Ep. 740: The Gunfighters

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Bryan Burrough http://www.bryanburrough.com, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en. Topics Discussed: Bryan's book, "The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611388/the-gunfighters-by-bryan-burrough/ is out; settling the score with a duel; the Colt revolver; robbing trains and robbing banks; Hickok, Jesse James, Billy The Kid, and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:25Steven Rinella?

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• 2:07Steven Rinella?

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• 2:50Steven Rinella?

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• 3:03Steven Rinella?

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• 3:10Speaker 02

  Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 3:13Steven Rinella?

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• 3:34Steven Rinella?

  Brian Burrow, dude, this book makes me so happy. Like, I love reading it. I'm not done with it. I'm halfway through it. I love reading it.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Well, I'm happy for you.

• 3:44Steven Rinella?

  It is. How you could have so much fun reading about so many people getting shot.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Well, that was the primary challenge of the book.

• 3:51Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Is how to convey one's enthusiasm for a pastime and get people to keep reading a book that is, you know, averages three or four dead people every page or so.

• 4:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's incredible. A lot of the reading I do, I have to read stuff just because I'm reading it for work, research stuff.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:09Steven Rinella?

  This is my, this is me, like, when I want to have fun, I work on reading your book. It's not work. I just, I love the book.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. Um, I, as you can probably tell, loved doing it.

• 4:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  You know, I've kind of reached the age, I'm 63, where I stopped doing stuff I don't want to do.

• 4:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  And I just want to pursue projects that I really want to go disappear into a room and learn about for five, six, seven years. This one took seven. And dude, I've been reading about gunfighters since sixth grade, since I was 11. This is a book I've wanted to do for like 50 years.

• 4:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you're from Texas.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  I am.

• 4:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And, and as you point out, we'll get into it. Uh, Texas is like, just kind of is a force that pushes gunfighters out into the American West.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  It's probably the most important of the number sources. Yeah, I think that's fair to say.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, you got a bunch of, you got a bunch of books. I'm gonna tell people about your books because they might recognize some of them. Barbarians at the Gate. Uh, you have eight books. Four New York Times bestsellers. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933 to 34. The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Families. Forget the Alamo. The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. We need to talk about that for a second. I haven't read that one. And we're here now to discuss The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the Wild West. Can we touch on the Alamo?

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Made the West Wild.

• 5:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What am I saying? How Texas Made the West Wild. I don't have my glasses on.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Two W's, I get it.

• 5:48Steven Rinella?

  Well, not only that, it's Crin put it in italics, which when you, as you, as you age, as you age, and you start losing your ability to see letters up close, italics is, becomes your worst enemy.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Italics is hell.

• 6:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, becomes your worst enemy. So you just leave your glasses on at all times.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:06Steven Rinella?

  I could leave mine on, but then this would be clear and you'd get blurry.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Can't help you.

• 6:11Steven Rinella?

  It's like a real.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  You gotta drop them down.

• 6:15Steven Rinella?

  Was that what you're doing right now?

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. And look there.

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  I thought you just did that to look pretentious.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Nope, that's what happens when you get old.

• 6:23Steven Rinella?

  No, because no matter what, if you got a hoodie and a hat on, I don't care what you do with your glasses, you're not gonna look.

• 6:30Steven Rinella?

  I just.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Maybe if I put doctor in my.

• 6:33Steven Rinella?

  There's a certain feeling when someone looks at you over the top of their glasses. It makes me think that I did something.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  That's how you gotta do it.

• 6:38Steven Rinella?

  Like you're getting.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  It's authoritative. Yeah, it's a power move, I feel like.

• 6:42Steven Rinella?

  Uh, what's your take? Do you think, do you think, uh, see, you're from Texas. I don't know if I, you're not gonna give a straight answer. Cause Texas get prickly about this subject. Do you think Crockett, uh, Crockett, they caught him alive? Or do you think that Crockett got, uh, killed in action?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  The versions that we have from people on the ground, which are Mexican soldiers, but let's face it, all the Americans died. Um, there are multiple versions that say he got, that he was captured and executed.

