheating was and how professional gamblers did it, whether it was with hidden cards, they hidden their clothes, sometimes entire decks.

They would have pulleys and things that they could pull up an ace from their foot.

I mean they had, they would have.

They wore rings with mirrors beneath them so that they could see every card that they dealt.

So what I argue in the book, and I think I'm on pretty solid ground here, is that what was different about the Old West, and what explains much of this violence, is two things.

Number One, cheating was epidemic.

More importantly, number two, now everybody knew it.

So just about every game of chance on the old Frontier, I'm arguing people were almost as keen to to spot whether other players were cheating as they were to win.

And of course, any type of accusation of cheating, which let's face it comes up a lot when somebody loses and has irked about it.

Any accusation and certainly any proof of cheating was about as acute an affront to a man's honor as you could get.

So there were a lot of gunfights, some of them in the moment, some of them you know, I'll meet you outside.

Some of them, you know, I'll see you a week later, and I'm still pissed, and so I'm gonna shoot you.

I mean, gambling became one of the main sources of dispute on the on the Old Frontier.

Was it also like a major source of income for a lot of these guys, Like how are they paying the bills?

Like gambling.

I mean some were robbing.

People, obviously, but think of think of the jobs on the old Frontier.

I mean, school teacher, cowboy, a bar keep.

None of these people are getting rich.

Those people are getting rich by in larger absentee mine owners and such cattlemen.

And gambling filled two holes there, one in a landscape that didn't have video games or internet or board games or much of anything.

Primarily it was entertainment, but also it became kind of the omnipressent gigwork of the Frontier.

Everybody, if you're making eighty percent of what you should make, I mean, you're gonna try to make extra And the easiest way to do that on the Frontier was was gambling.

And so you see almost all the major gamblers, and I think like almost all the men on the Frontier moonlight as gamblers.

I mean, the IRPs were quasi professional.

They would occasionally set up shop in a casino, and then you had the professionals.

Doc Holliday Luke short Ben Thompson, who became frankly more more famous as gunfighters fighting off challengers as they were as gambler.

But these were guys that were that were like making their living playing cards.

Yes, they would typically take Doc Holliday.

He had come west from Georgia because of his tuberculosis.

Was thought dryer air was good for him.

Tried to be a dentist, and he was a dentist, and he tried to open a practice in Dallas.

Unfortunately, tuberculosis, the cough and dentistry don't exactly need so so you know, he starts, He gets a buck board and uh a girlfriend slash lady of the night named Big Nose Kate, and begins basically touring the west.

And he would go from the Rio Grande to Montana, stay as long as he felt that there was still suckers to be flee store until he irked someone so bad he needed to leave town.

And it was a thing.

It was a type of job.

Gamblers actually talked of a circuit being up here in the mining towns, maybe in the in the winter, being in the Kansas cowtowns, or in Texas itself in the summer.

And they would go to towns where there was a lot of money flowing.

Well, it was easier to make money in those places than in poor towns.

Yes, yeah, like like gold rush gold like they would kind of follow mining mining booms and stuff like that.

Or you know the Kansas cowtowns with all the money coming in from Texas cowboys during the eighteen seventies.

Any place there was any type of boom, whether it was around minerals or cattle, you would find prostitution gamblers because that's where the money was.

Yeah, you're gonna see my knowledge of your bookstarts to fade pretty soon because I'm only halfway through, so you'll.

Have to help me.

It's all right, I'll just talk more.

Yeah, please, but you lay out this deal that, like tell the story of the Longhorns, because it just winds up had a big part of the book is does that there's a kind of a collapse or a lull and cattle activity, right, and then there's a great spike in cattle activity and that pushes out a lot of that That pushes out a lot of gunfighters to the north.

Well, the eating of beef wasn't a huge thing in the Antebellum years before before the war, and of the beef cattle in the country were in South Texas and the plains on those ranches, famously King Ranch south of San Antonio.

And it was during the war that trade just stopped because you couldn't anymore get you couldn't drive to New Orleans to market.

There was no more money, not enough money in Texas for people to be having beef dinner.

So essentially that trade frozen amber And so you know, cattle did what cattle do for about five years during the war.

They made little cattle, and by the time the war was over, there was something older of five million cattle roaming free in South Texas.

Unowned.

No, they were owned, oh were they just weren't.

Barboar wasn't a thing, so this was open range.

So someone would have claimed ownership of them, whatever level of control they had over brand.

I see.

So you would brand your cow and then allow them to run free, and then when it was time to go to market wherever they might be, you had to go out and round and round them up.

I see.

So during those years, just they weren't there was nowhere to send them.

That's exactly.

So your herd just built to build.

What happened immediately after the war in eighteen sixty five eighteen sixty six was Northerners wanted those They started to open the first ever stockyards in Chicago, and they needed those cows to get north.

Unfortunately, there were no railroads in Texas to get them up there.

