The gunfighters: how Texas made the West wild

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Burrough, Bryan, 1961-

Burrough, Bryan

Adult Non-Fiction

Athens Drive Community - Adult Non-Fiction
Duraleigh Road - Adult Non-Fiction
Eva H. Perry Regional - Adult Non-Fiction
Fuquay-Varina Community - Adult Non-Fiction
Middlecreek Community - Adult Non-Fiction
North Regional - Adult Non-Fiction
Oberlin Regional - Adult Non-Fiction
Southeast Regional - Adult Non-Fiction
WCPL - Adult Non-Fiction
Wake Forest Community - Adult Non-Fiction

"The Wild West gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there's much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas. Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers turned the heat up further. And the explosion in the cattle business after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the whole of the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable blood meridian. When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning. It's never stopped. The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the most unhinged tastes. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair-good, bad, and ugly. Like all great stories, this one has a rousing end-as the railroads and the settlers close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South America, ending their era in a blaze of glory. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story"--

Book

Books

91be958a-490d-02e8-6498-81f0ff6e8cc4

9781984878908

2025-08-03T16:24:04.227Z

-1

Non Fiction

Non Fiction

976.4 BURRO

Quarter
Six Months
Year

Wake County Public Libraries

Athens Drive Community
Duraleigh Road Community
Eva H. Perry Regional
Fuquay-Varina Community
Middle Creek Community
North Regional
Oberlin Regional
Southeast Regional
Wake Forest Community

9781984878908

2025

Penguin Press

grouped_work

Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.)
Gunfighters -- Texas -- Biography
Gunfights -- West (U.S.) -- History
Honor -- Texas -- History -- 19th century
Violence -- West (U.S.) -- History -- 19th century

The gunfighters : how Texas made the West wild

The gunfighters : how Texas made the West wild / Bryan Burrough

The gunfighters

how Texas made the West wild

Frontier and pioneer life
Gunfighters
Gunfights
History
Honor
Violence