• 7:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So you believe that?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  I don't have any reason not to. I mean, it's the only nonfiction based, um, uh, source for Crockett information. Most of kind of the, the famous stuff of how him swinging old Betsy is kinda neo fiction.

• 7:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So no source. It's a good point you're saying. The only sources that could have described what happened at the end of the battle would be Mexican soldiers.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:37Steven Rinella?

  And there's no source that ever came forward to say, oh no, Crockett went down swinging his rifle.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  The problem is for years, that just made sense, right? We didn't really have much information until decades after the, the battle. About that some people might be captured. For the longest time, it was just assumed that everybody died because ultimately they died. The idea that some of them were executed after being captured is an idea that really didn't start popping up till maybe 50 years after the battle.

• 8:04Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it. Um, what, what's your primary argument in, in the, in the book? Like I said, I haven't read it. I'd like to, but. Why forget the Alamo?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Well, we Texans have put, are enormously proud of our creation. And should be, but you know, we wrote the book with a sense that we love history. We love the accurate stories of history. We don't believe that the accurate stories of history make Texas any less special. I think the argument that got people most irked was when you go back and you read Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texans memoirs, when you go back and read a lot of people, you realize that the primary driver that split Texas from Mexico was the Texans insistence that they could only live there if they were able to use slaves to bring in their cotton. Cause that's why they came.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  That's the only way they knew to raise cotton. And so for that first 10 years, from 1820 to 1830, that was primarily what they were arguing about and there's ample evidence of that.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it. And you dig into that and the story?

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Steven Rinella?

  I got a bone to pick with you about this one here.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:20Steven Rinella?

  Like I, I, yeah.

• 9:25Steven Rinella?

  I don't really get a thing you did. So everyone that reviewed your book, I read a bunch of reviews of your book, which are all good. I haven't found any bad ones yet. And they're all like, they all, all the reviewers get a kick out of you saying that Hickock

• 9:40Steven Rinella?

  was a Titanic fraud. Okay.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:43Steven Rinella?

  That Hickock was a fraud. Hickock wasn't a badass. He wasn't the ultimate gunfighter like people think he might've been.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  I, I, I argued that he was, came into public view as a Titanic fraud.

• 9:56Steven Rinella?

  No, you say he was a Titanic fraud.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Well, in terms of-

• 9:59Steven Rinella?

  And then you go on to totally contradict yourself.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  At that point, he was a Titanic fraud.

• 10:03Steven Rinella?

  Cause you're blaming, you're blaming Hickock. So Hickock, just to ref- you could tell the story. I'll just give a little quick outline, just so you understand my, my gripe. Some journalists, early on in Hickock's life, some journalists or some, you know,

• 10:20Steven Rinella?

  what passed for journalists in those days, interviews Hickock or whatever, and comes out saying, oh, Hickock killed 100 men with his pistol. And all Hickock, Hickock doesn't contradict him. Hickock's like, oh, he wants to say that, that's fine.

• 10:36Steven Rinella?

  And then goes on to shoot all kinds of people. And you're saying he's a Titanic fraud, but it's not his fault. He couldn't control what the guy said.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  And we don't, I don't argue that it was his fault.

• 10:47Steven Rinella?

  No, you tell me.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  The same reason, the same reason with Johnny Ringo. Johnny Ringo is a Titanic fraud and he never once made a claim. They were all made years after his death. With Hickok, yeah, he was, the only reason you know his name is that article by that magazine. Oh yeah, you'd never know of him otherwise.

• 11:04Steven Rinella?

  But you start the book with him shooting a guy.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Yes, but that does not make you some notable gunfighter that you shot one guy. What makes you the nation's first gunfighter is to claim that you shot a hundred guys. When the actual number at that point would appear to be like two.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  That's how you build a reputation.