If so fact, the cattle drives the nearest railroad railroads to Texas were in Kansas, Abilene, Wichton, ultimately Dodd City.

And so the way that Texans and Texas longhorn cattle, and I've argued kind of this hyper violent ethos of Texas gunmen, the way that began to spread across the frontier was first up the Chisholm Trail to.

Kansas, and they would come, they they would establish a point of sale, and then you'd have all these dudes a lot of money, real violent, tearing up the town.

And you explain how the towns would sour on this right.

There were five principal Kansas cattle town from eighteen sixty nine to eighteen seventy nine, beginning with Applene, then wichital Than Ellsworth, ultimately ending in Dodge City.

And the Texas cowboys would drive large herds up there to each of each of these towns, they kind of handed it off being the place like a baton because the Texans were so violent and so aparisk, and the murder rates would go so sky high that each of the towns, you know, one after another, was like, Clint, that's it, We're done.

You know, you know which stall you take these guys, Dodd City, you take them.

And that's really where the first nationally famous gunfights occurred, the first ones that we still ride about today.

We know gunfights happened before that, but this was now in the north.

This was within range northern newspapers that suddenly we're like, wait, Texans are up here doing what?

And you know, I argue in the book that you know this was this kind of made these Kansas cowtowns the Madison Square Garden of the gunfighter era.

It's the first place you hear of so many of these police people from wide are up on down.

Oh.

Brodie had a question about mercenaries.

Oh well yeah, I mean it might even relate to like the cattle drives, like like in Western movies a lot you see where like someone hires the gang, right, Like was that a thing where these guys will get hired to do some kind of mercenary work for good or bad reasons.

It happened, but I would argue it didn't happen as much as the movies, right suggests the most famous incident of that.

Well, first, there's two things we're talking about here.

Individual gunmen who were hired as assassins is what would not call hitmen.

Right, that was a thing.

You may dimly remember a pretty good Steve Men movie from the seventies called Tom Horn.

Oh yeah, oh, I forget where I am.

The last man legally hung in Wyoming.

And Tom Horn was pretty clearly a hired killer, the most stockman.

He's a stock, he's a stock detective.

But I think most people, at least in Tom Horn's case, knew what he was doing.

But then there were others like Deacon Jim Miller in Texan, who, when he was strung up, his last words were, let the record show I have killed fifty one men, now hiring an entire group of hired killers.

And I can think of any number of movies where that happened.

Yeah, it happened.

The most famous one was in Wyoming Johnson during the Johnson County War in eighteen ninety two, in which the Wyoming Stockman's Association basically judged that Johnson County was allowing rustlers to run free and wouldn't convict them even when they were indicted, and so the the Wyoming Cattleman decided that they were going to invade Johnson came kill all the public officials, the newspaper editors, and the wrestlers.

For this, they dispatched a man to wait for it, Texas.

We're in Dallas.

He hired and brought north twenty one hired Texas Gunman.

You probably know the end of that story did not end well for the Texas Gunman.

Can I tell you funny Tom Horn story?

Please?

We used to hunt this dude's place named Tom Horn, and uh, he was a rancher and I would when I would go in and we'd shoot the breeze with him, and I always be like does he always be like does he know about Tom Horn?

And one day if Tom not, kiddy, man, I'm talking to him, was like don't.

We'd hunt rabbits in his place.

So as a joke, one day we get him a carrot cake.

Okay, we give a carrot cake and it's got like little rabbits and carrots on top of it, decorated, and we go on.

We give him the carrot cake, and I'm trying to ascertain if he like is getting the joke, Like he gave us rabbit hunting permissions, so here's a carrot cake.

And I'm also I'm wondering, like does he know about Tom Horn?

And I'm looking through him and like right off of his right ear, I realized on his shelf as a book is Tom Horn's book.

I'm like, oh good, he doesn't get the carrocake joke, but he does at least know that there's that there's another very famous Tom Horn h When you say it doesn't go well, explain what happened doesn't go well for the Texas Gunman.

The Texas Gunman, you know, they come in to shine and they start riding up to Johnson County, and at one point, when they're just on the edge of the county, a scout comes in and says, wait, wait, the King of the Rustlers and a couple of other three bad guys are nearby on this ranch.

Let's go over and get them first.

Big argument breaks out.

The Texans go over and get this guy.

They surround this cabin.

I think two of the bad guys get away and two of them are killed.

One of them the so called king of the Rustlers.

At this time, and it speaks to the pervasiveness of Texans even in Wyoming was a Texan named Nate Champion, who you know, wrote in a journal as they were, you know, shooting into the cabin and then starting to burn the cabin down.

He ultimately ran out into their pistols a lah butch cassidy and was killed.

But that gave the locals time to raise super posse, which was about twice the size of the incoming invaders.

The incoming invaders withdrew to a ranch called to the governor for help.

He was in on it.

The governor called to the White House, who called in the seventh Cavalry, who rescued the poor Texas invaders.

