“The story of the West,” mid-century academic Thomas K. Whipple declared, “is our Trojan War, our Volsunga Saga, our Arthurian cycle or Song of Roland.” Those heroes, as great authors such as Paul Horgan have documented, were soldiers, scouts, mountain men, cowboys, detectives, and clergy. And yet when many of us imagine the Wild West, a period generally lasting from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the turn of the twentieth century, we think less of such noble figures and more of the lone, mysterious gun fighter, epitomized by such actors as Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly or High Plains Drifter.
As Bryan Burrough explains in his new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild, much of that has to do with popular interest — reinforced by sensationalist media — that was endlessly fascinated by stories of a rugged and violent frontier where hardened men expertly employed firearms to settle scores or commit felonies. We think of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, or Butch Cassidy roaming vast and untamed western expanses, ever-ready for a quick draw with their revolvers, while gritty lawmen such as Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Pat Garrett hunted them down. It is a story generations of Americans learned as a catechesis in our peculiar understanding of good versus evil and order versus chaos. In truth, it was mostly chaos.
The Southern (and Texan) Roots of the Wild West
Texas produced far more gunfights and gunfighters than any other state in the Union. “If you study these marquee gunfights at any length, something jumps out at you about the participants. In Kansas, in Wyoming, in New Mexico, in Arizona, all across the frontier, a startling number of these deadly encounters involved a single kind of person: A Texan.”
Some of this was a result of the economic role Texans played in the West, given the outsized importance of cattle drives and cattle ranching in the years after the Civil War — and subsequent cattle rustling, which provoked cycles of violence between ranchers and rustlers.
Texas was a peculiarly martial culture, a result of being the only state to defeat a foreign power (Mexico) at war, as well as having to fight off the brutal Comanche. It was also thoroughly Southern in character, meaning that Texans were often imbued with a deep sense of honor that often provoked fighting and dueling. “Any insult, any slight, anything that might diminish a man’s honor demanded a response, often a violent one,” writes Burrough. On top of that, vigilantism was a more common feature of the South in the antebellum period. All of these cultural trends served to act as a powder keg in the West.
According to Burrough, during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, more duels were fought in the territory of California than in any other state or territory. Southerners initiated almost all of these duels. The end of the Civil War, which fostered an entire generation of embittered men who understood themselves as an aggrieved and persecuted party in their native states, threw gas on this already kindled Western fire. Burrough notes that the murder rate in some parts of the West was sometimes as much as 60 per 100,000 people, which is about double what we today would consider extremely high. (Chicago’s murder rate in 2024 was an estimated 24 per 100,000.)
Telling Heroes From Villains
Thus does the West become filled with gunfighters, though many of the most famous were not nearly as impressive as their legend. John Wesley Hardin, the son of a Methodist preacher memorialized in song by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, may have murdered twenty people by the time he turned 18. Alternatively, while writers at the time claimed the self-promoting fabulist Wild Bill Hickok killed hundreds, the number is far fewer, and one of them was a deputy he accidentally shot. Jesse James wasn’t really even a gunfighter, but a Confederate veteran-turned-criminal who executed far more men than he killed in fair fights. Butch Cassidy, one of the last (as well as most intelligent and successful) criminals of the West, avoided shooting as much as possible, and probably never killed a single person.
Wyatt Earp — who in the collective American imagination serves as perhaps the apotheosis of the noble Western hero — was a federal fugitive and likely a pimp before he made his name as an upright if imperfect lawman, most famously in Tombstone, Arizona. Thanks to Earp and his fellow lawman and friend Bat Masterson, Dodge City for two years was a comparatively safe town. And as much as Texans were responsible for the incredible amount of violence across the West — bringing their cattle, guns, and honor killings to New Mexico and then Arizona — they were also part of its pacification. In 1874, the Texas Rangers were mobilized under Captain Leander McNelly, in short order taming the Lone Star State of Mexican gangs, cattle rustlers, and train robbers such as the violent criminal Sam Bass.
Though Burrough does not explicitly make the connection, his narrative demonstrates that many of the most fantastic Western stories of Hollywood cinema actually have a basis in history. Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, which features a protagonist using a hidden iron plate to absorb rounds from his nemesis, appears to be loosely based on the contract killer “Deacon Jim” Miller, who habitually wore an iron plate sewn into his coat, saving his life on at least two occasions. The many Westerns that depict avaricious ranchers employing rough cowboys to harass and, if necessary, eliminate sheep herders and miners are also based on real events: In Oregon, Wyoming, and Colorado, cowboys slaughtered literally thousands of sheep because they viewed them as a threat to cattle ranching.
What Does the West Mean?
Burrough is an excellent storyteller, and anyone with even a marginal interest in the history of the West will find his book engaging. Yet as The Gunfighters ended, I couldn’t help but think he had neglected some of the most important and interesting questions about this era. For example, the West remains of such perennial interest to Americans that every year we see new Western films and series hoping to be the next blockbuster or hit streaming show. Why? Why are Americans fascinated by the fiercely independent, violent loner exacting his own justice?
I know some would say that our interest lies in the fact that we perceive, however inchoately, that such persons are necessary for civilization’s survival. As exemplified by such characters as John Wayne’s character Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, we know that we need rough men to protect us, even though we also know such men always exist uneasily on the boundaries of law and order. Yet Burrough’s story shows that such men are often as much the source of society’s ills as they are its cure — indeed, it was frequently men more integrated into civilization (e.g. Texas Rangers, established lawmen, soldiers) who brought criminals to justice. Perhaps celebrating such unsung heroes would foster an American imagination that, while honoring the individual, recognizes his place must ultimately be within, rather than outside the bounds of, polite society.