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Speaker 2: dot com. F I R S T L I T
Speaker 2: E dot com. Brian Burrow, Dude, this book makes me
Speaker 2: so happy, like like I love reading it.
Speaker 3: I'm not done with it, I'm halfway through it. I
Speaker 3: love reading it.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm happy for you.
Speaker 2: It is how you could have so much fun reading
Speaker 2: about so many people getting shot.
Speaker 4: Well, that was the primary challenge of the book. Sure
Speaker 4: is how to convey one's enthusiasm for a pastime and
Speaker 4: get people to keep reading a book that is, you know,
Speaker 4: averages three or four dead people every page or so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker 2: A lot of the reading I do, I have to
Speaker 2: read stuff just because I'm reading it for work research stuff. Right,
Speaker 2: this is my this is me. Like when I want
Speaker 2: to have fun, I work on reading your book.
Speaker 3: It's not work. I just I love the book.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you, I as you can probably tell love
Speaker 4: to doing it. Yeah, you know, I've kind of reached
Speaker 4: the age I'm sixty three where I stop doing stuff
Speaker 4: I don't want to do, OK, And I just want
Speaker 4: to pursue projects that I really want to go disappear
Speaker 4: into a room and learn about for five, six, seven years.
Speaker 4: This we took seven and dude, I've been reading about
Speaker 4: gunfighters since sixth grade, since I was eleven. This is
Speaker 4: a book I'm wanted to do for like fifty years.
Speaker 3: You're from Texas, A Yeah, and as you point out,
Speaker 3: we'll get into it. Texas is like.
Speaker 2: Just kind of is a force that pushes gun fighters
Speaker 2: out into the American West.
Speaker 4: It's probably the most important of the number sources. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I think that's fair to say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got a bunch of you got a bunch
Speaker 2: of books. I'm gonna tell people about your books because
Speaker 2: they might recognize some of them.
Speaker 3: Barbarians at the Gate.
Speaker 2: You have eight books, four New York Times bestsellers, Public Enemies,
Speaker 2: America's greatest crime wave, in the Birth of the FBI
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty three to thirty four, The Big Rich, The
Speaker 2: Rise and Fall of the greatest Texas oil families. Forget
Speaker 2: the Alamo, the rise and fall of an American myth.
Speaker 2: When you talk about that for a second, I haven't
Speaker 2: read that one. And we're here now to discuss the gunfighters.
Speaker 2: How Texas made the Wild West?
Speaker 3: Can we touch on the Alimal? Yeah? What am I saying?
Speaker 3: How Texas made the West wild? I don't have my
Speaker 3: glasses on two ws.
Speaker 4: I get it well.
Speaker 3: Not only that it's Krin put it in italics? Which one?
Speaker 3: You're as you as you age. As you age and you.
Speaker 2: Start losing your ability to see letters up close, italics
Speaker 2: is becomes your worst enemy.
Speaker 4: Metallics as hell, Yeah, it becomes.
Speaker 3: Your worst You just leave your glasses on at all times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could leave mine name, but then this would
Speaker 2: be clear and you'd get blurry.
Speaker 3: It's like a real time.
Speaker 5: Drop them down.
Speaker 3: Is that what you're doing right now?
Speaker 6: I thought you just did that to look pretentious.
Speaker 5: That's what happens when you get old.
Speaker 2: Because no matter what, if you got a hoodie and
Speaker 2: a hat on, I don't care what you do with
Speaker 2: your glasses, you're not gonna look.
Speaker 7: I just's if I put doctor in my there's a certain.
Speaker 8: Feeling when someone looks at you over the top of
Speaker 8: their glasses. It makes me think that I did something
Speaker 8: like get authoritative. Yeah, it's a power move.
Speaker 3: I feel like, what's your take do you think? Do
Speaker 3: you think uh see, you're from Texas.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you're not gonna give a straight answer,
Speaker 2: because Texas get prickly about this subject. Do you think Crockett,
Speaker 2: uh Crocketts they caught him alive? Or do you think
Speaker 2: that Crockett got killed in action?
Speaker 4: The versions that we have from people on the ground,
Speaker 4: which are Mexican soldiers, but just let's face it, all
Speaker 4: the Americans died. There are multiple versions that say that
Speaker 4: he was captured and executed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you believe that.
Speaker 4: I don't have any reason not to. I mean, it's
Speaker 4: the only non fiction based source for Crockett information. Most
Speaker 4: of kind of the famous stuff about him swinging Old
Speaker 4: Betsy is kind of neo fiction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, no source. It's a good point you're saying,
Speaker 3: the only.
Speaker 2: Sources that could have described what happened at the end
Speaker 2: of the battle would be Mexican soldiers, right, And there's
Speaker 2: no source that ever came forward to say, oh no,
Speaker 2: Crockett went down swinging his rifle.
Speaker 4: The problem is, for years that just made sense, right.
Speaker 4: We didn't really have much information until decades after the
Speaker 4: battle about that some people might be captured. For the
Speaker 4: longest time, it was just assumed that everybody died because
Speaker 4: ultimately they died. The idea that some of them were
Speaker 4: executed after being captured is in an idea that really
Speaker 4: didn't start popping up till maybe fifty years after the battle.
Speaker 4: Got it? Got it?
Speaker 2: What's your primary argument in the book? Like I said,
Speaker 2: I haven't read it. I'd like to, but why I
Speaker 2: forget the Alamo?
Speaker 4: Well, we at Texans have put are enormously proud of
Speaker 4: our creation and should be. But you know, we wrote
Speaker 4: the book with a sense that we love history. We
Speaker 4: love the accurate stories of history. We don't believe that
Speaker 4: the accurate stories of history make Texas any less special.
Speaker 4: I think the argument that got people most irked was
Speaker 4: when you go back and you read Steven F. Austin
Speaker 4: and the Father of Texans memoirs. When you go back
Speaker 4: and read a lot of people, do you realize that
Speaker 4: the primary driver that split Texas from Mexico was the
Speaker 4: Texans insistence that they could only live there if they
Speaker 4: were to use slaves to bring in their cotton, because
Speaker 4: that's why they came. That's the only way they knew
Speaker 4: to raise cotton. And so for that first ten years,
Speaker 4: from eighteen twenty to eighteen thirty, that was primarily what
Speaker 4: they were arguing about. And there's ample evidence of that.
Speaker 2: Got it, got it, And you dig into that in
Speaker 2: the story. Oh yeah, yeah, uh, I got a bone
Speaker 2: to pick with you about this one here.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Don't really get a thing you did. So everyone that
Speaker 2: reviewed your book. I read a bunch of reviews of
Speaker 2: your book, which are all good. I haven't found any
Speaker 2: bad ones yet, and they're all like, all the reviewers
Speaker 2: get a kick out of you saying that Hitcock was
Speaker 2: a Titanic fraud. Okay, yes, the Hitcock was a fraud.
Speaker 2: Hitcock wasn't a badass. He wasn't the ultimate gunfighter like
Speaker 2: people think he might have been.
Speaker 4: I argue that he was came into view as a
Speaker 4: Titanic fraud.
Speaker 2: No, you say he was a Titanic fraud. Well, and
Speaker 2: then you go on to totally contradict yourself at that point,
Speaker 2: he was a tight because you're blaming you're blaming Hitcock.
Speaker 2: So Hitcock, just a refresh, you could tell the story.
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna give a little quick outline just so
Speaker 2: you understand my gripe. Some journalists early on in Hitcock's life,
Speaker 2: some journalists or some you know what passed for a
Speaker 2: journalists in those days, interviews Hitcock or whatever and comes
Speaker 2: out saying, oh, Hitcock killed one hundred men with his pistol,
Speaker 2: and all Hitcock Hitcock doesn't contradict him. Hitcock's like he
Speaker 2: wants to say that that's fine, and then goes on
Speaker 2: to shoot all kinds of people. And you're saying he's
Speaker 2: a Titanic fraud.
Speaker 3: But it's not his fault. He couldn't control what the
Speaker 3: guy said.
Speaker 4: And we don't. I don't argue that it was his fault.
Speaker 4: No reason, The same reason, the same reason with Johnny Ringo.
Speaker 4: Johnny Ringo is a Titanic fraud and he never once
Speaker 4: made a claim. They were all made years after his death.
Speaker 4: With Hiccock, yeah he was the only reason you know
Speaker 4: his name is that article by oh yeah, you never
Speaker 4: know of him otherwise.
Speaker 3: But you start the book with him shooting a guy.
Speaker 4: Yes, but that does not make you some notable gunfighter,
Speaker 4: that you shot one guy. What makes you the nation's
Speaker 4: first gunfighter is to claim that you shot a hundred
Speaker 4: guys when the actual number at that point would appear
Speaker 4: to be like two.
Speaker 5: That's how you build a reputation, I know.
Speaker 2: But I just think Titanic fraud. I was thinking when
Speaker 2: I said that when I read that in the reviews,
Speaker 2: I don't want to start out negative here. When I
Speaker 2: read that in the reviews, I thought, Okay, he's going
Speaker 2: to dismantle Hickcock. But then I'm reading the book and
Speaker 2: I'm like, the one hundred that notwithstanding that hundred thing,
Speaker 2: he still was kind of a remarkable gunfighter.
Speaker 4: I yes, but when he first became known, he became
Speaker 4: known for what I think was a fraud fact that
Speaker 4: he killed over one hundred people. I think it's notable
Speaker 4: about him is that after that you can argue, as
Speaker 4: I think you're trying to, that he grew, that he
Speaker 4: grew into his legend, that he became a notable lawman
Speaker 4: and became a notable gunfighter. But I'm sorry, when it
Speaker 4: was first written in eighteen sixty seven, he wasn't okay.
Speaker 2: Like I say, you win, but lay out the premise
Speaker 2: of the book, like how you lay it out in
Speaker 2: the beginning. You know, you kind of fine, first, you
Speaker 2: kind of go like what is a gunfighter? Like what
Speaker 2: is and you kind of you kick around different people
Speaker 2: that carried pistols and different Western icons, and then you
Speaker 2: settle at when I say a gunfighter, here's what I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the first thing to do is to define our terms.
Speaker 4: A gunfighter is generally acknowledged as someone who was involved
Speaker 4: in exchanges of gunfire among civilians on the on the
Speaker 4: old Western frontier, so not involving soldiers military of any kind,
Speaker 4: and not involving Native Americans generally speaking. What I set
Speaker 4: out to do was I identified, you know what, what
Speaker 4: do all these guys that have in common, from wide
Speaker 4: Europe to Hiccock to Jesse James. The only thing they
Speaker 4: really had in common is a they got famous shooting people,
Speaker 4: mostly for shooting people. And it all happened during a
Speaker 4: period from eighteen sixty five till I ended at nineteen
Speaker 4: oh one. So I've grandly dubbed this the gunfighter Era.
Speaker 4: And I set out to tell a narrative history of
Speaker 4: those thirty six years.
Speaker 2: And you set out explaining, uh, sort of asking this question,
Speaker 2: why is it, why does it seemed to be Texans?
Speaker 4: Well, that was one of the first things you notice
Speaker 4: if you read, if you immerse yourself in this literature,
Speaker 4: is that if you look at what I call the
Speaker 4: Marquee gunfights, that is the famous ones, the ones that
Speaker 4: made the newspapers in the history books, a startling thing
Speaker 4: leaps out at you almost immediately, and that's the sheer
Speaker 4: number of Texans who were involved in these gunfights. I
Speaker 4: would argue someplay, if you totted them up, I would
Speaker 4: say between fifty and seventy percent of these gun of
Speaker 4: these famous gunfights from Kansas to Texas to New Mexico,
Speaker 4: Wyoming and Arizona involved Texans. At first, that didn't make
Speaker 4: a lot of sense because not to get all into
Speaker 4: it here. But I only discovered late brogan to understood
Speaker 4: how there was this Tayek, this Texas diaspora, this spread
Speaker 4: of Texans across the frontier that came with the spread
Speaker 4: of longhorn cattle. If you look at the great cattle ranches,
Speaker 4: the great cattle herds from Montana all the way down
Speaker 4: to Arizona, ninety percent of them came from one place.
Speaker 4: They came from Texas, and they came with.
Speaker 3: Texas, and they came with pistols.
Speaker 4: They sure as I did. Look, Look, I would never
Speaker 4: argue that Texans created the gunfighter archetype or certainly created
Speaker 4: gun gun violence in the West. They didn't. I wouldn't
Speaker 4: want to overstate this. But what I'm saying is that
Speaker 4: Texans had an impact on what we remember that's far
Speaker 4: more or significant than we remember.
Speaker 2: And you get into it in the beginning of the book.
Speaker 2: You get into this, this this idea of that people
Speaker 2: wanted to would defend their honor at all costs, and
Speaker 2: you kind of talk about how they had these that
Speaker 2: at that time it seemed that people had like somewhat
Speaker 2: fragile egos.