About three days later they all went away to nice Wyoming prisons and were quietly allowed to go on their way.

You know who, in reading and reading your book, you get into Billy the Kid, and throughout the book, oh at least a half I'm reading, I'm reading little bits and I'm like, this is kind of like from Young Guns.

But the movie Young Guns.

They make a real pole prix out of a ton of different shit.

Yes, like, what are they even talking about that movie?

Look, I would argue that as bad.

He's familiar with this movie, the Young Guns.

I've been the sequel, I've seen it twice.

Now looks like talking about ship from all over the west Man.

Well, that is kind of what Hollywood does.

They take the best look Young Guns.

He is not awful.

There are worse, including too, It's much worse.

I got Young Guns too.

Well, the beginning was pretty sweet.

That it's not think I'm not judging it on entertainment value.

But actual there was some real history in there.

Yeah, Young Guns, like Don Jovie was not there?

Really, No, God, you're crushing me, you know.

I thought Young Guns contribution the original to Billy the Kid was that I don't think Billy the Kid was the most stable of and Emilio Estavid did a good job of jesting there were moments when he wasn't all there and I that been all there.

That spoke to me in the movie, and the idea that that these was a small group of gunmen in this feud kind of being chased and dominated and overwhelmed by an from Lincoln Lincoln County War eighteen eighty eight, eighteen eighty one.

That felt right, But I mean they started to lose me a little young Guns during the Great Payote Sequences.

I mean, you know, but they were kind of mixing up their landscapes too, right, I.

Mean, like, remind me, it's been a few years.

Well, so the link where was the Lincoln County War?

Where did the Lincoln County War occur?

It's all New Mexico.

Billy the Kid is all in New Mexico.

Okay, all right?

So the so that was right because I thought they were borrowing stuff from the sheep.

The fence Cutter War is up in Wyoming.

Well, I can't.

I can't speak to that, uh.

I mean the thing about Billy the Kid is.

Let's just talk about the real ability Kid.

Tell the story of the real Billy the Kid, never mind Young Guns.

Well, the problem with Billy the Kid, if you're an author or an historian is I can take the accepted facts of Billy the Kid, and I can write ten different books that would take that would the book one would be of him is the worst villain and murderer you've ever read about all the way to book number ten, which would be what a sweet misunderstood guy is, because the elements of this guy's career and his personality could back up almost anything.

You know.

From the kind of the dastardly point of view, he was a murderer and a cattle rustler.

Okay, from the good point of view.

Even then, people admired his daring, his bravery in.

The news.

The news the New Mexican newspapers at the time that he was at the peak of his regional fame for about a year, were split.

Some of them said he was a demon spawned from hell.

Others said, well, you know, you can understand why he's doing this.

He's out numbered that type of thing.

Billy the Kid was an orphan raised and kind of escaped from Silver City, a town down in southwest New Mexico.

He went out into Arizona, which was remote and undeveloped, and came back having killed a man who picked on him because he was so small.

He was seventeen at the time, and he was a small kid.

And in the West, by the way, they're all small and they're all called the kid.

Like I can give you fifteen guys named the kid Harry the Kid.

I mean, just you know, for some somebody, these guys's book one hundred and twenty five pounds.

Well, I think that American men were smaller back in those days.

Billy the Kid was what five seven twenty five.

Something, probably malnourished for a while while he was young.

Maybe Billy the Kid's career is neatly cut into two parts.

The first is as as you mentioned, the Lincoln County War, where he had gone to work for a cattleman who got into a big feud with the local members of power, and Billy the Kid was on the losing side and hounded out of that after two or three years in which he killed two or three people.

After that he went he moved over up toward Las Vegas in Las Vegas, New Mexico, northeastern New Mexico, and became the fancy word for him.

People will say he was an outlaw, outlaws from ount law.

He was a cattle wrestler.

That's all he did was beintell cattle and he rose to fame when New Mexican New Mexico cattleman came after him, and ultimately they much as the governor of Texas in the nineteen thirties, brought in Frank Hamer to chase down Bonnie and Clyde, the cattleman of eastern New Mexico, almost all of whom were originally Texans.

Brought in a young fella named Pat Garrett, who was known.

He was little known for anything beforehand.

He'd basically been a bartender, but his one claim to fame seemed.

To be Garrett it's heid hunting.

Yep, he did.

As a matter of fact, he was really tall.

He was sick.

At a time I think the average American male was like five eight five nine, he was six four.

Wow.

Pat Garrett was symbolic of the changes overgoing frontier law enforcement.

You know, up until those years, in the early years after the Civil War, you could kill almost indiscriminately.

It was pretty unusual for somebody to get to put away for murder.

But in the eighteen seventies you start to see lawman like white Ear and Pat Garrett, who are notably more professional.