• 11:23Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, but I just think Titanic fraud. I was, when I said that, when I read that in the reviews, I don't want to start out negative here. When I read that in the reviews, I thought, okay, he's going to dismantle Hickok. But then I'm reading the book and I'm like, the hundred, notwithstanding that hundred thing.

• 11:42Steven Rinella?

  He still was kind of a remarkable gunfighter.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  I, yes, but when he first became known, he became known for what I think was a fraudulent fact. That he'd killed over a hundred people. I think what's notable about him is that after that, you can argue, as I think you're trying to, that he grew, that he grew into his legend. That he became a notable lawman and became a notable gunfighter. But I'm sorry, when it was first written in 1867, he wasn't.

• 12:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Like I say, you win, but.

• 12:13Steven Rinella?

  Lay out, lay out the premise of the book, like how you lay it out in the beginning. You know, you kind of define, you first, you kind of go like, what is a gunfighter? Like what is, and you, you kind of, you kick around different people that carried pistols and different Western icons, and then you settle at, when I say a gunfighter, here's what I mean.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. The first thing you do is to. To define our terms, a gunfighter is generally acknowledged as someone who was involved in exchanges of gunfire among civilians on the on the old western frontier, so not involving soldiers, military of any kind, and not involving Native Americans. Generally speaking, what I set out to do was I identified, you know, what do all these guys have in common, from Wyatt Earp to Hickok to Jesse James? The only thing that they really had in common is, A, they got famous shooting people, mostly for shooting people, and it all happened during a period from 1865 till I ended at 1901. So I've grandly dubbed this the Gunfighter Era, and I set out to tell a narrative history

• 13:16Speaker 03

  of of those 36 years.

• 13:18Steven Rinella?

  And you set out explaining, sort of asking this question, why is it, why is it seen to be Texans?

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Well, that was one of the first things you notice if you re- if you immerse yourself in this literature, is that if you look at what I call the marquee gunfights, that is the famous ones, the ones that made the newspapers and the history books, a startling thing leaps out at you almost immediately, and that's the sheer number of Texans who were involved in these gunfights. I would argue some pla- if you tottered them up, I would say between 50 and 70% of these gun- of these famous gunfights, from Kansas to Texas to New Mexico, Wyoming and Arizona involved Texans. At first, that didn't make a lot of sense, because, not to get all into it here, but

• 14:09Speaker 03

  the I only discovered late, or began to understood, how there was this tyac- this Texas diaspora, this spread of Texans across the frontier that came with the spread of longhorn cattle. If you look at the great cattle ranches, the great cattle herds, from Montana all the way down to Arizona, 90% of them came from one place. They came from Texas, and they came with Texas.

• 14:32Steven Rinella?

  And they came with pistols.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  They sure as I did. Look, look, I would never argue that Texans created the gunfighter archetype, or certainly created gunvi- gun violence in the West. They didn't. I wouldn't want to overstate this, but what I'm saying is that Texans had an impact on what we remember that's far more significant than we remember.

• 14:57Steven Rinella?

  And and you get into, in the beginning of the book, you get into this, um...

• 15:03Steven Rinella?

  This, this idea of that, that people wanted to, would defend their honor at all costs. And you kind of talk about how they had these, that, that at that time, it seemed like people had like somewhat fragile egos.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Well, that's one way to see, that's one way to see.

• 15:24Steven Rinella?

  That's not your words.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  When you look at their behavior, that's the way it seems to us. I think another way to interpret this is that during the 19th century, at the 1800s, at a time where we didn't have a whole lot of university degrees or financial statements for ordinary men and women to brag about, what emerged, especially in the South, and I'm arguing, gravitated out onto the Western frontier, was a male honor system that, well, it's a little, it's almost hard to explain, but it's a little like pornography. I know it when I see it. You know when I have attacked your honor, maybe I call you ugly, or your wife, or your dog. The thing about the Southern honor system, or really you could argue the American honor

• 16:07Speaker 03

  system in those days, is if you felt your honor had been impugned, if you've been insulted, you had an opportunity, and in many cases, an obligation to respond with violence, even deadly violence. You know, that famously, I mean, I argue in the book that the genesis of all this gunfighter behavior was duels. Duels back in the, the old South, that's really the only place you can point to, uh, American men shooting each other in kind of structured contest with, with guns before this.