Speaker 4: Well, that's one way to see, that's one way to see.
Speaker 3: That's not your word when you look.
Speaker 4: At their behavior, that's the way it seems to us.
Speaker 4: I think another way to interpret this is that during
Speaker 4: the nineteenth century, at the eighteen hundreds, at a time
Speaker 4: where we didn't have a whole lot of university degrees
Speaker 4: or financial statements for ordinary men and women to brag about,
Speaker 4: what emerged, especially in the South, that I'm arguing gravitated
Speaker 4: out onto the Western Frontier was a male honor system
Speaker 4: that well, it's a little it's almost hard to explain it,
Speaker 4: but it's a little like pornography. I know it when
Speaker 4: I see it. You know, when I have attacked your honor,
Speaker 4: maybe I call you ugly, or your wife or your dog.
Speaker 4: The thing about the Southern honor system, or really you
Speaker 4: could argue the American honor system in those days, is
Speaker 4: if you felt your honor had been impugned, if you've
Speaker 4: been insulted, you had an opportunity and in many cases,
Speaker 4: an obligation to respond with violence, even deadly violence. You
Speaker 4: know that famously. I mean, I argue in the book
Speaker 4: that the genesis of all this gunfighter behavior was duels.
Speaker 4: Duels back in the Old South. That's really the only
Speaker 4: place you can point to American men shooting each other
Speaker 4: in kind of structured contest with guns before this.
Speaker 2: You know, that's the thing that people talk about, how
Speaker 2: caustic American politics has become.
Speaker 3: Artstick to myself, not like then, dude, I mean like people,
Speaker 3: you'd have.
Speaker 2: An election, the election would be resolved, and it'd be
Speaker 2: like it'd be like Biden, It'd be like Biden and
Speaker 2: Trump would the election to be over Trump's like, I
Speaker 2: don't you know, there's a fishiness to the results.
Speaker 3: They'd be like, okay, let's have a duel and well
Speaker 3: at noon.
Speaker 2: Whoever, that'll wind up being like that, that'll wind up
Speaker 2: being the final say.
Speaker 3: The voters, in fact, have not spoken.
Speaker 4: In the years leading up to the war, there were
Speaker 4: fist fights and worse on the floor of Congress, as
Speaker 4: well as any number of duels involving politicians. Andrew Jackson,
Speaker 4: as you know, was involved in one, Abraham Lincoln almost
Speaker 4: was until he talked his way out of it. And
Speaker 4: our great Texas President Sam Houston was involved in one
Speaker 4: which he aimed a little low and ended up shooting
Speaker 4: the other gentleman in the crotch.
Speaker 3: You know, what was that role you explained? It's not
Speaker 3: ever heard of it before. What was that role in
Speaker 3: a duel?
Speaker 2: Like where you bring like your second Yeah, you bring
Speaker 2: like an advocate?
Speaker 3: Explain that? Can you explain that duel?
Speaker 4: In the formal duel as laid out in rules written
Speaker 4: by the Governor of South Carolina in eighteen thirty seven,
Speaker 4: you were you know, it laid out exactly how this
Speaker 4: is supposed to happen. Now, how often people went by
Speaker 4: the former rules. I can't argue. But one of the
Speaker 4: things you did see in many, if not most duels,
Speaker 4: is the you would bring a buddy who was officially
Speaker 4: called your second, and they would you know, kind of
Speaker 4: argue for the reasons that they should have a duel
Speaker 4: and should not have a duel, and you know, often
Speaker 4: people went ahead with it. But the main place where
Speaker 4: you where the duel where the second could come in
Speaker 4: is if one of you broke the rules. Let's say
Speaker 4: I fired at you and then fired again before anyone
Speaker 4: was allowed, the second could take a shot at you.
Speaker 4: And so there were all sorts of famous duels where
Speaker 4: like joke, there are all sorts of duels where like
Speaker 4: Joe and Jim would go out to an island in
Speaker 4: the Mississippi, they would shoot at each other from from
Speaker 4: ten paces and then miss. And the famous one of
Speaker 4: these involved the Texas yer, old Jim Bowie, who was
Speaker 4: a second, and both men were so angry and their
Speaker 4: seconds were so angry they just a melee, you know,
Speaker 4: broke out and they started shooting each other. And Bowie
Speaker 4: had this, you know, six foot short sort of a
Speaker 4: nice knife, the famous Bowie knife. So I almost don't
Speaker 4: want to emphasize the formal rules of duels too much
Speaker 4: because I think there were many more that were informal.
Speaker 8: But the fact that there were formal rules speaks to
Speaker 8: how prevalent it was and widely accepted.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, the funny thing you saw in the
Speaker 4: South from the high water mark of duels, which is
Speaker 4: say the seventeen nineties in the eighteen thirties, which I
Speaker 4: know overlaps with some of your work, is a sense
Speaker 4: that everybody said, you weren't supposed to do it. The
Speaker 4: preachers want women's associations. Formerly, you weren't supposed to do it.
Speaker 4: But everybody was like, wink, wink, this is the greatest
Speaker 4: things that slice bread. I mean, nobody ever got no
Speaker 4: sheriff ever walked out into the middle of a field
Speaker 4: yelling stop, you're all under arrest.
Speaker 2: And they'd have like towns that have a a formal
Speaker 2: maybe not formal, but they would have a they would
Speaker 2: have a what you well understood to be the dueling grounds.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Every southern statey not just some every single one.
Speaker 4: I can't you know. Saint Louis had an island out
Speaker 4: I think they call it Bloody Island. Out in the Mississippi. Uh.
Speaker 4: The famous one, the most famous one was you could
Speaker 4: still go there in the Oaks and underneath the Oaks
Speaker 4: and City Park in New Orleans at the end of
Speaker 4: vestipl In made. And you know, there were so many
Speaker 4: duels there during the eighteen thirties, you practically have to
Speaker 4: make an appointment. There were some Sundays right right, because
Speaker 4: there would be ten or twelve duels on a single afternoon.
Speaker 4: Now the big asterisk there is in New Orleans. Duels
Speaker 4: were almost always done with swords rather than guns, and
Speaker 4: typically those duels ended when one man drew blood.
Speaker 6: That's the French connection exactly.
Speaker 3: He talked about too, a style of duel where you
Speaker 3: take like you and me bind are.
Speaker 2: Left hands, right, and then you get a knife. Dude,
Speaker 2: that's a wicked google right there.
Speaker 3: Do you know what I'm saying? Like me and Randall,
Speaker 3: we bouting on them.
Speaker 2: Me and Randall clasp our hands left our class, our.
Speaker 3: Left hands, and they bind them, tie them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what if you're a lefty, that's what.
Speaker 2: That's my mold.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: Then you complain, Yeah, your second has got to make
Speaker 8: a case for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you then you're like on the counter three,
Speaker 2: and you each got a knife and your hands are
Speaker 2: tied and on the counter three.
Speaker 3: Go go stab you in this fight wherever fight.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a you know, a structured knife fight
Speaker 4: from a distance of about two and a half feet.
Speaker 4: The only problem with that is I, at least I
Speaker 4: was unable to find a single one in the non
Speaker 4: fiction annals of history. It remains popular in some movies.
Speaker 4: If you remember the Long Riders nineteen eighty Walter Hill
Speaker 4: movie of the James Gang, there was a beautiful one
Speaker 4: involving Cole Younger and Sam Starr. The problem is we
Speaker 4: just can't find any that you know, actually actually happened.
Speaker 8: We run into that a lot with our audio projects.
Speaker 8: There's just stories that you hear about the mountain men
Speaker 8: did this, or the mountain men did that, and then
Speaker 8: you spend months reading every mountain man account you can find,
Speaker 8: and it just seems to be an invention of later authors.
Speaker 4: Or I prefer to call it folklore, folk suggesting that
Speaker 4: they're probably and I suspect this did this practice that
Speaker 4: we're talking about now did not arise out of nowhere.
Speaker 4: It came from something. But the thing is they didn't
Speaker 4: have Harvard professors with them in Wyoming in eighteen thirty one,
Speaker 4: and a lot of those guys didn't live to author memoirs.
Speaker 4: So I don't doubt that there were incidents where men
Speaker 4: tied their hands together and went after the wind knives.
Speaker 4: I just think that a lot of documentation about that
Speaker 4: stuff in the early especially in the earlier Frontier, is
Speaker 4: pretty pre sparse.
Speaker 3: I'm from Michigan.
Speaker 2: Do you think that I could pull like if you
Speaker 2: saw me running around? I keep thinking about switching to
Speaker 2: those shirts you got on, but I feel like it'd
Speaker 2: be like, uh, you know what I mean, might not
Speaker 2: be cool if I switched to a Yavar being from Michigan.
Speaker 3: What would you think.
Speaker 4: I think you can pull it off?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, now, I mean if you're I think it's
Speaker 4: a geographic thing. I think it's harder to pull off
Speaker 4: north of Texas, north of areas that don't have a
Speaker 4: large Latino population. I think he's also age appropriate. I
Speaker 4: don't see a ton of twenty five year olds or
Speaker 4: youngsters your age wearing them. But once I got to sixty, I.
Speaker 3: Was I'm fifty years old.
Speaker 4: Okay, well, you're coming up on the age of my body.
Speaker 3: Brad from Texas. He wears the same shirts.
Speaker 4: They're the most comfortable thing you can wear.
Speaker 3: God, I want to switch bad.
Speaker 7: That's close to trying to pull off a cowboy hat.
Speaker 3: I'm worried about. Yeah, it's what I'm worried about. I
Speaker 3: want to buy five or six, get rid of all
Speaker 3: my other shirts and just run. Why of ours?
Speaker 4: I got ten or twelve? And in Texas we can
Speaker 4: wear eleven months a year. And uh, they're just they're
Speaker 4: just comfortable as I'll get as I'll get out.
Speaker 3: He's looking at the writer in that Son of a Bitch.
Speaker 4: No, see, I've also been I've also been told I
Speaker 4: look like a waiter.
Speaker 3: No, not to me, man, you look like a Texan
Speaker 3: and a writer.
Speaker 4: Well thank you.
Speaker 3: Uh you mentioned James Gang.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you are one of the I kind of laughed
Speaker 2: out loud in your book where you like, I don't
Speaker 2: want to put Jesse James in my Gunfighter book. I'm
Speaker 2: only putting him here because you think he should be
Speaker 2: in here, it's true, And then you go on to
Speaker 2: explain at great length why he does not belong your book.
Speaker 4: Jesse James killed people with guns, but we are talking
Speaker 4: about the Old West. And Jesse James was most certainly
Speaker 4: not a creature of the Old West. He was a
Speaker 4: Midwestern bank and train robber. He he pulled Johnson, Minnesota
Speaker 4: in Alabama.
Speaker 3: Why do people think he's a Western guy?
Speaker 4: Because the dime novels in the pulp fiction that came
Speaker 4: after him, for some reason, began gravitating his story, which
Speaker 4: is extensively in Missouri out west, because that's where people
Speaker 4: expected bang bang and gunfighters and bank robbers and all that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you even explained in that chapter people didn't rob
Speaker 2: banks in the.
Speaker 4: West, well, not until the eighteen nineties. It was all
Speaker 4: but unheard of because there's no money. There just wasn't
Speaker 4: enough hard currency. The one place where you could rob
Speaker 4: something making serious money was trains, and even that was
Speaker 4: pretty rare.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the banks, like oh sorry, oh no, sorry.
Speaker 8: I was just the other point that you made in
Speaker 8: there that I appreciated was there's people shooting each other
Speaker 8: in Eastern cities all the time, and they're not Obviously
Speaker 8: there is a higher rate of violence in the West
Speaker 8: and in Texas, but you're like, no one's writing, you know,
Speaker 8: folklore about somebody shooting someone on the streets of Brooklyn
Speaker 8: or anything like that.
Speaker 6: But there's this whole cultural.
Speaker 2: Now there's a whole genre of music about that called
Speaker 2: gangster rep Yeah.
Speaker 8: Well, I mean it's a similar thing, like there's certain
Speaker 8: parts of the country that you associate with violence, but
Speaker 8: there's violence ever where it's only what the.
Speaker 6: Culture chooses to focus fixate on. Right.
Speaker 4: Well, that was one of the first things that I
Speaker 4: had to confront is, Hey, let's face it, gunfighters do
Speaker 4: not seem to be a hugely important aspect of our history.
Speaker 4: There's no political or sociological impact in nothing that would
Speaker 4: justify putting them in a history book, a textbook. So
Speaker 4: I had to figure out why is it we're still
Speaker 4: talking about them one hundred and fifty years And obviously
Speaker 4: where I came down is that they are important culturally
Speaker 4: for America. We have decided that there is something in
Speaker 4: these exploits that connects with us. There's a reason that
Speaker 4: gunfighters became an aspect of twentieth century, especially entertainments of
Speaker 4: movies and literature. And I don't spend a lot of
Speaker 4: time trying to get all academic about why they were important,
Speaker 4: but I do think I had to address at least
Speaker 4: address why you know this the only gunfighters that anybody
Speaker 4: remembers rose in America on the frontier in that thirty
Speaker 4: five year old in that thirty five year period, I.
