Even the Cowboys Are Bigger in Texas

New York Times

5 days ago

THE GUNFIGHTERS: How Texas Made the West Wild, by Bryan Burrough
In the John Ford film 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,' Maxwell Scott, the editor of The Shinbone Star, hears the U.S. senator Ransom Stoddard confess that he was not the man who shot the villainous Valance. The editor spikes the story, explaining to a surprised Stoddard, 'This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.'
In 'The Gunfighters,' a lively chronicle of the way real-life cowboys and their high-noon duels captured American attention in the late 1800s, the journalist Bryan Burrough — best known for 'Barbarians at the Gate,' his classic exploration of the wild, wild east of 1980s Wall Street — prints the facts, the legends, the whole shootin' match.
These pages read more like a movie script than a history book. Between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the 20th century, social order in the American West straddled the rule of law and the grip of a gun. Roles on the frontier shifted constantly: Gunfighters became marshals, cowboys became killers, pimps became lawmen.
And many gangsters of the prairie became heroes, celebrated in a way that murderers in Boston or Baltimore could only envy. Why? Blame it on Texas, Burrough argues. Texans had ongoing, bloody face-offs with Mexicans to their south, and Comanches in their midst. Violence was to be expected; even insisted upon. Moreover, while a cop on the corner could protect your store in New York, vigilante violence was probably the only way to secure 'millions of cattle roaming free across millions of acres' out West. Add to that a media eager to romanticize Texans' perverse Southern sense of 'honor,' whereby 'gentlemen' avenged the mildest slight by dueling. There was money to be made peddling lies about swashbuckling frontier gunfighters across hundreds of miles of telegraph wires to clerks in cities around the country.
Burrough follows the winding facts wherever they lead. At times I felt like I was reading a Russian novel as so many characters crisscrossed and double-crossed: one day a villain, the next a victim. But it's also satisfying to watch Burrough explode the legends of the late frontier the way Butch Cassidy dynamited safes. Wild Bill Hickok, to start with, 'was a titanic fraud' and 'the fake patient zero of the gunfighter myth.' A former Union scout turned lawman, Hickok allegedly killed hundreds, but the real number, off the battlefield, was probably fewer than 10.
The Texan outlaw John Wesley Hardin, on the other hand, was no fabulist. Burrough reveals the hero of Bob Dylan's 1967 ballad to be a psychopath. 'Literally,' Burrough writes, 'a serial killer.' He shot Black men for little or no reason (even by the standards of the time, Hardin was a vicious, violent racist) and seems to have killed a man for snoring. He had already murdered as many as 24 people by his 18th birthday.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.