The gritty, unglamorous truth about the antiheroes of the Wild West

Washington Post

12-06-2025

I've long been obsessed with the fact that, in 1869, even as the Brooklyn Bridge rose, you could board a train in New York City and some days later disembark into a parallel universe where horse-mounted Comanche warriors still reigned unconquered over the Great Plains. The two worlds coincided for the briefest moment, a time when, under the big skies of that untamed frontier, so too rose that most American icon the cowboy — and his even more heroic alter ego, the Old West gunfighter. I grew up with them; we all did, no matter what year we were born. Even in the twilight of Clint Eastwood's career, you can stream a modern western of one form or another on any given night, among them one of the greatest television shows ever written, David Milch's Shakespearean drama 'Deadwood.'
Bryan Burrough's 'The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,' a history of that era (ideally paired with S.C. Gwynne's fantastic 'Empire of the Summer Moon,' about the Comanche during the same period), is a great debunking, Burrough forewarns. He's not out to prove that those legendary figures of the frontier were purely mythological, but he does set his sights on the way that they were mythologized. Forget facing off in the streets of Dodge City and Tombstone, saloon doors swinging to Ennio Morricone's soundtrack as time slowed and both men reached for their guns. More often than not it was just murder — a sudden, explosive violence, often with a racial component against Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, especially in the earliest years in Texas. People were shot in the eye. In the back. In the hands. No trick shooting required. They were shot through doors, and they were shot through walls. They were shot with pistols, and they were shot with long guns, and they were shot holed up in hotels, brothels, ranches, trains and banks, or out in the open on the streets, everywhere and anywhere. Of the legendary John Wesley Hardin — memorialized by Rock Hudson in a 1953 film, by Johnny Cash in two songs and by Bob Dylan on a whole album — Burrough writes: 'Hardin ranged the Texas backcountry shooting men in the face. … He killed just about anyone who irked him in any way, from Black men he found disrespectful to white men who beat him at cards or jostled him in a crowd; most famously, he probably killed a man for snoring. He may have been the first 'great' gunfighter, but it's also clear he was a maniac.'
The story — and death — of Wild Bill Hickok, one of the most famous of them all, is typical. His early legend was fantastically exaggerated and his denouement (by which time he was an alcoholic and arthritic gambler not yet 40) came as he played poker at a saloon (in Deadwood, of course). When 'a drunk named Jack McCall was losing big,' Hickock encouraged him to take a break and McCall left the table, only to return the next afternoon. He circled behind Hickock and 'placed a Colt .45 beside his temple, and with the words 'Damn you! Take that!' Pulled the trigger. Hickock died instantly.' There was no gunfight at all, which 'Deadwood' the show seems to have gotten right.
This is no weighty, soporific tome of history, but a gallop through the years 1869 to 1901, when a specific set of conditions aligned: the end of the Civil War and the expansion of the railroads and open range cattle ranching, which sent large numbers of Southerners, particularly Texans, driving herds west and north into territories that had little government or law enforcement. 'If you think of postwar Texas masculinity as a bubbling cauldron,' Burrough writes, 'its roux was the Southern honor code, but other ingredients were crucial as well: the tumult of war, the persistent and ongoing risk of Mexican and Native American raiders, the rigors and isolation of frontier life, the searing hatred of northern dominance. … From this combustible brew rose a stridently martial way of experiencing the world, tribal, heavily armed, hypermasculine, hyperviolent, and acutely sensitive to slight.' Oxidizing this simmering explosion was the introduction of the Colt revolver, the first mass-produced, easy-to-carry handgun able to fire rapidly.
In this lawless landscape of frail masculine egos clinging to cockeyed, and often booze-fueled, notions of honor, the bullets fly, the bodies pile up, the pages turn fast and easy, and other places and other ideas come to mind: how these glorified American icons aren't so different from other men in other cultures and times much more readily vilified — young men who nowadays fill our prisons. Or of honor cultures everywhere — the Pashtuns of the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance — who have never been celebrated in film, television and popular music. Indeed, Burrough makes clear that there wasn't a whole lot to celebrate in these men and their stories, and at the time it was happening, 'the gunfighter wasn't really a thing.' 'Though they fought in the nineteenth century, the fame of men like Earp and Hickok mushroomed during the twentieth, thanks to modern media, especially Hollywood films.' It is a reminder that we are selective about our heroes. And that American history was made not just by the Founding Fathers but also by the messy rascals and gamblers and liars and killers who have long filled out its more sordid chapters. Our nation has always been shaped by the latter, too, it turns out, and reading about them years after the fact, antiheroes though they may have been, is still a hell of a good time.
Carl Hoffman is the author of five books, including 'Liar's Circus,' 'The Last Wild Men of Borneo' and 'Savage Harvest.'
How Texas Made the West Wild
By Bryan Burrough
Penguin. 430 pp.