Speaker 7: Want to ask you a question that's like a twenty
Speaker 7: first twentieth century, twenty first century gun control spin.
Speaker 4: On that era.
Speaker 7: Would that gunfighter era have occurred without the proliferation of
Speaker 7: six shooters, like after the Civil War?
Speaker 5: Like when that technology part.
Speaker 3: Of the book?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, I think you have to argue they were.
Speaker 4: I mean, what made the gunfighter era possible? What made
Speaker 4: all these famous shootings possible was the invention of the
Speaker 4: revolver by Samuel Colt in the lighteen eighteen thirties and
Speaker 4: its adoption and thus popularization by the Texas Rangers in
Speaker 4: the eighteen forties. When you talk about the phenomenon that
Speaker 4: we call today open car Carrie, it was not unknown
Speaker 4: before the revolver. You can find memoirists who toured southern
Speaker 4: areas and rural areas that are like, gosh, I saw
Speaker 4: a guy carrying a gun this in Arkansas in eighteen
Speaker 4: thirty seven. But after the war, especially after in eighteen
Speaker 4: sixty five and eighteen sixty six, the federal government auctioned
Speaker 4: off or gave away something the order of one point
Speaker 4: three million dollars one point three million side arms. I
Speaker 4: think you have to acknowledge that open carry became not
Speaker 4: only prevalent but accepted. There you can find memoirs writing
Speaker 4: about at the time who were like, good lord, can
Speaker 4: you believe men are wearing guns like they used to
Speaker 4: wear bow ties? And I think I think that these
Speaker 4: gun fights, what you needed for them to happen were revolvers,
Speaker 4: something where you can fire a lot so cause a
Speaker 4: lot of mayhem. You don't really have gun fights pre war.
Speaker 4: Back in the day with a primary handgun was a
Speaker 4: single shot.
Speaker 3: Short gun fight.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, the typical duel be bang bang, and
Speaker 4: then everybody takes ten minutes to reload.
Speaker 8: Yeap oh, And there's a very similar phenomena. I mean,
Speaker 8: I'm not just vaguely. The Tommy gun arrived too late
Speaker 8: on the scene in World War One to really be
Speaker 8: issued to troops, so they sold all of those after
Speaker 8: the war, like in hardware stores, right, And that's the
Speaker 8: rise of okid of the nineteen twenties gangster.
Speaker 4: I would I wrote an entire book that that that argued,
Speaker 4: in part I knew.
Speaker 6: You could speak that, which is why I brought up
Speaker 6: my face.
Speaker 4: Either spread of surplus Tommy guns in the twenties did
Speaker 4: as much to create al caponent as anything else, because
Speaker 4: suddenly if you could shoot hundred rounds a minute or
Speaker 4: whatever it was some sheriff named Goober out in Iowa
Speaker 4: was just you know, he he's not gonna be able
Speaker 4: to face off with you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, uh, you know, I want to I
Speaker 2: want to talk about the Colt Pistol, but I want
Speaker 2: to back up to Mint, to the man that doesn't
Speaker 2: belong in the book, but he's in there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, can you explain to folks like who was Jesse James? Like, like,
Speaker 2: what did that world that he came out of?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Because that winds up having a little bit of an
Speaker 3: impact on a number of these people, it does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's some of the goings ons in the Civil
Speaker 2: War shaped a lot of these individuals.
Speaker 4: One of the things that a number of the early gunfighters,
Speaker 4: those who kind of began their careers in the late
Speaker 4: eighteen sixties have in common is a number of them,
Speaker 4: from Jesse James to John Wesley Harden of Texas to
Speaker 4: Doc Holliday, were inveterate and angry Southerners. Jesse James was
Speaker 4: the biggest one in terms of his fame. He was
Speaker 4: a teenage boy during the Civil War whose brother Frank
Speaker 4: was out there fighting at a time that the warfare
Speaker 4: in Missouri was much less about the movement of armies
Speaker 4: and much more about rural gorillas descending on farms and
Speaker 4: burning up farms and such. Frank was into that Jesse
Speaker 4: joined him. Jesse was shot twice in the chest during
Speaker 4: the war, survived, and then goes utterly black for four years.
Speaker 4: We don't know much about him, but we do know
Speaker 4: that many of the Confederate guerrillas known as bushwhackers did
Speaker 4: begin to engage in crime in Missouri in the late
Speaker 4: eighteen sixties. And the first time we see Jesse and Frank,
Speaker 4: the first time they walk out onto the pages of history,
Speaker 4: is eighteen sixty nine and Gallatin, Missouri, far north. They
Speaker 4: walk into a bank ostensively to rob it, but you
Speaker 4: learn immediately that robbery was just second. They go up
Speaker 4: to a gentleman who's sitting at a desk, and they
Speaker 4: call him by a name, let's say Burluson, whatever it was,
Speaker 4: and shoot him in the hat. They thought he had
Speaker 4: this guy had killed one of their commanding officers. They
Speaker 4: were there to exactly they were wrong and they killed
Speaker 4: the wrong guy. That led to Jesse and Frank forming
Speaker 4: a group that two years later began robbing banks and
Speaker 4: continued very successful for ten years. Jesse James in his
Speaker 4: career as a bank and train robber. What's important, what's
Speaker 4: important for people to understand is what a unicorn he was.
Speaker 4: There was nobody like this in the country that was
Speaker 4: doing this, that was doing it this much or making
Speaker 4: this money. And when you look at the entirety of
Speaker 4: this period from eighteen sixty five and nineteen oh one,
Speaker 4: there's nobody else that comes closed. I mean, if you
Speaker 4: wanted to say who is the second most successful outlaw
Speaker 4: of the Old West, if you put Jesse James at
Speaker 4: the top, you'd probably say Butch cast was a distant second.
Speaker 4: But Jesse James was the first household name criminal in
Speaker 4: American history. But he was not, as you point out,
Speaker 4: he was not a gunfighter.
Speaker 3: You say he was just a murderer.
Speaker 4: Well, he never actually even did anything that we can
Speaker 4: figure out west of the Missouri Kansas line, which is
Speaker 4: kind of the beginning of the Old West. When you
Speaker 4: look at the people that Jesse James shot five or six.
Speaker 4: Everyone was essentially executed with a shot to the head
Speaker 4: because he did something that pissed Jesse off during a robbery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it wasn't like going out into the street and
Speaker 3: being like draw.
Speaker 2: It was he was a shoot.
Speaker 3: He to shoot people.
Speaker 4: The only time we knew Jesse James was in a
Speaker 4: legitimately contentious gunfight situation. A detective out of Saint Louis
Speaker 4: somehow stumbled upon him and one of his cousins on
Speaker 4: a wooded road in Missouri in the eighteen seventies and
Speaker 4: the detective came right up to him and there was
Speaker 4: an exchange of gunfire. All three guys missed at a
Speaker 4: distance of like fifteen feet. Like you can look at
Speaker 4: some of these gunfighters. Hitcock, Ben Thompson, the Texan, Butch Cassidy,
Speaker 4: who did an awful lot of practicing. Billy the Kid
Speaker 4: practiced daily, as did Hitcock. There's not a single story
Speaker 4: that I could find in any of the ten Jesse
Speaker 4: James biographies I read that showed Jesse James ever practiced
Speaker 4: with a gun, And I think it shows.
Speaker 8: He's the kind of guy that would go out and
Speaker 8: buy one box am when it would last ten hunting seasons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like when I was a kid.
Speaker 2: If you own a box amb, well yeah, it's good
Speaker 2: for like twenty shells.
Speaker 3: You're like, oh, that would be good for fifteen sixteen
Speaker 3: deer every few years. I'll make sure it's my gun
Speaker 3: still accurate.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 4: The thing to remember about Jesse James is if he's
Speaker 4: in a gunfight, he's failed. You know, he wants to
Speaker 4: be able to walk into a bank point a gun,
Speaker 4: maybe shoot a single shot into the ceiling, and get
Speaker 4: out with the money before anybody notices him. So there's
Speaker 4: a reason that he probably didn't hone his gun skills.
Speaker 2: Who wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Speaker 2: Robert Ford?
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 4: He's a real good writer, Robert Hanson.
Speaker 3: Was Hanson.
Speaker 4: Someone type that didn't read the book.
Speaker 3: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford?
Speaker 3: It was made Ron Ron Hanson, Ron Hanson. That's the
Speaker 3: hell of a book. Are you? Are you much so?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 3: Robert Ford kills James. Robert Ford kills Jesse James. Yes,
Speaker 3: Bob Ford kills Jesse James. Do you haven't read much
Speaker 3: about the guy that then killed Bob Ford.
Speaker 4: No, I put it in a footnote. I know that
Speaker 4: he was killed by a guy that basically walked into
Speaker 4: a bar he owned or was working in. Ten fifteen
Speaker 4: years later.
Speaker 2: Many different versions of what happened, it's agreed upon that
Speaker 2: he shot him with a double barreled shotgun.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, there is there is a there's a
Speaker 4: fence around this book. There there are places that I
Speaker 4: kind of go up to the fence and going okay,
Speaker 4: that's probably a footnote. I'm not going to read through
Speaker 4: three more books.
Speaker 2: Hanson, Ron Hanson, that was his name, Ron Hanson.
Speaker 6: Robert Hanson, the FBI All of a sudden.
Speaker 3: The Ron Hanson's the author with author, So he writes
Speaker 3: a novel. But it's like very informed.
Speaker 2: Right in there he has his detail that the guy
Speaker 2: kills Robert Ford has a coach gun, has a shotgun,
Speaker 2: and he took a bunch of pipe, cut the pipe
Speaker 2: and little teeny discs, and then took a hammer and
Speaker 2: chisel and cut those diss into little shards, and then
Speaker 2: took a funnel and funneled the shards down into the shotgun.
Speaker 2: Because when you're reading about the guy that when you're
Speaker 2: reading about the guy that killed Bob Ford. Everybody talks
Speaker 2: about he was nearly cutting half. Some say cutting half
Speaker 2: at the way, some say cutting half at the jaw,
Speaker 2: but it's agreed upon that he was very shot up.
Speaker 2: And I was wondering if you knew about that detail
Speaker 2: that's true or not about filling that gun full of
Speaker 2: pipe shavings, which is a dirty deed.
Speaker 4: I don't, and I feel like a personal failure that
Speaker 4: I can't address that for him.
Speaker 2: But you know what, here's what, here's where you can
Speaker 2: find cover for yourself. You argue that he shouldn't even
Speaker 2: be in your book. So the last thing you need
Speaker 2: to do is spend a whole bunch of time talking
Speaker 2: about the guy that.
Speaker 3: Was out and then the guy that killed him. It's
Speaker 3: just getting very removed story.
Speaker 4: At some point, you got to realize people probably are
Speaker 4: not going to read the eight hundred page version of this,
Speaker 4: So I do have to make I have to make a.
Speaker 2: Lot of calls gunfighters speed versus accuracy. You know, that
Speaker 2: was the thing that would debate.
Speaker 4: It was typically journalists that would ask them, and we
Speaker 4: don't have a ton of those interviews and exchanges, but
Speaker 4: of those we do. Arp was weighed in on this,
Speaker 4: as did Hitcock. Those men who lived long enough to
Speaker 4: tell the story argued strongly in favor of accuracy. That
Speaker 4: the dumb ass thing to do, and you see people
Speaker 4: doing it repeatedly through the in this book, is to
Speaker 4: draw and shoot from the hip. Just as as as
Speaker 4: a question of accuracy, especially at distance, that's pretty questionable.
Speaker 4: In the in the in the gunfight that opens the book,
Speaker 4: in which while Bill Hiccock kills this fellow, Davis Tutt
Speaker 4: at seventy five.
Speaker 2: Yards the Titanic fraud, while Bill Hiccock kills a man
Speaker 2: at seventy five yards because that's right.
Speaker 4: Uh, you know, Tut fired from the hit Hitcock famously
Speaker 4: had a Navy colt. He thrust his left arm forward,
Speaker 4: placed the barrel of the Navy colt across his forearm,
Speaker 4: took what a millisecond longer than the other guy, and
Speaker 4: shot him in the chest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there you have it.
Speaker 4: I did the same thing an you know, any number
Speaker 4: of people he shot in the OK Corral fight. You know,
Speaker 4: I forget the guy's name. Shot made the mistake of
Speaker 4: shooting from the.
Speaker 2: Hip, yep, And he would draw a bead on him, Yes, Uh,
Speaker 2: the Colt pistol. It didn't take I couldn't believe when
Speaker 2: I was reading this that it wasn't immediately popular.
