Bryan Burrough - The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild

29:55His side won the feud in part because he won it for them by killing the leaders of the other side. And so, you know, that was the type of violence that, that feud, you know, you could point to 12 others like it in Texas during those years. And, you know, that was the type of behavior that once Texans began moving, moving their herds into New Mexico, into Wyoming, into Arizona, that was the type of behavior that you began finding in other states. I'm not saying Texans created that cattle industry and adjacent violence, but they certainly did more to spread it than anybody else on the old frontier.

30:39Yeah, and just to give our listeners a sense, like when we're talking about cattle rustling, I was just thinking of these numbers, but I think you mentioned there were 1.2 million cows in Texas alone in 1860. Five million. Oh, five million. Oh, no, 1.2 at the beginning of the war. By the end of the war, there were 5 million because they couldn't – they hadn't been able to move them during the war. OK. So Kansas opens up in 1867 and the Great Trail begins. You comment on this, but Chisholm, goodnight loving Texas Trail, right? Yeah. Cowboys ride to Abilene and Wichita and then Dodge, which the old saying is we better get out of Dodge.

31:16and that follows really the story of the Oregon Trail as well. Because colliding with this at the same time is we're hitting the manifest destiny story post-Civil War and people moving west. How do you think about legislative decision counter – the west is moving. These rustlers are getting ugly, and yet the economy of America over the next 100 years is going with all this too. Yeah. The spread of this Texas-born violence is largely via the cattle industry and the cattle trails. The first ones go from Texas to Kansas because Texas needed to get all these excess cattle up to these new stockyards opening in Chicago.

32:10But there were no northbound railroads in the first years after the Civil War. So the cattle needed to be herded physically to the nearest railroads, which were in Kansas. And so these Kansas cow towns spring up out of nowhere. They're basically to accept the Texas cattle, to entertain the Texas cowboys that come with them. So the first one was Abilene, which we just mentioned, which is like a Texas-themed amusement park. The bars are called the Longhorn and the Alamo. And, you know, it's all Texas themed. And these Texas cow, these Kansas cow towns during the 1870s, from Abilene all the way to the legendary Dodge City, these become the first place places where the rest of America starts to notice gunfights and gunfighter style behavior.

33:02And the reason that they noticed, amazingly, is because as luck would have it, the first, the marshal in Abilene in 1871 is the only gunfighter that at that point Americans ever heard of, which is Wild Bill Hickok, who got all that publicity four years before. And then he kind of disappears. But then suddenly in 1871 in Abilene, he's doing battle shooting with all these Texas cow, Texas cowboys. He and Harden almost come to a gunfight. I was going to say, so they run into each other, right? They meet, you know, Hickok, you know, disarms him, no fight. And like, it might be the greatest, like, man, what would have happened?

33:52The main gun fight ever. Yeah, the greatest scene that never had the climax that everyone would have written to the story. We only have one source on it, and that's Hardin, who wrote an autobiography while he was in prison. And what Hardin says is that Hickok came into a bowling alley. Yes, they had bowling alleys on the old west frontier where he and some buddies were drinking and hooping it up. They knew who they were. I mean, Hickok knew that Hardin had killed a bunch of guys, but at that point, small town sheriff's marshals didn't spend much time bringing in wanted men from other states. Yeah.

34:29But he went in and he said, now, John Wesley, y 'all need to calm down. You need to give me your guns because you're not supposed to be carrying them in town. And Hardin later claimed, and there's nobody who's ever officially doubted it, that he handed his guns to Hickok butt first, as you do, but then rolled them in a very difficult maneuver called the border roll. And so he rolled them in his hands so that suddenly the guns were facing Hickok, and he had Hickok covered. And amazingly, by all accounts, Hickok just said—Hickok's an older man, 15 years older—said, hey, calm down. Let's have a sarsaparilla.