You know, until then you had a lot of drunks, a lot of corruption, and after that less and Garrett, you know, famously tracked Billy down to the town where pretty much everybody knew he was hiding Fort Sumter, and went in one night with two other with his two deputies, both Texans, and they surveilled the town.

There was nothing going on, so they knew the halfway.

They knew the mayor, and they after midnight, circled around to his house and while the two deputies sat out in the yard, Pat Garrett went in through the open door, sat on his friend's bed and woke him up and started to ask him, you know, have you seen Billy?

As he ever around?

And at that moment, Billy the kid walked over from his mistress's house, which is about fifty yards away, came into the yard.

He had a butcher knife in his hand and he was gonna cut a steak off a beef that was hanging from one of the eaves.

When he saw the he saw the two mens.

The mistress happened to be Pat Garrett's sister in law, but that's a that's another story.

Well, Billy walks into the yard and sees these two strangers, and he's speaking only in Spanish.

He demands, who are they?

Who are they?

In the Garrett's two deputies are so stunned They don't even know what to do.

They certainly don't know that this agitated young guy is Billy the Kid.

There's an open door there into the bedroom where Pat Garrett is sitting in the bed, and Billy has his two pistols out pointed at the deputies.

He backs into the open door into the darkened bedroom where the mayor is laying there in bed and what oh yeah, and Gary's sitting on it.

Garrett sees the shadowy figure come in.

Billy sees the shadowy figure in the bed.

Nobody knows who anybody is.

And that's when the mayor, whose name is escaping me, basically says two words.

He says, ls it's him and Garrett on only that fires two guns into the shadowy figure.

He hears gurgle, gurgle, Fall walks out to clear the Gunsmolt walks back in and he realizes he has in fact killed Billy the Kid.

Well he didn't though, he let him go.

And that's young guns too.

You don't understand there are entire towns, including the town of Haiko in Texas, that have built museums around Billy the Kid, who the Billy the Kid that actually lived into the nineteen thirties.

We know our uncle.

Jesse was, so you explain, I haven't gotten that far.

In the book.

You tell that story about caught in the beefsteak and getting shot by Pat Garrett.

In the book chapter thirteen.

God can't wait, it's a good chapter.

That's how that happened.

Am I giving?

Am I giving too much away?

Oh?

Hell no, it's all such thing man.

You you mentioned like Pat Garrett being more of like whatever kind of a straight lace loman.

Or you know, like better than the one they had gone before him.

But what like was it also a thing where like at any given time, some of these gunfighters would be on one side a lot, like you hear that a lot?

You know?

That's yeah, that's that's the thing that comes out is kind of weird, is like the fluidity.

You even make jokes like a guy like does all these criminal acts like and of course his next job wasn't share.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because in many cases, communities didn't especially care about your moral character, and they also didn't have a ton of people willing to take the job.

You know, there weren't a lot of people out I mean a lot of these places were pretty small, but what they were looking for.

You saw this time and time again.

They were looking for somebody with bravery and a reputation that might swayed criminals and in the in the end, who knew how to use a gun.

So you absolutely saw people who had been wrestlers or criminals of some type who would go be a marshall for a season or two and then go back.

You know, I've often argued that Shakespeare stole a lot of his stuff from the show Three's Company, but uh, there's a time problem there.

I feel like Billy the Kid, they kind of stole stuff from your book a little bit because even though that came first, because he even uses that flip move which you explained in great detail, the border flip.

That's Harden, Harden does it twice.

No, no end.

Sorry, this is the last mention of Young Guns in Young Guns.

Oh, you're right, he does it in the movie.

Billy the Kid does that little, a little move where he's like going to hand a gun handled.

Someone's like, hey, give me your pistol, and he goes to hand it to him and then flips it on him.

Yeah, we don't know that he ever did that in real but John Weissey Harden.

Yeah, and but twice.

Yeah, so I'm done talking about young guns.

It's it's it's dumb, it doesn't make any sense.

It's a movie.

But in your book you give name to that move and talk about it's called like the Border Agent or the border flip or something.

I've heard it seen the border role, I think more more commonly it's called the road Agent's spin.

Yeah.

And and uh, it's a thing.

It was a real like.

It was a thing.

But one wonders if it was a thing people bragged about doing more than they actually did.

Yeah, you explain it, well, you would it.

There were two instances of it in Wes Harden's career, one where that he told of later and one that we know actually happened.

Uh.

The one he told is the classic one when Hickock went to disarm him at a bowling alley in Abilee because as we all know, bowling alley bowling was the sport of the old true you know, Uh, he was causing ruckus for over what we don't know.

Hickock went in with his guns drawn, knowing full well who he was, and demanded his guns, and Harden turned around and realized Okay, I'm not gonna win this.

The guy's already got his guns out, so he said, moving very slowly, pulled both his guns he wore to and handed them butt forward toward Hiccock.

Hitcock then put his guns down and reached for Harden's, at which point Harden spins them and thus that that the barrel is now is now pointing forward rather than the butt and he's got Hiccock, you know, right where he wants him, at which point you would think gunfight right.