Speaker 3: It was the Colt Revolver like people didn't want it.
Speaker 4: No, the original was introduced in like I was say,
Speaker 4: eighteen thirty seven, about a year after the Alma, and
Speaker 4: it was large, and it was unwieldy, and it could
Speaker 4: take five six minutes to to mean you practically had
Speaker 4: to dismantle it to reload it. So while Colt was
Speaker 4: able to unload some of these onto the federal government
Speaker 4: and was used were told during the Florida's Seminole War
Speaker 4: in the early eighteen forties, I want to say it
Speaker 4: was not a big deal. In fact, by the time
Speaker 4: a group of Texas Rangers stumbled upon some of these
Speaker 4: pistols in eighteen forty four, seven years later, Colt had
Speaker 4: gone out of business. And it was only when the
Speaker 4: rangers began using them in firefights against the Comanche and
Speaker 4: then later in the Mexican War that one of them,
Speaker 4: one of the rangers who used it, a fellow named
Speaker 4: Samuel Walker, went back east and said, Colt, this would
Speaker 4: be a great gun if you could just lighten it
Speaker 4: up and make the reload a little bit easier. And
Speaker 4: working together, Walker and Colt created the gun that created
Speaker 4: the gunfighter era. At the original six shoot of the
Speaker 4: Walker Colt.
Speaker 3: And some of these dudes.
Speaker 2: I always thought it was like from just a joke
Speaker 2: from Westerns. But some of these dudes you talked about,
Speaker 2: what actually they would wear two of them and they
Speaker 2: would rig them for crossdraw. But that's real.
Speaker 4: That was news to me.
Speaker 3: I always thought that was like a just goofy.
Speaker 8: When I read that detail, I had to figure how
Speaker 8: that was faster me too. I mean, I think the
Speaker 8: idea is like you swing it and you're aiming it
Speaker 8: in one motion rather than drawing and just and bring
Speaker 8: it up.
Speaker 4: But well, let's define our terms real quick. Most people
Speaker 4: who wore a gun or a single pistol low on
Speaker 4: the right hip or low on their shooting hip. It
Speaker 4: was somewhat rare to wear two guns. We know John
Speaker 4: Harden Wesley Harden did it. We know Hiccock did it.
Speaker 4: But now what we're talking about is the way Hiccock
Speaker 4: and certain others Jim Courtney, the Marshallo fort Orth did
Speaker 4: it as well. They wore the They wore their holsters
Speaker 4: high on their hip, so practically, you know, with the holster,
Speaker 4: the northern end of the holster in their stomach. And
Speaker 4: their argument was that if you are pulling from low
Speaker 4: on your hip, you've got to pull up and then point.
Speaker 4: With a crossdraw, you pull out and and and the
Speaker 4: barrel is already pointed the way it should go.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: So they would argue, and I am not a shooter,
Speaker 4: and I've never crossed, and I've never used a crossdraw.
Speaker 4: That it costs. The crossdraw worked because it required one
Speaker 4: less motion.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I was doing this in bed the other night.
Speaker 8: I put my I put my kindle down, and I
Speaker 8: was reaching across to this side and.
Speaker 3: Told your wife go stand across drawing at the ceiling.
Speaker 4: I was going to say that was the excuse for
Speaker 4: all those movements when your wife walked into the room.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, everybody had been asleep for hours.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 6: The dogs.
Speaker 2: The guy that kills Buster Scrugs and the very excellent
Speaker 2: battle to Buster Scrugs, he's rigged high for crossdraw m
Speaker 2: and Buster Scruggs I think carries on his hip.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, Uh, once these guys got it, they made
Speaker 2: they kind of made the Rangers kind of made.
Speaker 3: It famous in like a particular engagement, right right.
Speaker 4: We caught on battle Waller Creek eighteen forty four, the
Speaker 4: first time the ranger took these revolvers.
Speaker 3: And they got them like through army surplus or something.
Speaker 4: Right now, it was worse and it was I love
Speaker 4: telling this story in Texas because the Rangers discovered these
Speaker 4: pistols unused and left over by the Texas Navy. Like
Speaker 4: don't you just love that Texas had a navy when
Speaker 4: it was an individual country and then they disbanded it,
Speaker 4: right they did, because guess what, they didn't need a
Speaker 4: Texas Navy, know what was gonna invade from seaside, So
Speaker 4: these guns were put I imagined in some type of
Speaker 4: surplus warehouse where a young ranger named John Jack Hayes
Speaker 4: found him and took him out. That day he had
Speaker 4: a patrol with twenty three rangers and they ran into
Speaker 4: a group of about one hundred best estimate, about one
Speaker 4: hundred comanchee out in hill country northwest of San Antonio.
Speaker 4: The Comanche withdrew into a wooded hilltop as they often do,
Speaker 4: and chied it and yelled at the rangers, come on,
Speaker 4: come on, let's fight. Well. For as long as the
Speaker 4: Rangers had been out fighting Native Americans, the way you
Speaker 4: charged was you took a single shot with your musket,
Speaker 4: put it back, put it back in in the whatever
Speaker 4: you call him, musket holtzer, and then you would take
Speaker 4: a single shot with your flint, with your your single
Speaker 4: shot pistol, and then you would go in fighting with
Speaker 4: kniven sword. And this was the first time in history
Speaker 4: where anybody charged a group of Comanche, uh with single
Speaker 4: shot musket, put it away, and then and then six
Speaker 4: shot revolver. The numbers that I recall as one ranger
Speaker 4: died that day in something like twenty five Comanche. And
Speaker 4: the takeaway quote years later from the Comanche chief who've
Speaker 4: been present that day is I shall never I shall
Speaker 4: never fight that Jackayes again, for he has a bullet
Speaker 4: for every finger on his hand. That's good.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 3: Who's the Harden?
Speaker 2: Is a guy you spend a lot of time talking about, right,
Speaker 2: John is John West.
Speaker 4: John Wesley Harden. I call him Wes Harden.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you spend a lot of time talking about him.
Speaker 2: Like here is a kind of like a maniacal, indisputable
Speaker 2: unstableble gun.
Speaker 4: Yeah gun, Well, Wesley Harden, who was probably one of
Speaker 4: the big five I would call him, and he's certainly
Speaker 4: more well known in Texas than he is elsewhere. He's
Speaker 4: the bridge from the violence that kind of took over
Speaker 4: Texas in the decade after the war. He's the bridge
Speaker 4: into the more the later area era of gunfighters that
Speaker 4: we know it was hardened, you know, faced off with
Speaker 4: with Hiccock and Abilene. One of the things that's that's
Speaker 4: startling about John Lesley Harden, if you know nothing about him, is,
Speaker 4: of course he is credited or with killing between twenty
Speaker 4: six and forty two people by the time he was
Speaker 4: twenty one, and most of it when he was eighteen.
Speaker 4: He got into trouble at the age of fifteen when
Speaker 4: he killed a black man who he had wrestled with
Speaker 4: and they argued afterwards, and then was obliged to become
Speaker 4: a fugitive when federal troops looked for him. And so
Speaker 4: for the next how many years six years he kind
Speaker 4: of wandered Texas and ultimately a little bit into Kansas.
Speaker 4: And the wild thing about his career is we call
Speaker 4: him my moniacle, but it's hard to point to a
Speaker 4: heck of a heck of a lot of those shootings
Speaker 4: that were played, they were almost always because he got
Speaker 4: into some type of argument. You remember. The most famous one,
Speaker 4: of course, was he shot another Texas cattleman through the
Speaker 4: wall of his hotel room four in the morning in Abilene, Kansas.
Speaker 4: And the story that got told about ten years later
Speaker 4: is that he did it because the man was snoring.
Speaker 4: And for about one hundred years, it's been cool to say, oh,
Speaker 4: that's a bunch of bs. Come on, that's just Texans
Speaker 4: making up this stuff. But I'm sorry, why else do
Speaker 4: you shoot someone through a hotel room wall at four
Speaker 4: in the morning you think he got into an argument
Speaker 4: with him? I suspect snoring makes a lot of sense
Speaker 4: to me.
Speaker 2: I always think about opening their throat with a razor
Speaker 2: blade when I'm sleeping next to a snorer, like dirt,
Speaker 2: just like just like very delicate, so delicate.
Speaker 3: He doesn't even wake up.
Speaker 6: First in his throat you met like one of those
Speaker 6: mouth people.
Speaker 7: That's why I always make sure I'm sleeping in a
Speaker 7: different ten.
Speaker 4: I was about to say, can we can we rethink
Speaker 4: that can't.
Speaker 2: I would go up the dirt and I'd be like sleep, sleep,
Speaker 2: and just like, take a blade and just open up
Speaker 2: that artery in there.
Speaker 4: He's so nice, I think he'd understand.
Speaker 3: He wouldn't even be mad.
Speaker 6: It's okay, I'm not mad.
Speaker 3: It's just I can't handle it. I just can't handle
Speaker 3: it anymore.
Speaker 2: Uh. Card games man a lot a lot of bloodshed
Speaker 2: and gun fighting over playing cards.
Speaker 4: Which I didn't understand because on its face, it doesn't
Speaker 4: make any sense. If we're playing five card draw. I
Speaker 4: throw down my two aces and you throw down your
Speaker 4: two kings. What's to argue about, right? I mean, I
Speaker 4: just never understood the fact that easily half of the
Speaker 4: Marquee gunfights that I'm writing about here had something to
Speaker 4: do with an argument over cards. And it wasn't until
Speaker 4: I started reading about the history of gambling that I
Speaker 4: realized that things changed in the Old West, or in
Speaker 4: the years leading up to the Old West. In eighteen
Speaker 4: forty three, or Riverboat Gambler published a book and then
Speaker 4: went out on the lecture circuit to explain to Americans
Speaker 4: how prevalent cheating was and how professional gamblers did it,
Speaker 4: whether it was with hidden cards, they hidden their clothes,
Speaker 4: sometimes entire decks. They would have pulleys and things that
Speaker 4: they could pull up an ace from their foot. I
Speaker 4: mean they had, they would have. They wore rings with
Speaker 4: mirrors beneath them so that they could see every card
Speaker 4: that they dealt. So what I argue in the book,
Speaker 4: and I think I'm on pretty solid ground here, is
Speaker 4: that what was different about the Old West, and what
Speaker 4: explains much of this violence, is two things. Number One,
Speaker 4: cheating was epidemic. More importantly, number two, now everybody knew it.
Speaker 4: So just about every game of chance on the old Frontier,
Speaker 4: I'm arguing people were almost as keen to to spot
Speaker 4: whether other players were cheating as they were to win.
Speaker 4: And of course, any type of accusation of cheating, which
Speaker 4: let's face it comes up a lot when somebody loses
Speaker 4: and has irked about it. Any accusation and certainly any
Speaker 4: proof of cheating was about as acute an affront to
Speaker 4: a man's honor as you could get. So there were
Speaker 4: a lot of gunfights, some of them in the moment,
Speaker 4: some of them you know, I'll meet you outside. Some
Speaker 4: of them, you know, I'll see you a week later,
Speaker 4: and I'm still pissed, and so I'm gonna shoot you.
Speaker 4: I mean, gambling became one of the main sources of
Speaker 4: dispute on the on the Old Frontier.
Speaker 7: Was it also like a major source of income for
Speaker 7: a lot of these guys, Like how are they paying
Speaker 7: the bills?
Speaker 4: Like gambling.
Speaker 5: I mean some were robbing.
Speaker 4: People, obviously, but think of think of the jobs on
Speaker 4: the old Frontier. I mean, school teacher, cowboy, a bar keep.
Speaker 4: None of these people are getting rich. Those people are
Speaker 4: getting rich by in larger absentee mine owners and such cattlemen.
Speaker 4: And gambling filled two holes there, one in a landscape
Speaker 4: that didn't have video games or internet or board games
Speaker 4: or much of anything. Primarily it was entertainment, but also
Speaker 4: it became kind of the omnipressent gigwork of the Frontier. Everybody,
Speaker 4: if you're making eighty percent of what you should make,
Speaker 4: I mean, you're gonna try to make extra And the
Speaker 4: easiest way to do that on the Frontier was was gambling.
Speaker 4: And so you see almost all the major gamblers, and
Speaker 4: I think like almost all the men on the Frontier
Speaker 4: moonlight as gamblers. I mean, the IRPs were quasi professional.
Speaker 4: They would occasionally set up shop in a casino, and
Speaker 4: then you had the professionals. Doc Holliday Luke short Ben Thompson,
Speaker 4: who became frankly more more famous as gunfighters fighting off
Speaker 4: challengers as they were as gambler.
Speaker 2: But these were guys that were that were like making
Speaker 2: their living playing cards.