• 16:36Steven Rinella?

  You know, that's the thing, people talk about how caustic American politics has become. I always think to myself, well, not like then.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Dude, you, I mean.

• 16:46Steven Rinella?

  Like people, you'd have an election, the election would be resolved. And it'd be like, it'd be like Biden, it'd be like Biden and Trump would, the election would be over. Trump's like, I don't, you know, there's, there's a fishiness to the results. And they'd be like, okay, let's have a duel. And at noon.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Whoever lives.

• 17:08Steven Rinella?

  And that'll wind up being like, that'll wind up being the final say. The voters, in fact, have not spoken.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  In the years leading up to the war, there were fistfights and worse on the floor of Congress, as well as any number of duels involving politicians. Andrew Jackson, as you know, was involved in one. Abraham Lincoln almost was until he talked his way out of it. And our great Texas President, Sam Houston, was involved in one, which he aimed a little low and ended up shooting the other gentleman in the crotch.

• 17:39Steven Rinella?

  You know, what was that role? You explained, it's not ever heard of it before. What was that role in a duel? Like, where you bring like a... Right. Your second. Yeah, you bring like an advocate. Yeah, can you explain that? Can you explain that in duels?

• 17:52Speaker 03

  In the formal duel, as laid out in rules written by the governor of South Carolina in 1837, you were, you know, it laid out exactly how this is supposed to happen. Now, how often people went by the formal rules, I can't argue. But one of the things you did see in many, if not most, duels is the, you would bring a buddy, who is officially called your second, and they would, you know, kind of argue for the reasons that they should have a duel and should not have a duel. And, you know, often people went ahead with it. But the main place where you, where the duel, where the second could come in is if one of you broke the rules, let's say I fired at you and then fired again before anyone was allowed, the second could take a shot at you.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  And so there were all sorts of famous duels where like Joe...

• 18:41Speaker 00

  We should bring this back.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  There were all sorts of duels where like Joe and Jim would go out to an island in the Mississippi, they would shoot at each other from 10 paces and then miss. And the famous one of these involved the Texas hero Jim Bowie, who was a second. And both men were so angry and their seconds were so angry, they just, a melee, you know, broke out and they started shooting each other. And Bowie had this, you know, six foot short sword of a knife, the famous Bowie knife. So... I, I, I almost don't want to emphasize the formal rules of duels too much because in, I think there were many more that were informal.

• 19:16Speaker 05

  But the fact that there were formal rules speaks to how prevalent it was.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  And accepted.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  And widely accepted, yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  You know, the funny thing you saw in the South from the, the high watermark of duels, which is say the 1790s and the 1830s, which I know overlaps with some of your work, is a sense that everybody said you weren't supposed to do it. The preachers, wa- uh, women's associations, formally you weren't supposed to do it, but everybody was like, wink, wink, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I mean, nobody ever got, no, no sheriff ever walked out into the middle of a field yelling, stop, you're all under arrest.

• 19:53Steven Rinella?

  And they'd have like, uh, towns that have like a formal, maybe not formal, but they would have a, they would have a, what was understood to be the dueling grounds.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, every southern city, not just some, every single one, I can't, you know, St. Louis had an island out, I think they called it Bloody Island, out in the Mississippi. Uh, the famous one, the most famous one was, uh, you could still go there in the oaks and, underneath the oaks in City Park in New, in New Orleans at the end of Esplanade. And, you know, it, there were so many duels there during the 1830s, that you all, you practically have to make an appointment. There were some Sundays. Reservation. Right, right, because there would be 10 or 12 duels on a single afternoon. Now, the, the aster- the big asterisk there is, in New Orleans, duels were almost always done with swords rather than, uh, guns, and typically those duels ended when one man drew blood.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  That's the French connection?