No, now it didn't happen.

Harden actually shoot off his buddies and said nobody, nobody shoot shoots this man but me.

And then a strange thing happened.

You know, Wes Harden was seventeen at the time, oh man, Hickock was in his thirties, and Hiccock, we don't have the exact words, but clearly said something like dude, chill, come on, let's go have a lemonade, and basically talked him down a.

Little celtz around there.

You get is Harden was so stunned you didn't really know how to do it.

Don't know what to do.

Oh he could have just if you wanted to shoot while Bill Hiccock.

He could have done it right there.

Oh and then he We also know that Harden successfully used the spin.

It's documented in the killing of a Texas State policeman later that same year.

M hm hm.

The border agents flip what was it called the.

Border roll or the road agent's spin the border role.

I've never been able to do either.

Yeah, I haven't experimented.

No me either, journalists.

Here's a part that that's so confused.

I mean, I accept that it's true, but I just can't picture the sort of thought process.

If there's a guy in one of these towns and he gets in some skirmishes, he gets in some of these shootouts over card games and whatnot, and their eyes getting cleared, like oh, it was so defense, or there's no witness, therefore we're gonna let you go, or it's unclear what happened, therefore we're gonna let you go.

And then journalists want to come then talk to them and interview them about their disputes, like again and again and again, and they kind of like craft these sort of through these articles, craft these personalities.

And you talk about a unique aspect of a lot of these gunfights, is there are many eyewitnesses, so you can really late in the later years, there's very detailed descriptions of he said this, he said this, he did that, Yeah, he did that.

At times you find it there's there's contradicting details, but it's just like, can you address that a little bit that like, how are they sort of arguing that this was How are journalists arguing that this was like productive or serving the public good or whatever to kind of like profile and make heroes out of people that we would today recognize as just like flat out murders.

In large part, the press accounts don't rise them up as heroic as unusual, yes, as in Hickock's thing, but I don't You don't find a lot of moralistic commentary, except to the extent that they were saying this is bad, this is murder.

Okay, I will say that to the extent that you do find just the fact that writing about them at all glorifies them.

It reflects a fascination with them.

At the local level.

We know that the first and greatest fans of gunfighters were the people who lived in their communities.

They didn't have a lot else to talk about.

Mark Twain till it's a great story of going out west, and there was a gunfighter forgetting his name at the moment, who was prevalent in the Civil War years, and he said, you know, as he rode out on on the stage coach for Nevada, it was the only subject that anybody wanted to talk about was this guy, and he killed somebody recently.

There wasn't a lot of news out there, so gunfighters were news.

I think the worst that you could say about the journalists at coverage is that it ended up being pretty gullible.

I'm thinking of I'm thinking of a character named while Bill Longley, who was arrested in eighteen seventy seven in Texas and claimed to kill something on the order of forty two people.

This was like a year or two after Harden had been arrested and in prison for a murder murdering a ranger.

And so this guy Longley went to the gallows having claimed to kill something like forty two people, and he got written about by a lot of journalists, and later in the twentieth century there were books and even a TV series about this guy.

In the in the nineteen fifties, which was kind of the high water mark of what a fascination with these type people.

And it wasn't until the nineteen nineties when they retired.

Disc attorney in Central Texas set out to write a new biography that he was unable to uh find evidence of it maybe five or six of these forty two killings, all of whom were men shot in the back or in other words, murdered, rather than any type of contentious gunfighter situation.

So there were a number of kind of bogus counterfeit gunfighters.

Longley would be one.

Johnny Ringo, who kind of is often seen as one of the major guns up against White orp A Tombstone, is often represented, you know, as one of the great gunfighters.

In fact, he never fired a shot in anger.

Yeah, I haven't gotten there yet, but tell what happened?

Okay Corral?

And and and uh why is it still so debated?

Right?

You know, like every night on some cable network or is a thing about me and random are joking about this?

You can spend your whole life just watching shows, yes, arguing about who did what?

OK Corral, you.

Know, OK Corral, which we should, of course, if we were going to get super accurate here, we need to be calling this the gunfight beside the OK Corral.

It wasn't It wasn't in the corral.

It was then a vacant lot next to it.

Well, I think most people probably understand if you've ever seen the movie Tombstone the ninety three Kurt russell I, while it opens with a fictitious massacre, it's pretty darn close to accurate, as is the Kevin Costro Wider, although from a year before, which puts me to sleep.

Long story short, Wider was an occasional lawman there.

His brother Virgil, who had come to town, and his brother Morgan were actual lawmen who had come to town, and they came to Tombstone from various places in the West to make money in a new boomtown where silver had been found.

They wanted to make money gambling.

They wanted to make money anyway they could.

They first they tried it.

They put their initial cout capital into buying vacant lots and into mining claims.

When claims in vacant lots are not the greatest sources of immediate cash flow.