35:14You don't need to do this. and Hickok who seemed to kill people, shoot people for every reason under the sun, for some reason allowed himself to be talked out of at that one time. And yeah, it's probably the greatest non-gunfight between, it is certainly the moment when the two most, where you had the most gunfighter fame, you know, where you had two real headline gunfighters come face to face and darn it, would you know they didn't have a gunfight yeah and and obviously what i loved about you telling all this the story about hickok is because you know hickok is known as a fighter but he might be more well known in today's popular culture as a gambler right and obviously he died you know what's known now known as dead man's hand which is aces and eights and i was talking to my younger colleagues i was like hey what's the you know what's dead man's hand what's wild bill hickok famous for and like no one knew i was like gosh you guys got to play some poker every once in a while.

36:12Um, well, you know, that was one of the whole reasons Cole to write the book was just when I was a kid 50 years ago, while Bill Hickok was a household name, you know, I mean, Bat Masterson was a household name and you know, they just aren't now. We, we have, you know, all these guys had TV shows back in the early days of television. That was one of the reasons they were still famous. But now you say while Bill Hickok to a group of 10 guys, I'm not sure nine of them know who he is. And so that was the fun of the book is trying to reclaim and reintroduce all these guys that just aren't known that much anymore.

36:48And I just, I think it's fascinating history, but they're each individually so different. You know, there's every flavor of gunfighter. There's good ones, there's bad ones, there's smart ones, there's dumb ones. And a gunfighter could be almost anything. He could be a feudist, a cowboy, a cattleman, a law enforcement officer, a conventional outlaw, a bank robbery. So the fun was weaving all those stories into one story. You mentioned Ben Thompson, who did two years in prison. And then he gets like this special note in the book, which is he gets a presidential pardon from Ulysses S. Grant. There's never been a full explanation for it to this day that I'm aware of.

37:31What's your best guess of the why for that? Well, Ben Thompson is probably the most famous gunfighter that no one's ever heard of. You know, back in the 1870s, you know, he was giving regular interviews to, you know, Eastern newspapers. He was a gambler who just got into a lot of gunfights. Tough guy. Before he was famous, yeah, he did two years in Huntsville, the Texas prison, and then suddenly gets out on a presidential pardon. The only thing we've ever had to explain that, the very cryptic comment that he made once, that it was illegal technicality. That's really all we know. Certainly he didn't have the heft, the power, or know anybody powerful that could have prevailed on a president.

38:10So it just, it seems like there was some type of appeal that has disappeared into the ethos. But, you know, Ben Thompson, one day he's in prison, the next he's up in Abilene becoming, you know, one of the best known gunfighters in Ellsworth. He basically, in the cattle town of Ellsworth, he basically, you know, faces down a whole town, practically, of people who want his head and survives. And, you know, he has a wonderful career that's fun to write about. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management.

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39:31So Wyatt Earp obviously is a big character in the book, as he is with a lot of the Old West. You know, he, as you lay out, you give a really good history of, you know, what he did in Kansas and what he did in other places. He was an escaped fugitive, federal fugitive, almost his entire career. You know, him and his brothers, while romanticized, it seems like they wanted to make a buck on anything they could, including prostitution. I think you – one person called them the fighting pimps, which is not something you'd normally hear. They're a little controversial in the Western oeuvre. Correct. So as like – I'm putting this together.

40:07It's like how does this man – like why Wyatt Earp? Is it just that he spread across so many of these locales? It was like, oh, everybody's ran into Earp. Everybody's ran into one of his brothers at some point. In other words, you think of like the six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon. Was he Kevin Bacon in one way? He was. White Earp was, there is a serendipitous element to his fame. He was at a lot of places. He was there in Wichita, one of the first cattle towns. He was the marshal in Dodge City at the height of its violence. He, you know, at a time where an awful lot of gunfighters, from Ben Thompson to Clay Allison to Bat Masterson passed through Dodge City because it was the last great cattle town.

40:55And then famously, he moves, he, he moves down to Tombstone where he gets into the most famous gunfight in, in American history, the, the gunfight, uh, at the okay Corral. But, you know, so he was during his life, he was famous, but not household name famous. He was kind of regionally famous. He was well-known in the West. What gave, what handed him his, you know, title today of the most famous gunfighter was his longevity. He lived into his eighties. He lived, you know, he didn't die until 1927 during which he had been hanging around Hollywood sets, you know, giving interviews, having, you know, biographers come to him for several years by that point.