Speaker 4: Yes, they would typically take Doc Holliday. He had come
Speaker 4: west from Georgia because of his tuberculosis. Was thought dryer
Speaker 4: air was good for him. Tried to be a dentist,
Speaker 4: and he was a dentist, and he tried to open
Speaker 4: a practice in Dallas. Unfortunately, tuberculosis, the cough and dentistry
Speaker 4: don't exactly need so so you know, he starts, He
Speaker 4: gets a buck board and uh a girlfriend slash lady
Speaker 4: of the night named Big Nose Kate, and begins basically
Speaker 4: touring the west. And he would go from the Rio
Speaker 4: Grande to Montana, stay as long as he felt that
Speaker 4: there was still suckers to be flee store until he
Speaker 4: irked someone so bad he needed to leave town. And
Speaker 4: it was a thing. It was a type of job.
Speaker 4: Gamblers actually talked of a circuit being up here in
Speaker 4: the mining towns, maybe in the in the winter, being
Speaker 4: in the Kansas cowtowns, or in Texas itself in the summer.
Speaker 2: And they would go to towns where there was a
Speaker 2: lot of money flowing.
Speaker 4: Well, it was easier to make money in those places
Speaker 4: than in poor towns.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, like like gold rush gold like they would
Speaker 2: kind of follow mining mining booms and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: Or you know the Kansas cowtowns with all the money
Speaker 4: coming in from Texas cowboys during the eighteen seventies. Any
Speaker 4: place there was any type of boom, whether it was
Speaker 4: around minerals or cattle, you would find prostitution gamblers because
Speaker 4: that's where the money was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're gonna see my knowledge of your bookstarts to
Speaker 2: fade pretty soon because I'm only halfway through, so you'll.
Speaker 3: Have to help me.
Speaker 4: It's all right, I'll just talk more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, please, but you lay out this deal that, like
Speaker 2: tell the story of the Longhorns, because it just winds
Speaker 2: up had a big part of the book is does
Speaker 2: that there's a kind of a collapse or a lull
Speaker 2: and cattle activity, right, and then there's a great spike
Speaker 2: in cattle activity and that pushes out a lot of
Speaker 2: that That pushes out a lot of gunfighters to the north.
Speaker 4: Well, the eating of beef wasn't a huge thing in
Speaker 4: the Antebellum years before before the war, and of the
Speaker 4: beef cattle in the country were in South Texas and
Speaker 4: the plains on those ranches, famously King Ranch south of
Speaker 4: San Antonio. And it was during the war that trade
Speaker 4: just stopped because you couldn't anymore get you couldn't drive
Speaker 4: to New Orleans to market. There was no more money,
Speaker 4: not enough money in Texas for people to be having
Speaker 4: beef dinner. So essentially that trade frozen amber And so
Speaker 4: you know, cattle did what cattle do for about five
Speaker 4: years during the war. They made little cattle, and by
Speaker 4: the time the war was over, there was something older
Speaker 4: of five million cattle roaming free in South Texas.
Speaker 3: Unowned.
Speaker 4: No, they were owned, oh were they just weren't. Barboar
Speaker 4: wasn't a thing, so this was open range.
Speaker 2: So someone would have claimed ownership of them, whatever level
Speaker 2: of control they had over brand.
Speaker 3: I see.
Speaker 4: So you would brand your cow and then allow them
Speaker 4: to run free, and then when it was time to
Speaker 4: go to market wherever they might be, you had to
Speaker 4: go out and round and round them up.
Speaker 3: I see. So during those years, just they weren't there
Speaker 3: was nowhere to send them.
Speaker 4: That's exactly.
Speaker 3: So your herd just built to build.
Speaker 4: What happened immediately after the war in eighteen sixty five
Speaker 4: eighteen sixty six was Northerners wanted those They started to
Speaker 4: open the first ever stockyards in Chicago, and they needed
Speaker 4: those cows to get north. Unfortunately, there were no railroads
Speaker 4: in Texas to get them up there. If so fact,
Speaker 4: the cattle drives the nearest railroad railroads to Texas were
Speaker 4: in Kansas, Abilene, Wichton, ultimately Dodd City. And so the
Speaker 4: way that Texans and Texas longhorn cattle, and I've argued
Speaker 4: kind of this hyper violent ethos of Texas gunmen, the
Speaker 4: way that began to spread across the frontier was first
Speaker 4: up the Chisholm Trail to.
Speaker 2: Kansas, and they would come, they they would establish a
Speaker 2: point of sale, and then you'd have all these dudes
Speaker 2: a lot of money, real violent, tearing up the town.
Speaker 2: And you explain how the towns would sour on this right.
Speaker 4: There were five principal Kansas cattle town from eighteen sixty
Speaker 4: nine to eighteen seventy nine, beginning with Applene, then wichital
Speaker 4: Than Ellsworth, ultimately ending in Dodge City. And the Texas
Speaker 4: cowboys would drive large herds up there to each of
Speaker 4: each of these towns, they kind of handed it off
Speaker 4: being the place like a baton because the Texans were
Speaker 4: so violent and so aparisk, and the murder rates would
Speaker 4: go so sky high that each of the towns, you know,
Speaker 4: one after another, was like, Clint, that's it, We're done.
Speaker 4: You know, you know which stall you take these guys,
Speaker 4: Dodd City, you take them. And that's really where the
Speaker 4: first nationally famous gunfights occurred, the first ones that we
Speaker 4: still ride about today. We know gunfights happened before that,
Speaker 4: but this was now in the north. This was within
Speaker 4: range northern newspapers that suddenly we're like, wait, Texans are
Speaker 4: up here doing what? And you know, I argue in
Speaker 4: the book that you know this was this kind of
Speaker 4: made these Kansas cowtowns the Madison Square Garden of the
Speaker 4: gunfighter era. It's the first place you hear of so
Speaker 4: many of these police people from wide are up on down.
Speaker 6: Oh.
Speaker 3: Brodie had a question about mercenaries.
Speaker 7: Oh well yeah, I mean it might even relate to
Speaker 7: like the cattle drives, like like in Western movies a
Speaker 7: lot you see where like someone hires the gang, right,
Speaker 7: Like was that a thing where these guys will get
Speaker 7: hired to do some kind of mercenary work for good
Speaker 7: or bad reasons.
Speaker 4: It happened, but I would argue it didn't happen as
Speaker 4: much as the movies, right suggests the most famous incident
Speaker 4: of that. Well, first, there's two things we're talking about here.
Speaker 4: Individual gunmen who were hired as assassins is what would
Speaker 4: not call hitmen. Right, that was a thing. You may
Speaker 4: dimly remember a pretty good Steve Men movie from the
Speaker 4: seventies called Tom Horn. Oh yeah, oh, I forget where
Speaker 4: I am.
Speaker 3: The last man legally hung in Wyoming.
Speaker 4: And Tom Horn was pretty clearly a hired killer, the
Speaker 4: most stockman.
Speaker 3: He's a stock, he's a stock detective.
Speaker 4: But I think most people, at least in Tom Horn's case,
Speaker 4: knew what he was doing. But then there were others
Speaker 4: like Deacon Jim Miller in Texan, who, when he was
Speaker 4: strung up, his last words were, let the record show
Speaker 4: I have killed fifty one men, now hiring an entire
Speaker 4: group of hired killers. And I can think of any
Speaker 4: number of movies where that happened. Yeah, it happened. The
Speaker 4: most famous one was in Wyoming Johnson during the Johnson
Speaker 4: County War in eighteen ninety two, in which the Wyoming
Speaker 4: Stockman's Association basically judged that Johnson County was allowing rustlers
Speaker 4: to run free and wouldn't convict them even when they
Speaker 4: were indicted, and so the the Wyoming Cattleman decided that
Speaker 4: they were going to invade Johnson came kill all the
Speaker 4: public officials, the newspaper editors, and the wrestlers. For this,
Speaker 4: they dispatched a man to wait for it, Texas. We're
Speaker 4: in Dallas. He hired and brought north twenty one hired
Speaker 4: Texas Gunman. You probably know the end of that story
Speaker 4: did not end well for the Texas Gunman.
Speaker 3: Can I tell you funny Tom Horn story?
Speaker 4: Please?
Speaker 2: We used to hunt this dude's place named Tom Horn,
Speaker 2: and uh, he was a rancher and I would when
Speaker 2: I would go in and we'd shoot the breeze with him,
Speaker 2: and I always be like does he always be like
Speaker 2: does he know about Tom Horn? And one day if
Speaker 2: Tom not, kiddy, man, I'm talking to him, was like don't.
Speaker 2: We'd hunt rabbits in his place. So as a joke,
Speaker 2: one day we get him a carrot cake. Okay, we
Speaker 2: give a carrot cake and it's got like little rabbits
Speaker 2: and carrots on top of it, decorated, and we go on.
Speaker 2: We give him the carrot cake, and I'm trying to
Speaker 2: ascertain if he like is getting the joke, Like he
Speaker 2: gave us rabbit hunting permissions, so here's a carrot cake.
Speaker 3: And I'm also I'm wondering, like does he know about
Speaker 3: Tom Horn?
Speaker 2: And I'm looking through him and like right off of
Speaker 2: his right ear, I realized on his shelf as a
Speaker 2: book is Tom Horn's book. I'm like, oh good, he
Speaker 2: doesn't get the carrocake joke, but he does at least
Speaker 2: know that there's that there's another very famous Tom Horn
Speaker 2: h When you say it doesn't go well, explain what
Speaker 2: happened doesn't go well for the Texas Gunman.
Speaker 4: The Texas Gunman, you know, they come in to shine
Speaker 4: and they start riding up to Johnson County, and at
Speaker 4: one point, when they're just on the edge of the county,
Speaker 4: a scout comes in and says, wait, wait, the King
Speaker 4: of the Rustlers and a couple of other three bad
Speaker 4: guys are nearby on this ranch. Let's go over and
Speaker 4: get them first. Big argument breaks out. The Texans go
Speaker 4: over and get this guy. They surround this cabin. I
Speaker 4: think two of the bad guys get away and two
Speaker 4: of them are killed. One of them the so called
Speaker 4: king of the Rustlers. At this time, and it speaks
Speaker 4: to the pervasiveness of Texans even in Wyoming was a
Speaker 4: Texan named Nate Champion, who you know, wrote in a
Speaker 4: journal as they were, you know, shooting into the cabin
Speaker 4: and then starting to burn the cabin down. He ultimately
Speaker 4: ran out into their pistols a lah butch cassidy and
Speaker 4: was killed. But that gave the locals time to raise
Speaker 4: super posse, which was about twice the size of the
Speaker 4: incoming invaders. The incoming invaders withdrew to a ranch called
Speaker 4: to the governor for help. He was in on it.
Speaker 4: The governor called to the White House, who called in
Speaker 4: the seventh Cavalry, who rescued the poor Texas invaders. About
Speaker 4: three days later they all went away to nice Wyoming
Speaker 4: prisons and were quietly allowed to go on their way.
Speaker 2: You know who, in reading and reading your book, you
Speaker 2: get into Billy the Kid, and throughout the book, oh
Speaker 2: at least a half I'm reading, I'm reading little bits
Speaker 2: and I'm like, this is kind of like from Young Guns.
Speaker 2: But the movie Young Guns. They make a real pole
Speaker 2: prix out of a ton of different shit. Yes, like,
Speaker 2: what are they even talking about that movie?
Speaker 4: Look, I would argue that as bad.
Speaker 3: He's familiar with this movie, the Young Guns.
Speaker 4: I've been the sequel, I've seen it twice.
Speaker 2: Now looks like talking about ship from all over the
Speaker 2: west Man.
Speaker 4: Well, that is kind of what Hollywood does. They take
Speaker 4: the best look Young Guns. He is not awful. There
Speaker 4: are worse, including too, It's much worse.
Speaker 3: I got Young Guns too. Well, the beginning was pretty sweet.
Speaker 4: That it's not think I'm not judging it on entertainment value.
Speaker 5: But actual there was some real history in there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Young Guns, like Don Jovie was not there?
Speaker 4: Really, No, God, you're crushing me, you know. I thought
Speaker 4: Young Guns contribution the original to Billy the Kid was
Speaker 4: that I don't think Billy the Kid was the most
Speaker 4: stable of and Emilio Estavid did a good job of
Speaker 4: jesting there were moments when he wasn't all there and
Speaker 4: I that been all there. That spoke to me in
Speaker 4: the movie, and the idea that that these was a
Speaker 4: small group of gunmen in this feud kind of being
Speaker 4: chased and dominated and overwhelmed by an from Lincoln Lincoln
Speaker 4: County War eighteen eighty eight, eighteen eighty one. That felt right,
Speaker 4: But I mean they started to lose me a little
Speaker 4: young Guns during the Great Payote Sequences.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, but they were kind of mixing
Speaker 3: up their landscapes too, right, I.
Speaker 4: Mean, like, remind me, it's been a few years.