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 20:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he, he talked about too, um, a style of duel where you take like, uh, you and me bind our left hands.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 20:56Steven Rinella?

  Right? And then you get a knife. Dude, that's a wicked duel right there. Do you know what I'm saying? Like me and Randall, we bind, no, me and Randall clasp our hands. Left, our, clasp our left hands. And they bind them.

• 21:12Steven Rinella?

  Tie 'em.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 21:13Speaker 05

  What if you're a lefty?

• 21:15Steven Rinella?

  That's what I, that's my whole gripe.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Then you complain.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. Your second has got to make a case for you.

• 21:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and then you, then you're like, on the count of three, and you each got a knife, and your hands are tied, and on the count of three, go!

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Go stab you in the

• 21:30Steven Rinella?

  Fight.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  wherever, okay.

• 21:31Steven Rinella?

  Fight.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was a, you know, a structured knife fight from a distance of about two and a half feet. The only problem with that is I, at least was unable to find a single one in the nonfiction annals of history.

• 21:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  It remains popular in some movies. If you remember The Long Riders, 1980, Walter Hill movie of the, uh, the James Gang. There was a beautiful one involving, uh, Cole Younger and Sam Starr.

• 21:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  The problem is, we just can't find any that, you know, actually, actually happened.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  We run into that a lot with our audio projects. There's just stories that you hear about the mountain men did this, or the mountain men did that. And then you spend months reading every mountain man account you can find, and it just seems to be an invention of later authors or

• 22:22Speaker 03

  I prefer to call it folklore.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Folklore, yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Suggesting that they're probably, and I suspect this, this did, this practice that we're talking about now did not rise out of nowhere. It came from something. But the thing is, they didn't have Harvard professors with them in Wyoming in 1831, and a lot of those guys didn't live to author memoirs. So I don't doubt that

• 22:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  there were incidents where men tied their hands together and went after the wooden knives. I just think that a lot of documentation about that stuff in the early, especially in the earlier frontier, is pretty, pretty sparse.

• 22:55Steven Rinella?

  I'm from Michigan. Do you think that I could put, like, if you saw me running around, I keep thinking about switching to those shirts you got on. But I feel like it'd be like, uh, You know what I mean? Might not be cool if I switched to a Yavara, being from Michigan. What would you think?

• 23:11Speaker 03

  I think you can pull it off.

• 23:12Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Now, I mean, if you're, I think it's a geographic thing.

• 23:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  I think it's harder to pull off north of Texas, north of areas that don't have a large Latino population.

• 23:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  And he's also age appropriate. I don't see a ton of 25-year-olds or youngsters your age wearing them. But once I got to 60, I was like-

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  I'm 50 years old.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Okay, well, you're, you're coming up on the age-

• 23:35Steven Rinella?

  My buddy Brad from Texas, he wears the same shirts.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  They're the most comfortable thing you can wear.

• 23:40Steven Rinella?

  God, I want to switch bad, man.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  That's close with trying to pull off a cowboy hat.

• 23:44Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm worried about.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:46Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm worried about. I want to buy five or six, get rid of all my other shirts, and just run Yavars.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  I got 10 or 12, and in Texas, we can wear them 11 months a year. And they're just, they're just comfortable as I'll get, as I'll get out.

• 24:00Steven Rinella?

  You look like a writer in that son of a bitch, man.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  No, see, I've also been, I've also been told I look like a waiter.

• 24:06Steven Rinella?

  No, not to me, man. You look like a Texan and a writer.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Well, thank you.

• 24:11Steven Rinella?

  Uh, you mentioned James Gang.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:14Steven Rinella?

  You are one of the, I kind of laughed out loud in your book where you're like, I don't want to put Jesse James in my gunfighter book. I'm only putting him here because you think he should be in here.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 24:28Steven Rinella?