41:42And while his memory was pretty crappy, during the 1920s, when a new generation of Americans kind of rediscovered the Old West, there was this famous magazine article whose first words were, who remembers Billy the Kid? You can't imagine writing that today. There was this huge boom in interest around the Old West and Wyatt Earp found himself in the middle of it. So they, he suddenly Hollywood begins making movies of him, but the, about him, but the real reason for his fame, I think, is that at a time where so many of these gunfighters are not particularly lovable, John Wesley Harden being example, uh, a, um, Wyatt Earp really stood for something.

42:27He was a genuinely good guy. If you look at his career, he was hardworking and honest at a time where an awful lot of lawmen in the West were corrupt, coward, or both. White Ope was the real deal. And yes, he's controversial in some corners because in Tombstone, he did become a vigilante and kill people outside the law who had attacked his brothers. I still think he's the real deal. I think he's straight up. And I think that accounts for the longevity. The fact that, you know, he's one of only a handful of lawmen whose names you could say in an Applebee's today. And most people in the bar are going to know who Wyatt Earp is, even if they only know it from a bad Kevin Costner movie back in 1993 or a good Kurt Russell movie in 1993.

43:20Yeah, I'm more the Kurt Russell guy. You gotta be. Yeah, you gotta be. And also Val Kilmore as Doc Holliday. I'm going to throw a shameless plug in. And as a child, I was born and raised in Seattle. My parents brought us down to Arizona. We went to Tombstone as a kid. So you're probably eight or nine years old. And you're just like, wow, this is incredible. I mean, this is like American history right in front of me. And you go to the OK Corral, and they represent the scene for you. And you're walking around this dirt road town that I think the closest town there is Sierra Vista, if my member serves me correctly.

43:57You know, like a good American father. I have also taken my kids there a few years ago while my daughter had a softball tournament there. And then we visit Bisbee, you know, which is obviously, you know, was important there in the region as well at the time. And to your point, I mean, like these places were there because there was money to be made. It was very pragmatic in that sense. And once there was money to be made, everyone else had a reason to be in town. you know it wasn't like they just pinpointed a random dirt town in Arizona and said let's set up shop and prostitute and fight and all that kind of stuff around here Doc Holliday you know you talk about his life you talk about his education in Latin and ancient Greek I mean like that Kurt Russell movie shows he was an intellectual you know his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 15.

44:45So, you know, he's on his own at an early age. Um, you know, how, how, how much, uh, of what we associate with doc? I mean, if you watch that movie, it was about consumption. Like he, he just was on something all the time. Is that, is that fair for him? And is there more that you took away in doing your research on doc? You know, people, um, in reviewing and talking about this book and I, you know, obviously the reception was very generous. I always want to say that the book is about myth busting, that I'm trying to, you know, bit, you know, tear down all these guys. And, and, and, and there are some of them like Hickok, like that, that aren't what they were cracked up to be, but there are others.

45:27And I would say Wyatt Earp is example is the first example. Doc Holliday is the second where I think the movies that we know got them pretty close to being right. You know, the, you know, Doc Holliday's dominant trait was the fact that he had consumption. He had tuberculosis. He was a sick man. He coughed like all the time and he was cantankerous and he was absolutely loyal to Wyatt Earp. The main, the most, one of the most incredible things about the gunfight at the OK Corral is there was absolutely no reason for Doc Holliday to be there other than the fact that he came up to Wyatt Earp and his brothers at a bar about 10 minutes beforehand and said, hey, what's going on?

46:06I just got up from a nap and they're like, well, we're going to go down and have a shootout. And he's like, and you didn't invite me? And when it's back to like a sense of honor, like, you know, it's portrayed in the movie. It's like, well, if you're going to be there, I'm going to be there with you. It was it. And I'm telling you so much of this stuff. When you know the history, you're like, that can't be true. Yeah. And so often it is. I mean, the idea that you would go down to a gunfight where you're outnumbered four to six to four just because your buddy is going. I mean, yeah, I think we'd all like to be that guy.