Speaker 2: Well, so the link where was the Lincoln County War?
Speaker 3: Where did the Lincoln County War occur?
Speaker 4: It's all New Mexico. Billy the Kid is all in
Speaker 4: New Mexico.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right?
Speaker 2: So the so that was right because I thought they
Speaker 2: were borrowing stuff from the sheep.
Speaker 3: The fence Cutter War is up in Wyoming.
Speaker 4: Well, I can't. I can't speak to that, uh. I
Speaker 4: mean the thing about Billy the Kid is.
Speaker 2: Let's just talk about the real ability Kid. Tell the
Speaker 2: story of the real Billy the Kid, never mind Young Guns.
Speaker 4: Well, the problem with Billy the Kid, if you're an
Speaker 4: author or an historian is I can take the accepted
Speaker 4: facts of Billy the Kid, and I can write ten
Speaker 4: different books that would take that would the book one
Speaker 4: would be of him is the worst villain and murderer
Speaker 4: you've ever read about all the way to book number ten,
Speaker 4: which would be what a sweet misunderstood guy is, because
Speaker 4: the elements of this guy's career and his personality could
Speaker 4: back up almost anything. You know. From the kind of
Speaker 4: the dastardly point of view, he was a murderer and
Speaker 4: a cattle rustler. Okay, from the good point of view.
Speaker 4: Even then, people admired his daring, his bravery in.
Speaker 5: The news.
Speaker 4: The news the New Mexican newspapers at the time that
Speaker 4: he was at the peak of his regional fame for
Speaker 4: about a year, were split. Some of them said he
Speaker 4: was a demon spawned from hell. Others said, well, you know,
Speaker 4: you can understand why he's doing this. He's out numbered
Speaker 4: that type of thing. Billy the Kid was an orphan
Speaker 4: raised and kind of escaped from Silver City, a town
Speaker 4: down in southwest New Mexico. He went out into Arizona,
Speaker 4: which was remote and undeveloped, and came back having killed
Speaker 4: a man who picked on him because he was so small.
Speaker 4: He was seventeen at the time, and he was a
Speaker 4: small kid. And in the West, by the way, they're
Speaker 4: all small and they're all called the kid. Like I
Speaker 4: can give you fifteen guys named the kid Harry the Kid.
Speaker 2: I mean, just you know, for some somebody, these guys's
Speaker 2: book one hundred and twenty five pounds.
Speaker 4: Well, I think that American men were smaller back in
Speaker 4: those days. Billy the Kid was what five seven twenty five.
Speaker 3: Something, probably malnourished for a while while he was young.
Speaker 4: Maybe Billy the Kid's career is neatly cut into two parts.
Speaker 4: The first is as as you mentioned, the Lincoln County War,
Speaker 4: where he had gone to work for a cattleman who
Speaker 4: got into a big feud with the local members of power,
Speaker 4: and Billy the Kid was on the losing side and
Speaker 4: hounded out of that after two or three years in
Speaker 4: which he killed two or three people. After that he
Speaker 4: went he moved over up toward Las Vegas in Las Vegas,
Speaker 4: New Mexico, northeastern New Mexico, and became the fancy word
Speaker 4: for him. People will say he was an outlaw, outlaws
Speaker 4: from ount law. He was a cattle wrestler. That's all
Speaker 4: he did was beintell cattle and he rose to fame
Speaker 4: when New Mexican New Mexico cattleman came after him, and
Speaker 4: ultimately they much as the governor of Texas in the
Speaker 4: nineteen thirties, brought in Frank Hamer to chase down Bonnie
Speaker 4: and Clyde, the cattleman of eastern New Mexico, almost all
Speaker 4: of whom were originally Texans. Brought in a young fella
Speaker 4: named Pat Garrett, who was known. He was little known
Speaker 4: for anything beforehand. He'd basically been a bartender, but his
Speaker 4: one claim to fame seemed.
Speaker 3: To be Garrett it's heid hunting.
Speaker 6: Yep, he did.
Speaker 4: As a matter of fact, he was really tall. He
Speaker 4: was sick. At a time I think the average American
Speaker 4: male was like five eight five nine, he was six four.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: Pat Garrett was symbolic of the changes overgoing frontier law enforcement.
Speaker 4: You know, up until those years, in the early years
Speaker 4: after the Civil War, you could kill almost indiscriminately. It
Speaker 4: was pretty unusual for somebody to get to put away
Speaker 4: for murder. But in the eighteen seventies you start to
Speaker 4: see lawman like white Ear and Pat Garrett, who are
Speaker 4: notably more professional. You know, until then you had a
Speaker 4: lot of drunks, a lot of corruption, and after that
Speaker 4: less and Garrett, you know, famously tracked Billy down to
Speaker 4: the town where pretty much everybody knew he was hiding
Speaker 4: Fort Sumter, and went in one night with two other
Speaker 4: with his two deputies, both Texans, and they surveilled the town.
Speaker 4: There was nothing going on, so they knew the halfway.
Speaker 4: They knew the mayor, and they after midnight, circled around
Speaker 4: to his house and while the two deputies sat out
Speaker 4: in the yard, Pat Garrett went in through the open door,
Speaker 4: sat on his friend's bed and woke him up and
Speaker 4: started to ask him, you know, have you seen Billy?
Speaker 4: As he ever around? And at that moment, Billy the
Speaker 4: kid walked over from his mistress's house, which is about
Speaker 4: fifty yards away, came into the yard. He had a
Speaker 4: butcher knife in his hand and he was gonna cut
Speaker 4: a steak off a beef that was hanging from one
Speaker 4: of the eaves. When he saw the he saw the
Speaker 4: two mens. The mistress happened to be Pat Garrett's sister
Speaker 4: in law, but that's a that's another story. Well, Billy
Speaker 4: walks into the yard and sees these two strangers, and
Speaker 4: he's speaking only in Spanish. He demands, who are they?
Speaker 4: Who are they? In the Garrett's two deputies are so
Speaker 4: stunned They don't even know what to do. They certainly
Speaker 4: don't know that this agitated young guy is Billy the Kid.
Speaker 4: There's an open door there into the bedroom where Pat
Speaker 4: Garrett is sitting in the bed, and Billy has his
Speaker 4: two pistols out pointed at the deputies. He backs into
Speaker 4: the open door into the darkened bedroom where the mayor
Speaker 4: is laying there in bed and what oh yeah, and
Speaker 4: Gary's sitting on it. Garrett sees the shadowy figure come in.
Speaker 4: Billy sees the shadowy figure in the bed. Nobody knows
Speaker 4: who anybody is. And that's when the mayor, whose name
Speaker 4: is escaping me, basically says two words. He says, ls
Speaker 4: it's him and Garrett on only that fires two guns
Speaker 4: into the shadowy figure. He hears gurgle, gurgle, Fall walks
Speaker 4: out to clear the Gunsmolt walks back in and he
Speaker 4: realizes he has in fact killed Billy the Kid.
Speaker 3: Well he didn't though, he let him go. And that's
Speaker 3: young guns too.
Speaker 4: You don't understand there are entire towns, including the town
Speaker 4: of Haiko in Texas, that have built museums around Billy
Speaker 4: the Kid, who the Billy the Kid that actually lived
Speaker 4: into the nineteen thirties. We know our uncle.
Speaker 3: Jesse was, so you explain, I haven't gotten that far.
Speaker 3: In the book.
Speaker 2: You tell that story about caught in the beefsteak and
Speaker 2: getting shot by Pat Garrett.
Speaker 4: In the book chapter thirteen. God can't wait, it's a
Speaker 4: good chapter.
Speaker 3: That's how that happened.
Speaker 4: Am I giving? Am I giving too much away?
Speaker 3: Oh? Hell no, it's all such thing man.
Speaker 7: You you mentioned like Pat Garrett being more of like
Speaker 7: whatever kind of a straight lace loman.
Speaker 4: Or you know, like better than the one they had
Speaker 4: gone before him.
Speaker 7: But what like was it also a thing where like
Speaker 7: at any given time, some of these gunfighters would be
Speaker 7: on one side a lot, like you hear that a lot?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: That's yeah, that's that's the thing that comes out is
Speaker 2: kind of weird, is like the fluidity. You even make
Speaker 2: jokes like a guy like does all these criminal acts
Speaker 2: like and of course his next job wasn't share.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because in many cases, communities didn't especially
Speaker 4: care about your moral character, and they also didn't have
Speaker 4: a ton of people willing to take the job. You know,
Speaker 4: there weren't a lot of people out I mean a
Speaker 4: lot of these places were pretty small, but what they
Speaker 4: were looking for. You saw this time and time again.
Speaker 4: They were looking for somebody with bravery and a reputation
Speaker 4: that might swayed criminals and in the in the end,
Speaker 4: who knew how to use a gun. So you absolutely
Speaker 4: saw people who had been wrestlers or criminals of some
Speaker 4: type who would go be a marshall for a season
Speaker 4: or two and then go back.
Speaker 2: You know, I've often argued that Shakespeare stole a lot
Speaker 2: of his stuff from the show Three's Company, but uh,
Speaker 2: there's a time problem there. I feel like Billy the Kid,
Speaker 2: they kind of stole stuff from your book a little
Speaker 2: bit because even though that came first, because he even
Speaker 2: uses that flip move which you explained in great detail,
Speaker 2: the border flip.
Speaker 4: That's Harden, Harden does it twice.
Speaker 3: No, no end. Sorry, this is the last mention of
Speaker 3: Young Guns in Young Guns.
Speaker 4: Oh, you're right, he does it in the movie.
Speaker 2: Billy the Kid does that little, a little move where
Speaker 2: he's like going to hand a gun handled. Someone's like, hey,
Speaker 2: give me your pistol, and he goes to hand it to
Speaker 2: him and then flips it on him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we don't know that he ever did that in
Speaker 4: real but John Weissey Harden. Yeah, and but twice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm done talking about young guns. It's it's
Speaker 2: it's dumb, it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 3: It's a movie.
Speaker 2: But in your book you give name to that move
Speaker 2: and talk about it's called like the Border Agent or
Speaker 2: the border flip or something.
Speaker 4: I've heard it seen the border role, I think more
Speaker 4: more commonly it's called the road Agent's spin.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And and uh, it's a thing. It was a real like.
Speaker 4: It was a thing. But one wonders if it was
Speaker 4: a thing people bragged about doing more than they actually did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you explain it, well, you would it.
Speaker 4: There were two instances of it in Wes Harden's career,
Speaker 4: one where that he told of later and one that
Speaker 4: we know actually happened. Uh. The one he told is
Speaker 4: the classic one when Hickock went to disarm him at
Speaker 4: a bowling alley in Abilee because as we all know,
Speaker 4: bowling alley bowling was the sport of the old true
Speaker 4: you know, Uh, he was causing ruckus for over what
Speaker 4: we don't know. Hickock went in with his guns drawn,
Speaker 4: knowing full well who he was, and demanded his guns,
Speaker 4: and Harden turned around and realized Okay, I'm not gonna
Speaker 4: win this. The guy's already got his guns out, so
Speaker 4: he said, moving very slowly, pulled both his guns he
Speaker 4: wore to and handed them butt forward toward Hiccock. Hitcock
Speaker 4: then put his guns down and reached for Harden's, at
Speaker 4: which point Harden spins them and thus that that the
Speaker 4: barrel is now is now pointing forward rather than the
Speaker 4: butt and he's got Hiccock, you know, right where he
Speaker 4: wants him, at which point you would think gunfight right. No,
Speaker 4: now it didn't happen. Harden actually shoot off his buddies
Speaker 4: and said nobody, nobody shoot shoots this man but me.
Speaker 4: And then a strange thing happened. You know, Wes Harden
Speaker 4: was seventeen at the time, oh man, Hickock was in
Speaker 4: his thirties, and Hiccock, we don't have the exact words,
Speaker 4: but clearly said something like dude, chill, come on, let's
Speaker 4: go have a lemonade, and basically talked him down a.
Speaker 3: Little celtz around there.
Speaker 4: You get is Harden was so stunned you didn't really
Speaker 4: know how to do it.
Speaker 3: Don't know what to do.
Speaker 4: Oh he could have just if you wanted to shoot
Speaker 4: while Bill Hiccock. He could have done it right there.
Speaker 4: Oh and then he We also know that Harden successfully
Speaker 4: used the spin. It's documented in the killing of a
Speaker 4: Texas State policeman later that same year.
Speaker 2: M hm hm.
Speaker 3: The border agents flip what was it called the.
Speaker 4: Border roll or the road agent's spin the border role.
Speaker 4: I've never been able to do either.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven't experimented. No me either, journalists. Here's a
Speaker 3: part that that's so confused.