They all actually had to find jobs, and so they you know, worked different things at different seasons, typically as lawmen, assistant us Marshalls, saloon keepers and most commonly gamblers.

They then came into conflict of what is now generally acknowledged to be the largest outlaw gang of the Old West, more than one hundred strong.

Centered there in southeast Arizona, it did most of its work of stealing cattle in Mexico.

Above the border, they were known as the Cowboys, typically cow hyphen boys, but below the border in Mexico they were known as the Tejanos because so many of them came from Texas.

And over time the IRPs came into conflict with this group.

And the key thing that happened we now know was Wider wanted to be Marshall.

He'd been a very successful lawman in Kansas and a somewhat success lawman in Missouri, but he felt like people in Arizona didn't really know him, so he needed some type of achievement.

There was a there was the Cowboys, from time to time rob stages, and he thought everybody thought they knew who was behind a big stage rogery, a big stage robbery, and so Wyat approached the most prominent of the cowboys, a guy named Ike Clinton, and said, if you'll set this guy up for me so that I can arrest him.

I'll give you the three hundred I think I think it was three thousand dollar reward.

H and Ike agreed to do this.

Unfortunately, the guy that they sought was killed in the interim.

And afterwards I realized he was in serious of trouble because if whyerp or any of his buddies spread the word that Ike Clinton was going to rat out and set up one of his criminal brethren, Ike Clinton's life span could be measured in days and so that that's what happened that windy day in October, Ike and two several other cowboys came into town.

They accused Wyatt and his brother Virgil and Doc Holliday, their friend, of starting to spread this story, which was a true story, that he was a rat, And it went on most of the night and it didn't get bad it meaning Ike's behavior didn't get bad until after dawn that next morning, by which point all the IRPs and other and everybody else involved had been up all night playing cards.

They were all out going having naps that morning when I Clanton started going saloon to saloon casino casino there in Tombstone, saying that the next up that any of the cowboys saw in the street was going to be killed.

And he didn't announce why, he just said, you know, they were skunks and bad guys and such, and so what happened was everybody then rushes to each of the irp's homes and wakes him up by noon and like, you got to stop this.

Something bad is going to happen.

And Joel, who was the marshal at the point, realized he had to go disarm them.

Uh, there was a as in Dodge City as in Abelee, there was some municipal orients against open carry, and Ike and the cowboys were seen carrying their guns, and so Virgil and Morgan and why it all all woke.

And there's this wonderful moment where they're standing at the edge of a saloon about to go down to this vacant lot to disarm the cowboys, when out of nowhere, Doc Holliday walks up and says, what's going on.

He'd been asleep, he didn't know of any of this, And White said, we're getting ready for a fight.

They used the word fight to call a for gunfight, as if by then there was no other other kind.

If I said, I'm going to fight you.

It was understood it would be guns.

And Doc Holliday, who kind of worshiped, whyet that part of the movies is pretty close to accurate, I'd say.

He says, well, I'm offended that you it was a Southern I'm gonna put on my face Southern accent.

Well, I'm offended.

I'm offended.

Why would you Why would you not be asking me to help out?

And whites are well, it's going to be a tough one.

And Doc Holliday actually said, well, those are the kind I like the most.

And so the four of them actually like a Western.

It's you know, we have eyewitness account begin walking shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, four guys straight across down to this vacant lot where I Klanton and five of the other cowboys were waiting, uh and had been overheard cursing and threatening the herbs.

Long story short, all four of them walk down there, they come up.

They come up to this vacant lot and it's small.

It's the size of, you know, a big living room.

It's like seventeen feet across.

There's six cowboys attending two horses, and there's three rps and Doc Holliday.

They come up four against six.

All that happens, the only thing that happens that triggers it is Virgil or Seeds that they're they're carrying their guns and calls for them to disarm, to give up their guns.

And the cowboys that were that were present, it was almost like they didn't hear hear the worst.

They just saw herps guns and they pulled and they drew.

Three of the cowboys did not.

They backed off, hands up like we don't want to want any of this.

So they immediately lose the numbers games.

So suddenly you now have four ERPs and Holiday against three bad guys, and two of the bad guys are holding horses which immediately start to buck at the first the first gunshots.

What we know is it lasted about thirty seconds at the end of which and I could take you through the second my second.

Unfortunately, this is what I get paid to do.

All all three cowboys were dead or dying.

Virgil had a bad uh had been shot in the in the calf of his right leg.

Morgan had been shot badly through a bullet went in his right shoulder and went across his back.

Doc had been grazed and White Rope was the only one that was.

Yeah.

Well, but anyway you talked about the controversy, the controversy is not about Okay Corral.

That Buy and Large is considered by observers and by newspapers at the time have been a pretty fierce fight.

I mean, after all, the cowboys shot first, shooting, as we know from the hip stupid.