46:42But are you going to take a bullet for your buddy? Yeah. I love my buddy Jason in Dallas. If he's going down to the basketball court to shoot it out with another team, I'm going to call the cops. I'm not going with him. But Doc Holliday went with Wyatt Earp that day. And Doc Holliburty got shot for it and survived. It's probably Doc's most standalone scene from the movie, obviously, is when he pops out from the tree and says, I'm your Huckleberry, which is such a great movie line. Probably never happened. But to your point, you think of this person that's like they're there for the reasons they want to be there and they don't really care what everybody else thinks.

47:24There's a lot of that in this book. You know, the Old West was – look, it was appealing to American men for a lot of reasons. Yes, there were places like Dodge City and Tombstone that had a boom. There was a commercial reason to go there to make money. But the real appeal of the Old West was that it was a place that didn't seem to have the restrictions of the East. The law, the churches, everybody telling you what you should do. It was a place where you could go and be reinvented. And so it was especially like Texas, you know, before the war, after the war, the West was a place that if you had a business that failed, if you had debts, if you were wanted, if you'd had a bad divorce, you went out West.

48:14You didn't get a lot of Harvard and Yale men in Tombstone, if you know what I mean. Yeah. You had men that were there who were desperate, who needed money, who wanted to reinvent themselves. And, you know, they got into a lot of trouble. Yeah. You know, as you're saying that, it makes you think of even today. So like, you know, Texas is gathering a lot of people because if you're not aware of this and you're a listener, there's no income tax in Texas. That's right. I might say there's some high property taxes depending on who you talk to, but there's no income tax. We're seeing that same thing here in Arizona where it's like we have a 2.5 % flat income tax, the lowest of a state that has an income tax.

48:52And so we're collecting people and that same phenomena of like if you're a successful business person or you have a career that you want to bring there, you can kind of reinvent yourself. Like I moved from Seattle, right? We moved our business here and it's like – but it's not the same way. Like if you're a well-to-do business person, you might move to Texas and you got to figure out where you're going to join a country club. That might take you a few years nowadays. Back then, you didn't have to wait. There was no such thing as a country club, right? So some of these things hold true, and yet at the same time, there's something more stayed about Texas or more stayed about Arizona compared to the past.

49:26The other business you get into a lot in is gambling. I'm going to use a quote from Bat Masterson. Quote, gambling was not only the principal and best-paying industry of the town at the time, but it was also reckoned among its most respectable, end quote. You know, as I was thinking about this gambling phenomena, you also give some of the history of the riverboat, which I'd love you to mention too. But, I mean, we're at a time that that's kind of a similar question. I saw a stat the other day that says there is more online sports betting going on than like 12 categories of Americans' consumer spending.

50:00Okay? And we're kind of seeing this like back off of regulation of gambling altogether. And it's proliferating in American culture, not Western culture, just kind of going on everywhere. And guess who it's dominated by? Men. How do you think about some of these analogous things in the West versus what we're seeing today? Well, you are seeing the second great gambling boom because the old West was the first. Look, Americans have always gambled. going back to Jamestown, going back to Plymouth Rock. But, you know, beginning with the Pilgrims, they persecuted. It often, as for most of the 20th century, was obliged to be underground.

50:43In the Old West, what you had was, you know, gambling was very big, had been very big on riverboats. Sure. On the Mississippi River before the Civil War. But with the railroads, suddenly the riverboats went out of business. So all these professional gamblers just started going west, many of them originally to San Francisco. But across the West, there was wide open, unregulated gambling. This is before there were just anything like, you know, it obviously originated before there was anything like legal authority and just continued. You know, the popularity of gambling, I think much of it had to do with boredom.

51:32This was an open, empty territory without radio, TV, Internet or much to do. And so gambling was just a natural thing to do. Gamblers were present in every Western city. In many cities like Dallas, they practically ran the government. The question for me, Cole, had always been, gunfighting seems so associated with gambling. After the cattle business, the gambling business is where you see more gunfighting going on than any place. And I just didn't understand that. What is there to argue about when you lose a poker game? My aces beat your kings. Where's the argument? That's when I began to realize that there had been a huge controversy in America just before this over books and gamblers who went public talking about cheating.