Speaker 2: I mean, I accept that it's true, but I just
Speaker 2: can't picture the sort of thought process. If there's a
Speaker 2: guy in one of these towns and he gets in
Speaker 2: some skirmishes, he gets in some of these shootouts over
Speaker 2: card games and whatnot, and their eyes getting cleared, like oh,
Speaker 2: it was so defense, or there's no witness, therefore we're
Speaker 2: gonna let you go, or it's unclear what happened, therefore
Speaker 2: we're gonna let you go. And then journalists want to
Speaker 2: come then talk to them and interview them about their disputes,
Speaker 2: like again and again and again, and they kind of
Speaker 2: like craft these sort of through these articles, craft these personalities.
Speaker 2: And you talk about a unique aspect of a lot
Speaker 2: of these gunfights, is there are many eyewitnesses, so you
Speaker 2: can really late in the later years, there's very detailed
Speaker 2: descriptions of he said this, he said this, he did that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he did that. At times you find it there's there's
Speaker 2: contradicting details, but it's just like, can you address that
Speaker 2: a little bit that like, how are they sort of
Speaker 2: arguing that this was How are journalists arguing that this
Speaker 2: was like productive or serving the public good or whatever
Speaker 2: to kind of like profile and make heroes out of
Speaker 2: people that we would today recognize as just like flat
Speaker 2: out murders.
Speaker 4: In large part, the press accounts don't rise them up
Speaker 4: as heroic as unusual, yes, as in Hickock's thing, but
Speaker 4: I don't You don't find a lot of moralistic commentary,
Speaker 4: except to the extent that they were saying this is bad,
Speaker 4: this is murder. Okay, I will say that to the
Speaker 4: extent that you do find just the fact that writing
Speaker 4: about them at all glorifies them. It reflects a fascination
Speaker 4: with them. At the local level. We know that the
Speaker 4: first and greatest fans of gunfighters were the people who
Speaker 4: lived in their communities. They didn't have a lot else
Speaker 4: to talk about. Mark Twain till it's a great story
Speaker 4: of going out west, and there was a gunfighter forgetting
Speaker 4: his name at the moment, who was prevalent in the
Speaker 4: Civil War years, and he said, you know, as he
Speaker 4: rode out on on the stage coach for Nevada, it
Speaker 4: was the only subject that anybody wanted to talk about
Speaker 4: was this guy, and he killed somebody recently. There wasn't
Speaker 4: a lot of news out there, so gunfighters were news.
Speaker 4: I think the worst that you could say about the
Speaker 4: journalists at coverage is that it ended up being pretty gullible.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking of I'm thinking of a character named while
Speaker 4: Bill Longley, who was arrested in eighteen seventy seven in
Speaker 4: Texas and claimed to kill something on the order of
Speaker 4: forty two people. This was like a year or two
Speaker 4: after Harden had been arrested and in prison for a
Speaker 4: murder murdering a ranger. And so this guy Longley went
Speaker 4: to the gallows having claimed to kill something like forty
Speaker 4: two people, and he got written about by a lot
Speaker 4: of journalists, and later in the twentieth century there were
Speaker 4: books and even a TV series about this guy. In
Speaker 4: the in the nineteen fifties, which was kind of the
Speaker 4: high water mark of what a fascination with these type people.
Speaker 4: And it wasn't until the nineteen nineties when they retired.
Speaker 4: Disc attorney in Central Texas set out to write a
Speaker 4: new biography that he was unable to uh find evidence
Speaker 4: of it maybe five or six of these forty two killings,
Speaker 4: all of whom were men shot in the back or
Speaker 4: in other words, murdered, rather than any type of contentious
Speaker 4: gunfighter situation. So there were a number of kind of
Speaker 4: bogus counterfeit gunfighters. Longley would be one. Johnny Ringo, who
Speaker 4: kind of is often seen as one of the major
Speaker 4: guns up against White orp A Tombstone, is often represented,
Speaker 4: you know, as one of the great gunfighters. In fact,
Speaker 4: he never fired a shot in anger.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven't gotten there yet, but tell what happened?
Speaker 3: Okay Corral? And and and uh why is it still
Speaker 3: so debated?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: You know, like every night on some cable network or
Speaker 2: is a thing about me and random are joking about this?
Speaker 2: You can spend your whole life just watching shows, yes,
Speaker 2: arguing about who did what?
Speaker 3: OK Corral, you.
Speaker 4: Know, OK Corral, which we should, of course, if we
Speaker 4: were going to get super accurate here, we need to
Speaker 4: be calling this the gunfight beside the OK Corral. It
Speaker 4: wasn't It wasn't in the corral. It was then a
Speaker 4: vacant lot next to it. Well, I think most people
Speaker 4: probably understand if you've ever seen the movie Tombstone the
Speaker 4: ninety three Kurt russell I, while it opens with a
Speaker 4: fictitious massacre, it's pretty darn close to accurate, as is
Speaker 4: the Kevin Costro Wider, although from a year before, which
Speaker 4: puts me to sleep. Long story short, Wider was an
Speaker 4: occasional lawman there. His brother Virgil, who had come to town,
Speaker 4: and his brother Morgan were actual lawmen who had come
Speaker 4: to town, and they came to Tombstone from various places
Speaker 4: in the West to make money in a new boomtown
Speaker 4: where silver had been found.
Speaker 3: They wanted to make money gambling.
Speaker 4: They wanted to make money anyway they could. They first
Speaker 4: they tried it. They put their initial cout capital into
Speaker 4: buying vacant lots and into mining claims. When claims in
Speaker 4: vacant lots are not the greatest sources of immediate cash flow.
Speaker 4: They all actually had to find jobs, and so they
Speaker 4: you know, worked different things at different seasons, typically as lawmen,
Speaker 4: assistant us Marshalls, saloon keepers and most commonly gamblers. They
Speaker 4: then came into conflict of what is now generally acknowledged
Speaker 4: to be the largest outlaw gang of the Old West,
Speaker 4: more than one hundred strong. Centered there in southeast Arizona,
Speaker 4: it did most of its work of stealing cattle in Mexico.
Speaker 4: Above the border, they were known as the Cowboys, typically
Speaker 4: cow hyphen boys, but below the border in Mexico they
Speaker 4: were known as the Tejanos because so many of them
Speaker 4: came from Texas. And over time the IRPs came into
Speaker 4: conflict with this group. And the key thing that happened
Speaker 4: we now know was Wider wanted to be Marshall. He'd
Speaker 4: been a very successful lawman in Kansas and a somewhat
Speaker 4: success lawman in Missouri, but he felt like people in
Speaker 4: Arizona didn't really know him, so he needed some type
Speaker 4: of achievement. There was a there was the Cowboys, from
Speaker 4: time to time rob stages, and he thought everybody thought
Speaker 4: they knew who was behind a big stage rogery, a
Speaker 4: big stage robbery, and so Wyat approached the most prominent
Speaker 4: of the cowboys, a guy named Ike Clinton, and said,
Speaker 4: if you'll set this guy up for me so that
Speaker 4: I can arrest him. I'll give you the three hundred
Speaker 4: I think I think it was three thousand dollar reward.
Speaker 4: H and Ike agreed to do this. Unfortunately, the guy
Speaker 4: that they sought was killed in the interim. And afterwards
Speaker 4: I realized he was in serious of trouble because if
Speaker 4: whyerp or any of his buddies spread the word that
Speaker 4: Ike Clinton was going to rat out and set up
Speaker 4: one of his criminal brethren, Ike Clinton's life span could
Speaker 4: be measured in days and so that that's what happened
Speaker 4: that windy day in October, Ike and two several other
Speaker 4: cowboys came into town. They accused Wyatt and his brother
Speaker 4: Virgil and Doc Holliday, their friend, of starting to spread
Speaker 4: this story, which was a true story, that he was
Speaker 4: a rat, And it went on most of the night
Speaker 4: and it didn't get bad it meaning Ike's behavior didn't
Speaker 4: get bad until after dawn that next morning, by which
Speaker 4: point all the IRPs and other and everybody else involved
Speaker 4: had been up all night playing cards. They were all
Speaker 4: out going having naps that morning when I Clanton started
Speaker 4: going saloon to saloon casino casino there in Tombstone, saying
Speaker 4: that the next up that any of the cowboys saw
Speaker 4: in the street was going to be killed. And he
Speaker 4: didn't announce why, he just said, you know, they were
Speaker 4: skunks and bad guys and such, and so what happened
Speaker 4: was everybody then rushes to each of the irp's homes
Speaker 4: and wakes him up by noon and like, you got
Speaker 4: to stop this. Something bad is going to happen. And Joel,
Speaker 4: who was the marshal at the point, realized he had
Speaker 4: to go disarm them. Uh, there was a as in
Speaker 4: Dodge City as in Abelee, there was some municipal orients
Speaker 4: against open carry, and Ike and the cowboys were seen
Speaker 4: carrying their guns, and so Virgil and Morgan and why
Speaker 4: it all all woke. And there's this wonderful moment where
Speaker 4: they're standing at the edge of a saloon about to
Speaker 4: go down to this vacant lot to disarm the cowboys,
Speaker 4: when out of nowhere, Doc Holliday walks up and says,
Speaker 4: what's going on. He'd been asleep, he didn't know of
Speaker 4: any of this, And White said, we're getting ready for
Speaker 4: a fight. They used the word fight to call a
Speaker 4: for gunfight, as if by then there was no other
Speaker 4: other kind. If I said, I'm going to fight you.
Speaker 4: It was understood it would be guns. And Doc Holliday,
Speaker 4: who kind of worshiped, whyet that part of the movies
Speaker 4: is pretty close to accurate, I'd say. He says, well,
Speaker 4: I'm offended that you it was a Southern I'm gonna
Speaker 4: put on my face Southern accent. Well, I'm offended. I'm offended.
Speaker 4: Why would you Why would you not be asking me
Speaker 4: to help out? And whites are well, it's going to
Speaker 4: be a tough one. And Doc Holliday actually said, well,
Speaker 4: those are the kind I like the most. And so
Speaker 4: the four of them actually like a Western. It's you know,
Speaker 4: we have eyewitness account begin walking shoulder to shoulder to shoulder,
Speaker 4: four guys straight across down to this vacant lot where
Speaker 4: I Klanton and five of the other cowboys were waiting,
Speaker 4: uh and had been overheard cursing and threatening the herbs.
Speaker 4: Long story short, all four of them walk down there,
Speaker 4: they come up. They come up to this vacant lot
Speaker 4: and it's small. It's the size of, you know, a
Speaker 4: big living room. It's like seventeen feet across. There's six
Speaker 4: cowboys attending two horses, and there's three rps and Doc Holliday.
Speaker 4: They come up four against six. All that happens, the
Speaker 4: only thing that happens that triggers it is Virgil or
Speaker 4: Seeds that they're they're carrying their guns and calls for
Speaker 4: them to disarm, to give up their guns. And the
Speaker 4: cowboys that were that were present, it was almost like
Speaker 4: they didn't hear hear the worst. They just saw herps
Speaker 4: guns and they pulled and they drew. Three of the
Speaker 4: cowboys did not. They backed off, hands up like we
Speaker 4: don't want to want any of this. So they immediately
Speaker 4: lose the numbers games. So suddenly you now have four
Speaker 4: ERPs and Holiday against three bad guys, and two of
Speaker 4: the bad guys are holding horses which immediately start to
Speaker 4: buck at the first the first gunshots. What we know
Speaker 4: is it lasted about thirty seconds at the end of
Speaker 4: which and I could take you through the second my second. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: this is what I get paid to do. All all
Speaker 4: three cowboys were dead or dying. Virgil had a bad
Speaker 4: uh had been shot in the in the calf of
Speaker 4: his right leg. Morgan had been shot badly through a
Speaker 4: bullet went in his right shoulder and went across his back.
Speaker 4: Doc had been grazed and White Rope was the only
Speaker 4: one that was. Yeah. Well, but anyway you talked about
Speaker 4: the controversy, the controversy is not about Okay Corral. That
Speaker 4: Buy and Large is considered by observers and by newspapers
Speaker 4: at the time have been a pretty fierce fight. I mean,
Speaker 4: after all, the cowboys shot first, shooting, as we know
Speaker 4: from the hip stupid. The controversy becomes after in the
Speaker 4: months that follow Phantom unidentified gun men badly wound Virgil
Speaker 4: and kill Morgan, and it's then that something inside Wider
Speaker 4: breaks like he'd always been a pretty much buy the
Speaker 4: numbers lawmen, certainly by old West standards, but by then,
Speaker 4: you know, after Morgan's death, Morgan died in his arms,
Speaker 4: shot in the back at a pool hall. It was
Speaker 4: he was shooting. As he was shooting pool That Whyatt
Speaker 4: said he was going to go get him, and he did.
Speaker 4: He's that's what started what's classically called the Vendetta Ride.