The controversy becomes after in the months that follow Phantom unidentified gun men badly wound Virgil and kill Morgan, and it's then that something inside Wider breaks like he'd always been a pretty much buy the numbers lawmen, certainly by old West standards, but by then, you know, after Morgan's death, Morgan died in his arms, shot in the back at a pool hall.

It was he was shooting.

As he was shooting pool That Whyatt said he was going to go get him, and he did.

He's that's what started what's classically called the Vendetta Ride.

It lasted well, I want to say, three or four days, in which why it put together a group of five or six other writers and they went out and they killed three or four of the cowboys, including their acknowledge Lee or curdly Bill Brochs, at which point they they they washed their hands of tombstone and they they wrote off, never to return.

But you know, they left a big controversy and an American legend in their ways.

So how's your book end?

Literally, how does it end?

Yeah?

What happens in the end of the book?

Well, the last chapter of action has to be the last marquee outlaws of the Old West.

That's Butch and Sundance.

So the narrative of the book before an epilogue, the narrative of the book book begins with these guys saying it's no good being an outlaw anymore.

The lawmen are out there and the Pinkertons are everywhere, and so Butch gets this idea that he's going to go to Argentina and and and set up a cattle ranch.

He does the famous thing.

That I've been a bunch of those little sites down there.

Yeah, every place claims to be some Butch Cassidy things great.

He was down there for seven years until they finally got him.

And then there's an epilogue that basically goes, whatever happened to everybody?

What their graves are like now?

I take I take readers on a little tour of Dodge City and Tombstone and Lincoln, Uh, just to get a sense what that what that world was like these days.

Yeah, so the last gun Fighters.

As I'm reading along, I'm going to find that a case to be made that that Broiche Cassidy, according to your definition, is the last of the gunfighters.

Is that true?

I would say he's the last of the prominent ones.

Look, nobody would ever argue that gunfighting or criminality beget law, you know, ended in the Old West in nineteen oh one.

But I do think it's that moment that a lot of those activities started moving from the headlines into history.

Yeah, so I thought, you know, you've got to end it somewhere, and that that felt that felt fair to me.

The penultimate chapter, the one before that, would be a much more deadly group of fellas the Dalton Gang in Oklahoma.

Oh okay, I know that name, but I'm excited to read about those guys.

It's a pretty good story.

I'm going to keep reading this book.

E'ven though already talked to you.

Well, I was one of my best friends who is kind of a pacifist guy, doesn't like guns.

He said, well, I'm going to try to read this, and he liked.

My wife got exactly halfway through the book, about ten eleven chapters, he had to put it on.

He said, that's that problem, my wife, just too much killing.

And he went back.

He went back afterwards to read it, and he said not only did he like it, but that he thought initially that the story of gunfighters would just be one of chaos, just people getting drunk and shooting each other.

And there's plenty of that, but he said he found a real moral component, but real sense of right and wrong by the time he get done.

He got done.

So I'll be deeply curious what you think.

Well, now, what was your wife's scrape with it?

Well, my wife grew up on ranches in West Texas and she shot her first gear when she was like twelve, and by fifteen or sixteen she'd had enough and it just still she's just queasy with killing.

Got it?

Got it?

Yeah?

But you know, I don't know, man, It's like it's like it's not like a sociology book, but it's like it just does a great job of explaining like a period in history.

I don't think it's like, I don't think you have to read it because you want to celebrate people dying.

It's just like it's an explanation of stuff that happened, right, and like why it happened, well, that's certainly, and why it stopped happening.

Well, that certainly was my point of view.

I didn't write this because wow, it would be great to write about eleven hundred murders.

I wrote about it because it was fat.

I wanted to understand why it happened in this period of American history.

But I can also acknowledge and appreciate that there are people to whom blooding, gore and killing is just hard to read about.

Yeah, but you know, you know that whole genre of telling like doing documentaries whatever about like serial killers, right, you could try to dress that up as being that it's something other than just you know, somebody is reveling in someone's sadistic behavior.

Like there's not like it's not history.

You know, when I watched those things.

I hate watching the ones I have seen.

It's like it's not even masquerading as like history or sociology, like little serial killer series like that.

They're kind of disgusting, I think.

But this is I mean, this is explaining.

It explains like this really important part of American history, and we tend to go like, Okay, the Civil War happened and then the Civil War ended and that was it, right, But this is about well, what of those people, you know, what of those habits, what of those technologies, and here's sort of what they did.

And then it touches base with perhaps you've heard of blank, blank and blank.

You know, you've probably heard a Billy of the Kid, You've heard of Doc Holiday, and people have, but people don't know.

I'm saying, like people in general don't know what they actually did and who they actually worked.

Well, from a purely commercial point of view, if if I could apologize for this, I thought that would be one of the appeals of the book is that there's a lot of people out there these days that didn't grow up on these stories the way I did fifty years ago, but know the names.

But you're probably not going to go buy a four hundred and fifty page book about Billy the Kid and drill that deep in.