52:28that divulge all the ways that professional gamblers were cheating you, the moms and pops. So when that broke, the old West suddenly was wide open, and everybody that sat down at a poker table, they were as keen to watch for cheating as they were to win the actual game. And so any accusation of cheating, to circle back to our very beginning, was an acute insult to your honor. and so that's why you got so many gunfights at and after the after um uh after the gambling table sure well and to come back back back to bat masterson i mean the other thing too is like whether it's erp or all these characters you know we we learned that some of these folks are jack of all trades i mean they can they can kind of recreate and invent themselves however they choose to.

53:21Masterson ends up as a New York sports writer, a friend of Teddy Roosevelt, probably the only gunfighter that ever stayed the night at the White House. Is it just the romance of these people that would cause someone to go from Dodge City to the White House? Did America want something? To your point, I agree with you. Gambling is done because of boredom, which what does that mean today? We're dying of boredom. Okay. We're dying of boredom today in America. I agree with that view, but you know, here's Roosevelt hosting Bat Masterson, gunslinger turned sports writer. Well, you got in, in the old West, you do see a lot of Jack of all trades.

54:06Um, you, you, there weren't a lot of jobs that lasted 20, 30, 40 years. Sure. You know, if you're in Tombstone or Dodge city, you're not getting a job with General Electric and staying there until you retire. You get a job at a saloon. And a lot of these guys also, let's face it, don't have any type of specialized learning. So you get outlaws who become sheriffs. I mean, Wyatt Earp had 16 different jobs over his career, from miner to saloon keeper to lawman. And he was only a lawman for maybe, what, 15 years. Sure. So Masterson was emblematic of that. And he was a little bit smarter, I think, clearly than a lot of men out West, such that when he went into gambling, he, like a number of others like Luke Short, had enough success that he was able to go into business and buy saloons.

54:59And then from there, the next step was to kind of become a gentleman traveling gambler. And as the West evolved away from toward when you get the introduction of horse racing in the late 1800s and the introduction of boxing and wrestling, gamblers become the first experts on sports because they're the ones who follow it the most. And so that becomes Masterson's trail from gambler to sports writer. And yeah, he spends the last 25 years of his life in New York as one of America's premier sports writers. It is an incredible life story. And yeah, he ends up palling around with Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most famous, one of the more famous Americans when he dies in 19, I want to say 1921.

55:52Yeah. Twain's story is great on its own. He obviously was in Virginia City at the time of the Comstock mine. And I visited there and that's kind of like a classic old Western tourist trap now. But to your point, Twain got to see quite a few things. Jesse James is like really unhappy how things go down. So he's telegraphing the St. Louis paper after the Gadsill train robbery to make sure to get credit. So I think the other thing too is like there's the people, there's what they did, and there's how they want the story to be told. And obviously you're a paper writer. You need content, and this is interesting to your readers.

56:36you know this is kind of the social media of its day in some respects isn't it yeah I mean James was it's funny they all all the gunfighters had their own relationship with the press sure the press hardly knew of some of these guys I can cite you guys who killed more people than Wyatt Earp that you've never heard of because they just didn't make the newspapers enough sure Jesse James is a name that people may know today but what you may not know about Jesse James is he was America's first celebrity criminal. He was the first household name. He was a bank and train robber who operated from 1869 to 1882.

57:15And as I write in the book, Cole, you saw, I have, excuse me, deep ambivalence about putting Jesse James in this book because he was not an Old West gunfighter. He worked in Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio. There was nothing Old West about him. But the thing is, if you pick up this book and it doesn't have Jesse James about it in it, you're like thinking, I felt like I had to write about Jesse James, if only to explain his context. And because if nothing else, his career is kind of gunfighter adjacent. And he did have the one famous gunfight there in Northfield, Minnesota, in which his whole gang got shot up.

57:54But he did have a unique relationship with the press, which loved him, and he mostly loved it. The only outlaw, I think, whose relationship with the press rivaled that would be the next celebrity criminal of America, and that was Billy the Kid, who became famous in 1879, 1880. Billy the Kid wrote and talked with newspapermen. He wrote and talked with the governor of New Mexico, where he was at large, to try to get prosecutions put aside. So generally speaking, the fame or the infamy of gunfighters goes up and down almost exclusively based on their relationship with the press. when you look at the most famous five, the ones, you know, Billy, the kid Harden, West, um, uh, uh, uh, a couple of others, they were all written about extensively.