Speaker 4: It lasted well, I want to say, three or four days,
Speaker 4: in which why it put together a group of five
Speaker 4: or six other writers and they went out and they
Speaker 4: killed three or four of the cowboys, including their acknowledge
Speaker 4: Lee or curdly Bill Brochs, at which point they they
Speaker 4: they washed their hands of tombstone and they they wrote off,
Speaker 4: never to return. But you know, they left a big
Speaker 4: controversy and an American legend in their ways.
Speaker 3: So how's your book end?
Speaker 4: Literally, how does it end?
Speaker 3: Yeah? What happens in the end of the book?
Speaker 4: Well, the last chapter of action has to be the
Speaker 4: last marquee outlaws of the Old West. That's Butch and Sundance.
Speaker 4: So the narrative of the book before an epilogue, the
Speaker 4: narrative of the book book begins with these guys saying
Speaker 4: it's no good being an outlaw anymore. The lawmen are
Speaker 4: out there and the Pinkertons are everywhere, and so Butch
Speaker 4: gets this idea that he's going to go to Argentina
Speaker 4: and and and set up a cattle ranch. He does
Speaker 4: the famous thing.
Speaker 2: That I've been a bunch of those little sites down there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: every place claims to be some Butch Cassidy things great.
Speaker 4: He was down there for seven years until they finally
Speaker 4: got him. And then there's an epilogue that basically goes,
Speaker 4: whatever happened to everybody? What their graves are like now?
Speaker 4: I take I take readers on a little tour of
Speaker 4: Dodge City and Tombstone and Lincoln, Uh, just to get
Speaker 4: a sense what that what that world was like these days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the last gun Fighters.
Speaker 2: As I'm reading along, I'm going to find that a
Speaker 2: case to be made that that Broiche Cassidy, according to
Speaker 2: your definition, is the last of the gunfighters.
Speaker 3: Is that true?
Speaker 4: I would say he's the last of the prominent ones. Look,
Speaker 4: nobody would ever argue that gunfighting or criminality beget law,
Speaker 4: you know, ended in the Old West in nineteen oh one.
Speaker 4: But I do think it's that moment that a lot
Speaker 4: of those activities started moving from the headlines into history. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so I thought, you know, you've got to end it somewhere,
Speaker 4: and that that felt that felt fair to me. The
Speaker 4: penultimate chapter, the one before that, would be a much
Speaker 4: more deadly group of fellas the Dalton Gang in Oklahoma.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, I know that name, but I'm excited to
Speaker 2: read about those guys.
Speaker 4: It's a pretty good story.
Speaker 3: I'm going to keep reading this book. E'ven though already
Speaker 3: talked to you.
Speaker 4: Well, I was one of my best friends who is
Speaker 4: kind of a pacifist guy, doesn't like guns. He said, well,
Speaker 4: I'm going to try to read this, and he liked.
Speaker 4: My wife got exactly halfway through the book, about ten
Speaker 4: eleven chapters, he had to put it on.
Speaker 3: He said, that's that problem, my wife, just too much killing.
Speaker 4: And he went back. He went back afterwards to read it,
Speaker 4: and he said not only did he like it, but
Speaker 4: that he thought initially that the story of gunfighters would
Speaker 4: just be one of chaos, just people getting drunk and
Speaker 4: shooting each other. And there's plenty of that, but he
Speaker 4: said he found a real moral component, but real sense
Speaker 4: of right and wrong by the time he get done.
Speaker 4: He got done. So I'll be deeply curious what you think.
Speaker 3: Well, now, what was your wife's scrape with it?
Speaker 4: Well, my wife grew up on ranches in West Texas
Speaker 4: and she shot her first gear when she was like twelve,
Speaker 4: and by fifteen or sixteen she'd had enough and it
Speaker 4: just still she's just queasy with killing.
Speaker 3: Got it? Got it?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: But you know, I don't know, man, It's like it's
Speaker 2: like it's not like a sociology book, but it's like
Speaker 2: it just does a great job of explaining like a
Speaker 2: period in history. I don't think it's like, I don't
Speaker 2: think you have to read it because you want to
Speaker 2: celebrate people dying. It's just like it's an explanation of
Speaker 2: stuff that happened, right, and like why it happened, well,
Speaker 2: that's certainly, and why it stopped happening.
Speaker 4: Well, that certainly was my point of view. I didn't
Speaker 4: write this because wow, it would be great to write
Speaker 4: about eleven hundred murders. I wrote about it because it
Speaker 4: was fat. I wanted to understand why it happened in
Speaker 4: this period of American history. But I can also acknowledge
Speaker 4: and appreciate that there are people to whom blooding, gore
Speaker 4: and killing is just hard to read about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, you know that whole genre of
Speaker 2: telling like doing documentaries whatever about like serial killers, right,
Speaker 2: you could try to dress that up as being that
Speaker 2: it's something other than just you know, somebody is reveling
Speaker 2: in someone's sadistic behavior. Like there's not like it's not history.
Speaker 2: You know, when I watched those things. I hate watching
Speaker 2: the ones I have seen. It's like it's not even
Speaker 2: masquerading as like history or sociology, like little serial killer
Speaker 2: series like that. They're kind of disgusting, I think. But
Speaker 2: this is I mean, this is explaining. It explains like
Speaker 2: this really important part of American history, and we tend
Speaker 2: to go like, Okay, the Civil War happened and then
Speaker 2: the Civil War ended and that was it, right, But
Speaker 2: this is about well, what of those people, you know,
Speaker 2: what of those habits, what of those technologies, and here's
Speaker 2: sort of what they did. And then it touches base
Speaker 2: with perhaps you've heard of blank, blank and blank. You know,
Speaker 2: you've probably heard a Billy of the Kid, You've heard
Speaker 2: of Doc Holiday, and people have, but people don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm saying, like people in general don't know what they
Speaker 2: actually did and who they actually worked.
Speaker 4: Well, from a purely commercial point of view, if if
Speaker 4: I could apologize for this, I thought that would be
Speaker 4: one of the appeals of the book is that there's
Speaker 4: a lot of people out there these days that didn't
Speaker 4: grow up on these stories the way I did fifty
Speaker 4: years ago, but know the names. But you're probably not
Speaker 4: going to go buy a four hundred and fifty page
Speaker 4: book about Billy the Kid and drill that deep in.
Speaker 4: But if you want like an introduction to all these guys,
Speaker 4: and by the way, you know, suggestions of other books
Speaker 4: to go read about each of them. This is a
Speaker 4: really good place to start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're very generous with site putting out source material
Speaker 2: and recommendations for further reading.
Speaker 4: I just assumed that people were going to want to
Speaker 4: know more, and so I take great joy in saying
Speaker 4: this is a great book. Go read this, Go read that.
Speaker 4: Don't read this.
Speaker 8: Your I liked your footnotes because they're very conversational. Well,
Speaker 8: I could like get a sense of your personality from
Speaker 8: your footnotes.
Speaker 4: I have a lot of challenges and personal problems in life,
Speaker 4: but enthusiasm for my material is not one of them.
Speaker 4: I as I said at the very beginning, I yeah,
Speaker 4: I had a heck of a lot of fun doing this,
Speaker 4: and I you know, I mean, the one thing you
Speaker 4: worry about, like I really worried about this is Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm a sixty three year old white guy writing a
Speaker 4: book about in which eleven hundred people are killed, and
Speaker 4: it's the twenty first century. And oh, by the way,
Speaker 4: it's conversational and almost a little humorous in places. What
Speaker 4: could go wrong? Yeah, And so I've been you know, obviously,
Speaker 4: the reviews. The reception has been very generous, and it's
Speaker 4: been one among I thought this was a prime candidate
Speaker 4: to be canceled.
Speaker 8: Well, it's it's I mean, I think there's a lot
Speaker 8: of it's.
Speaker 3: A new era though, Man, there's been a vibe shift.
Speaker 4: You're not the first person just say great time for
Speaker 4: this book.
Speaker 6: There's like a very simplistic.
Speaker 8: Understanding of this era where it's like people move out
Speaker 8: beyond the reach of the law, and then the criminals
Speaker 8: do what they want, and then there's this class of
Speaker 8: heroes that rise up and sort of that's what naturally
Speaker 8: happens when people are out in the wilderness, right. And
Speaker 8: I think what's what's very what I really appreciate is
Speaker 8: how you set it up with these cultural undercurrents that
Speaker 8: come out of the Civil War and come out of
Speaker 8: Southern culture and even come from Europe.
Speaker 6: That just adds a texture to it.
Speaker 8: But then at the same time, it's very funny and
Speaker 8: it's very read like there's a depth, there's a depth
Speaker 8: of analysis that's that's very satisfying, but then it's also
Speaker 8: very funny.
Speaker 4: Well, and and and the thing there is you don't
Speaker 4: look I want to I want to give the challenge
Speaker 4: for means I want to give the reader kind of
Speaker 4: the most up to date academic thinking. But you don't
Speaker 4: want to get all fusty and fuddy duddy and academic
Speaker 4: about it. So the idea is, yeah, I mean, if
Speaker 4: you're going to read one of one of my books,
Speaker 4: if nothing else, it's I always say, I want I
Speaker 4: want it to be an easy read. I want it
Speaker 4: to be friendly. And if at the end of it
Speaker 4: you look you learn something, okay, that's great. But I'm
Speaker 4: not going to tell you what it should be.
Speaker 2: Most this academic writing isn't boring because they wanted to
Speaker 2: be boring. They're not good enough to make it interesting.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but you're like, You're like, it's like
Speaker 2: they like they decide, yes, they decide to have it
Speaker 2: be unapproachable.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a class of
Speaker 4: academic that just loves being obscure or difficult to get through.
Speaker 4: That's like a point of pride. You know.
Speaker 2: Currant McCarthy wrote a thing about like advice to academic writers.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that, but I would. I would go
Speaker 4: pick it up. Within twenty minutes of leaving.
Speaker 7: I got to ask you one question before we finish up.
Speaker 7: Since it's a Texas book and we were talking about
Speaker 7: a lot of the bad guys. Did the Texas Rangers
Speaker 7: like did they did they earn their reputation as like
Speaker 7: someone these guys didn't want to cross.
Speaker 6: They have a baseball team.
Speaker 4: Texas Rangers existed, they were They existed like three or
Speaker 4: four different times during the nineteen hundred, during the eighteen
Speaker 4: hundreds and Texas. The chaos in Texas got so bad
Speaker 4: after the war that they were reintroduced. And I want
Speaker 4: to say eighteen seventy four, and my judgment is, rarely
Speaker 4: in American history have we set a more effective introduction
Speaker 4: of law enforcement entity than the Texas Rangers. When they
Speaker 4: came into being, the state was overrun by random bad guys,
Speaker 4: a lot of feuds around cattle, just a lot of
Speaker 4: violence and that stuff. That stuff just pretty much ends
Speaker 4: in four or five years. And I think that, as
Speaker 4: much as anything, is a moment where all the frontier
Speaker 4: begins to realize, hey, we don't have to live with
Speaker 4: this level of chaos, this level of criminal Now they
Speaker 4: are violence. And you know, Texas was not a perfect
Speaker 4: place thereafter, But I think that the worst of the
Speaker 4: chaos following the war began to abb with the introduction
Speaker 4: of the Rangers. They were the real deal.
Speaker 2: He's got There's a quote there from you where he
Speaker 2: says something like the Texas Rangers set out to clean
Speaker 2: up some town, and then Brian writes, and boy did they?
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, everybody the gunfighters. How Texas Made the
Speaker 3: West Wild? By Brian Burrow. Holy smokes, it's a good book.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 2: I've been reading on my phone, but I'm gonna switch
Speaker 2: over key signs for me.
Speaker 3: Your watch, phill cover this.
Speaker 4: We've got it.
Speaker 3: Let's do a little lesson.
Speaker 4: It's okay to use or somebody got signed.
Speaker 1: I've got it.
Speaker 4: I've got a right here. That's what I need.
Speaker 2: This is the page you're supposed to sign if you
Speaker 2: signed the wrong They used to call this page.
Speaker 3: There's one page that they used to call the bastard page.
Speaker 2: You ever hear this book publishing, there's a page that
Speaker 2: doesn't have the publisher and it would call it the
Speaker 2: bastard page. Or maybe I'm mixed up. That doesn't have
Speaker 2: the author. Like see how here there's a title, but
Speaker 2: maybe this is the bastard page. It's a fatherless, bless book.
Speaker 3: But then you get to this page title author, publisher, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So sign that page for me, say to the to
Speaker 2: my favorite man.
Speaker 5: It's the best gun fighter.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 3: He's going with my favorite man.
Speaker 6: Practice practice your border roll.
Speaker 4: We should do some kind of video thing where you
Speaker 4: practice the moves.
Speaker 3: No, well yeah, with one of those five pound pistols.
Speaker 3: Up my break, my fingers. Thanks man, thanks for coming
Speaker 3: on my pleasure. I hope people check out the book.
Speaker 3: I think they'll get a real kick out of it.
Speaker 3: Thanks again.