But if you want like an introduction to all these guys, and by the way, you know, suggestions of other books to go read about each of them.

This is a really good place to start.

Yeah, you're very generous with site putting out source material and recommendations for further reading.

I just assumed that people were going to want to know more, and so I take great joy in saying this is a great book.

Go read this, Go read that.

Don't read this.

Your I liked your footnotes because they're very conversational.

Well, I could like get a sense of your personality from your footnotes.

I have a lot of challenges and personal problems in life, but enthusiasm for my material is not one of them.

I as I said at the very beginning, I yeah, I had a heck of a lot of fun doing this, and I you know, I mean, the one thing you worry about, like I really worried about this is Okay, I'm a sixty three year old white guy writing a book about in which eleven hundred people are killed, and it's the twenty first century.

And oh, by the way, it's conversational and almost a little humorous in places.

What could go wrong?

Yeah, And so I've been you know, obviously, the reviews.

The reception has been very generous, and it's been one among I thought this was a prime candidate to be canceled.

Well, it's it's I mean, I think there's a lot of it's.

A new era though, Man, there's been a vibe shift.

You're not the first person just say great time for this book.

There's like a very simplistic.

Understanding of this era where it's like people move out beyond the reach of the law, and then the criminals do what they want, and then there's this class of heroes that rise up and sort of that's what naturally happens when people are out in the wilderness, right.

And I think what's what's very what I really appreciate is how you set it up with these cultural undercurrents that come out of the Civil War and come out of Southern culture and even come from Europe.

That just adds a texture to it.

But then at the same time, it's very funny and it's very read like there's a depth, there's a depth of analysis that's that's very satisfying, but then it's also very funny.

Well, and and and the thing there is you don't look I want to I want to give the challenge for means I want to give the reader kind of the most up to date academic thinking.

But you don't want to get all fusty and fuddy duddy and academic about it.

So the idea is, yeah, I mean, if you're going to read one of one of my books, if nothing else, it's I always say, I want I want it to be an easy read.

I want it to be friendly.

And if at the end of it you look you learn something, okay, that's great.

But I'm not going to tell you what it should be.

Most this academic writing isn't boring because they wanted to be boring.

They're not good enough to make it interesting.

I don't know, but you're like, You're like, it's like they like they decide, yes, they decide to have it be unapproachable.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think there's a class of academic that just loves being obscure or difficult to get through.

That's like a point of pride.

You know.

Currant McCarthy wrote a thing about like advice to academic writers.

I didn't know that, but I would.

I would go pick it up.

Within twenty minutes of leaving.

I got to ask you one question before we finish up.

Since it's a Texas book and we were talking about a lot of the bad guys.

Did the Texas Rangers like did they did they earn their reputation as like someone these guys didn't want to cross.

They have a baseball team.

Texas Rangers existed, they were They existed like three or four different times during the nineteen hundred, during the eighteen hundreds and Texas.

The chaos in Texas got so bad after the war that they were reintroduced.

And I want to say eighteen seventy four, and my judgment is, rarely in American history have we set a more effective introduction of law enforcement entity than the Texas Rangers.

When they came into being, the state was overrun by random bad guys, a lot of feuds around cattle, just a lot of violence and that stuff.

That stuff just pretty much ends in four or five years.

And I think that, as much as anything, is a moment where all the frontier begins to realize, hey, we don't have to live with this level of chaos, this level of criminal Now they are violence.

And you know, Texas was not a perfect place thereafter, But I think that the worst of the chaos following the war began to abb with the introduction of the Rangers.

They were the real deal.

He's got There's a quote there from you where he says something like the Texas Rangers set out to clean up some town, and then Brian writes, and boy did they?

Yeah, all right, everybody the gunfighters.

How Texas Made the West Wild?

By Brian Burrow.

Holy smokes, it's a good book.

Thank you.

I've been reading on my phone, but I'm gonna switch over key signs for me.

Your watch, phill cover this.

We've got it.

Let's do a little lesson.

It's okay to use or somebody got signed.

I've got it.

I've got a right here.

That's what I need.

This is the page you're supposed to sign if you signed the wrong They used to call this page.

There's one page that they used to call the bastard page.

You ever hear this book publishing, there's a page that doesn't have the publisher and it would call it the bastard page.

Or maybe I'm mixed up.

That doesn't have the author.

Like see how here there's a title, but maybe this is the bastard page.

It's a fatherless, bless book.

But then you get to this page title author, publisher, Yeah.

So sign that page for me, say to the to my favorite man.

It's the best gun fighter.

I know.

He's going with my favorite man.

Practice practice your border roll.

We should do some kind of video thing where you practice the moves.

No, well yeah, with one of those five pound pistols.

Up my break, my fingers.

Thanks man, thanks for coming on my pleasure.

I hope people check out the book.

I think they'll get a real kick out of it.

Thanks again.