  And then you go on to explain at great length why he does not belong in your book.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Jesse James killed people with guns, but we are talking about the Old West. And Jesse James was most certainly not a creature of the Old West. He was a midwestern bank and train robber. He, he pulled jobs in Minnesota, in Alabama.

• 24:49Steven Rinella?

  Why do people think he's a Western guy?

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Because the dime novels and, and the pulp fiction that came after him, for some reason, began gravitating his story, which is extensively in Missouri, out west. Because that's where people expected bang, bang, and gunfighters and bank robbers and all that.

• 25:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you even explain in that chapter- People didn't rob banks in the West.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Well, not until the 1890s, it was all but unheard of.

• 25:17Steven Rinella?

  Cause like, there's no money there.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  There just wasn't enough hard currency. The one place where you could rob something, making serious money, was trains. And even that was pretty rare.

• 25:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but the banks, like, oh, sorry.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  Oh, no, this, sorry, I was just, the other point that you made in there that I appreciated was, there's people shooting each other in eastern cities all the time. And they're not, obviously, there is a higher rate of violence in the West and in Texas, but, you're like, no one's writing, uh, you know, folklore about somebody shooting someone on the streets of, of Brooklyn, or anything like that, but there's this whole cultural.

• 25:58Steven Rinella?

  No, but there's a whole genre of music about that, called gangster rap.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's a similar thing, like, there's certain parts of the country that you associate with violence, but there's violence everywhere, it's only what the culture chooses to fixate on, right?

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Well, that was one of the first things that I had to confront is, A, let's face it, gunfighters do not seem to be a hugely important aspect of our history. There's no political or sociological impact, nothing that would justify putting them in a history book, a textbook. So I had to figure out, why is it, we're still talking about them 150 years? And obviously, where I came down is that they are important culturally for America. We have decided that there is something in these exploits that connects with us. There's a reason that gunfighters became an aspect of 20th century, especially, um, entertainments of movies and literature. And I don't spend a lot of time trying to get all academic about why they were important,

• 26:56Speaker 03

  but I do think I had to address, at least address, um, why, you know, this, the only gunfighters that anybody remembers rose in America on the frontier in that 35-year, in that 35-year period.

• 27:12Steven Rinella?

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• 27:57Steven Rinella?

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• 28:42Steven Rinella?

  second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. What if you could save up for that new car or vacation just by buying the stuff you're already buying? With the One Pay Banking App, you earn 3% cash back on up to $150 in monthly spending in categories you choose. So it's easy to save. So what are you saving for? Maybe you got your eyes on a new truck, or a new boat, or you're saving up for your first house. Download the One Pay App or visit OnePay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 29:26Speaker 02

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• 29:43Speaker 04

  I want to ask you a question that's like a 21st, 20th century, 21st century gun control spin.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  On that era, would that gunfighter era have occurred without the like proliferation of six shooters like after the civil war? Like when that technology.

• 30:06Steven Rinella?

  That's a big part of the book.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you have to argue they were. I mean, what made the gunfighter era possible? What made all these famous shootings possible was the invention of the revolver by Samuel Colt in the late 1880s, 1830s and its adoption and thus popularization by the Texas Rangers in the 1840s.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  When you talk about the phenomenon that we call today open carry, it was not unknown before the revolver. You can find memoirists who tour southern areas and rural areas that are like, gosh, I saw a guy carrying a gun in this in Arkansas in 1837. But after the war, especially after in 1865 and 1866, the federal government auctioned off or gave away something in order of 1.3 million dollar, 1.3 million sidearms. I think you have to acknowledge that open carry became not only prevalent, but accepted. There are, you can find memoirists writing about at the time who were like, good Lord, can you believe men are wearing guns like they used to wear bow ties?

• 31:11Speaker 03

  And I, and I think, I think that these gunfights, what you needed for them to happen were revolvers, something where you can fire a lot, cause a lot of mayhem. You don't really have gunfights pre-war back in the day with the primary handgun was a single shot.