58:53And I can, I can tell you, I mean, you've never heard of Deacon Jim Miller. He probably killed more men than anyone in the West, probably 51. You've never heard of him because I don't know that he ever gave a, uh, uh, an interview to the press. I don't think he got a biography till the sixties. You mentioned when the Texas Rangers got revived under McNally and they start cracking skulls, if you will, right? Yeah. Kingfisher goes down. Sam Bass gets betrayed by his own gang member, Jim Murphy. Harden gets caught in a train in Alabama. I think I remember it was a deputy who lost money to him. Do you have a – is that really the beginning of the end for the gunslinger?

59:31The Texas Rangers, I think few people may appreciate how when they were reformed in 1874, many parts of Texas were still in anarchy and lawlessness was rampant. And boy, I'm not sure I can point to the rise of another American law enforcement entity that had more immediate effect than the Rangers did in taming Texas during the 1870s. And no, they didn't spread beyond Texas, but that was the type of law enforcement that, of course, would eventually come to the West, state by state, territory by territory, year after year. So that by 1900, 1901, Butch Cassidy really can no longer have a career as a train robber anymore.

1:00:20There's too much law. There's too many Pinkerton agents. And so the gunfighter era with the advance of civilization, with the advance of law enforcement by 1900 is pretty much over. Sure. The book covers about 36 years. Hickok's shootout was in 1865. And then you get all the way out to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid boarding a steamer for South America, which actually crossed over in the 20th century, 1901. you know you you talk about the connection to journalism how that inflated or romanticized these myths um buffalo bills wild west and hollywood cemented that as well looking you know kind of through the the mosaic of all this high level what what did we all get right about that through all this and what are the things to your point that that that you had to kind of generally myth bust about and kind of break some mistruths?

1:01:15I think, you know, one of the biggest kind of debate about old West gunfighters has always been, and I think we've all had this thought, you're sitting there watching a movie, you're sitting there watching a TV show, all these shootouts in the old West, and you're thinking, come on, really? How much of this is true? This is what fascinated me when I was 11 years old. When I first watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid. I didn't want to be a bank robber or a criminal, but I had to know how much of that is true. So beginning in the 60s, long story short, all these kind of long-haired academics, it became very fashionable to say that this violence was overblown, that the Old West was just not that violent.

1:02:00And it wasn't until the 2000s with the advent of really big data techniques, examining and reanalyzing homicide rates that we have come to believe, and I'll spare you the arcana of this debate, that in fact, the most violent places of the Old West from Dodge City to Tombstake were among the most violent places in American history and that they were every bit as violent as you'll see in some movies. You know, no, gunfighters didn't shoot it out in the streets of Dodge City every Saturday at four. Sure. But if you just look at the homicide rates, it's pretty clear they were astronomically violent places.

1:02:39So I think that's a big thing that kind of has gone back and forth that I think we can answer that question safely. When you drill down into it, you know, there are gunfighters here that like, as we mentioned, like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, who measure up to their myths. and there are those like Wild Bill Hickok who don't Johnny Ringo famously you see him as one of the bad guys in Toonstone in every Wyatt Earp movie Johnny Ringo not a gunfighter you know was in one guy only fired his gun as far as we know twice once he got drunk and shot a minor in the foot shot a minor in a drunken brawl And another time he shot himself in the foot, you know, just he's famous because he got in one really bad argument with Doc Holliday.

1:03:37And then, you know, 60 years later, people began to claim he was this gunfighter. It's a great story. Yeah. But no truth to it. So, you know, it's the book basically takes you deep into this gunfighter era. It is not it does not demolish a ton of myths. It demolishes a handful. and it in just as many as it demolishes, it can point to and say, but that one we got right. And that's the fun of this is being able to resurrect all this in kind of the clear light of day and try to correct, you know, sift through all the stories and legends to find out the accuracy of history. Yeah. Um, final kind of idea, you know, we talked about the gambling nowadays.

1:04:18I was thinking a lot about that as it flows through to, you know, current day in society, You know, to this day, like the West is a place that there's just not as many rules. There's, you know, it's been really kind of the growth of the United States from a people, business, geography. Many of the biggest cities in America now sit in the West in a way that they weren't, you know, to your point, 200 years ago. You know, are there other higher level topics that as you're finishing up this book, getting ready to go out and tell people about your story that you think a lot about relative to things you see today?

1:04:51No. In fact, if anything, I really wanted to push back because on that idea that I'm not writing about anything to do with today in this book because my concern is people are going to see this book, which is a lighthearted, fun look at gun violence. Very fun. Very fun book. Yeah. But that's not the way we look at gun violence today. Sure. And so I thought, gosh, people are going to see this and think I'm being irresponsible. they're going to think that I'm trying to make some statement about how guns are bad or good or something. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just looking at it as a historical phenomena, trying to explain it and understand it.

1:05:31I've got, I'm making no parallels to anything today. I got no problem if you want to do it yourself, but I'm not doing it. Yeah. No, I, and I, I mean, cause like we, you know, we, we have high season here and I think of like, you know, what was high season back in the day in these towns? Cause what you see in phoenix is like you know you get around to the winter months and everyone and their brother comes rolling into town and everything that comes with that and that's the good the bad and the ugly come rolling into town for about four or five months and then it gets hot and what happens people almost and it's like in these towns when the cattle weren't there neither were the neither were the wrestlers for example right so so same same kind of things that we continue to see um brian uh outside of your books where can people follow you going forward uh you know i mentioned you're doing some writing for Vanity Fair, you know, where, where, do you have a website or anything or social media handle out there?

1:06:22I've closed the, I've closed the website and I've stopped journalism. Uh, just doesn't pay like it used to. Plus I turned 65 next month. So all I'm doing now, Cole, is I, I put a, I put a book out about every five years. Um, this one came out last year. It was a lot of fun. Uh, we're gonna, um, well, what am I saying? The, uh, I've sold it as a, as a movie to get Netflix, uh, with a name director, named screenwriter. I'm excited about that. And I'm going to be starting it as a, if you're not really a book guy, if you're a podcast guy, we're turning the book into a 26 episode podcast by the, if you know, the outfit up in Montana, Meat Eater.

1:07:01They do all the podcasts about hunting and fishing in Western history. Meat Eater and I are going to be turning this into a podcast called The Gun Fighters, tentatively scheduled to start in mid-September. Excited about that. Other than that, you know the next book will be um probably my last uh because you know at some point i don't need to be doing this into my 70s well so so to keep to keep in the ilk of all these great characters to talk about maybe a better way of asking that question brian would be what's your favorite watering hole for you to go get a drink or a beer at in texas my favorite dive dive bar in the country is in Austin and it's called Deep Eddy.

1:07:42E-D-Y. It's right by downtown. Anybody who's ever been to Austin knows Deep Eddy. And it just hasn't changed since 1967. It's great. Awesome. Well, I just wrote that down. I got that on my list. Thank you for joining me today, Brian. Your book, The Gunfighters, reminds me that culture and technology and the movement of people and flourishing really shape history in ways that outlast any single generation. All these characters, these legends that you talk about, not only is it fun, but we inherit it in some way. To your point, you inherited it as a child. I know I did myself. And the question is, is that the right version that we inherited?

1:08:23Also, in many cases, people on the wrong side of history often stayed there. what we celebrate as rugged individualism was often something far messier as we learn in your writing our listeners should go and buy a copy of the gunfighters if you enjoy this podcast go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to a book with legs give us a review tell others about the books and great authors like Brian Burrow that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through for our tribe if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend email podcast at smeedcap.com that's podcast at SmeetCap.com you can also send your suggestions to us on X our handle is at SmeetCap thank you for joining us for a book with legs podcast we look forward to the next episode thank you for listening to a book with legs a podcast brought to you by Smeet Capital Management the material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice you can learn more about Smeet Capital Management and its products at SmeetCap.com or by calling your financial advisor.

1:09:56Thank you.