• 31:28Steven Rinella?

  Short gunfights.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, very short. You know, the typical duel would be bang, bang. And then everybody takes 10 minutes to reload.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 31:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, and there's a very similar phenomenon. I mean, I'm not. Just vaguely, the Tommy gun arrived too late on the scene in World War I to really be issued to troops, so they sold all of those after the war, like in hardware stores, right? And that's the rise of

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Oh, no kidding?

• 31:56Steven Rinella?

  Of the nineteen twenties gangster.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  I would, I wrote an entire book that argued in part

• 32:05Steven Rinella?

  I knew you could speak to that, which is why I brought up my hazy

• 32:08Speaker 03

  The spread of surplus Tommy guns in the twenties did as much to create Al Capone as anything else. Because suddenly, if you could shoot a hundred rounds a minute, or whatever it was, some sheriff named Guber out in Iowa, he's not gonna be able to face off with you.

• 32:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, I wanna talk about the Colt pistol. But I wanna back up to the man that doesn't belong in the book, but he's in there.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, can you explain to folks, like, who was Jesse James? Like, what did that world that he came out of, right? Because that winds up having a little bit of an impact on a number of these people.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  It does.

• 32:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Some of the goings on in the Civil War shaped a lot of these individuals.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  One of the things that a number of the early gunfighters, those who kind of began their careers in the late eighteen sixties have in common, is a number of them, from Jesse James to John Wesley Hardin of Texas to Doc Holliday, were inveterate and angry southerners. Jesse James was the biggest one in terms of his fame. He was a teenage boy during the Civil War, whose brother Frank was out there fighting. At a time that the warfare in Missouri was much less about the movement of armies and much more about rural guerrillas descending on farms and burning up farms and such.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Frank was into that, Jesse joined him. Jesse was shot twice in the chest during the war, survived, and then goes utterly black for four years. We don't know much about him, but we do know that many of the Confederate guerrillas, known as bushwhackers, did begin to engage in crime in Missouri in the late eighteen sixties. And the first time we see Jesse and Frank The first time they they walk out onto the pages of history is 1869 in Gallatin, Missouri, far north. They walk into a bank ostensibly to rob it, but you learn immediately that that robbery was just second. They go up to a gentleman who's who's sitting at a desk and they call him by a name, let's say Burleson, whatever it was, and shoot him in the head.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  They thought he had this guy had killed one of their commanding officers. They were there to exactly

• 34:26Steven Rinella?

  And they were wrong.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  And they killed the wrong guy. That led to Jesse and Frank forming a group that two years later began robbing banks and continued very successfully for 10 years. Jesse James, in the, in his career as a bank and train robber, what's important for, what's important for people to understand is what a unicorn he was. There was nobody like this in the country that was doing this, that was doing it this much or making this money. And when you look at the entirety of this period from 1865 and 1901, there's nobody else that comes close. I mean, the close, if you wanted to say, who was the second most successful

• 35:07Speaker 03

  outlaw of the Old West, if you put Jesse James at the top, you'd probably say Butch Cassidy was a, was a, was a distant second.

• 35:14Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  But Jesse James was the first household name criminal in American history, but he was not, as you, as you point out, he was not a gunfighter.

• 35:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you say he was just a murderer.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Well, he never actually even did anything that we can figure out west of the, of the Missouri-Kansas line, which is kind of the beginning of the Old West. When you look at the people that Jesse James shot, five or six, every one was essentially executed with a shot to the head because he did something that pissed Jesse off during a robbery.

• 35:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It wasn't like going out into the street and being like, draw! It was just, he was a shoot, he'd just shoot people.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  The only time we knew Jesse James was in a legitimately contentious gunfight situation, a detective out of St. Louis somehow stumbled upon him and one of his cousins on a wooded road in Missouri in the 1870s. And the detective came right up to him and there was an exchange of gunfire. All three guys missed at a distance of like 15 feet. Like, like you can look at some of these gunfighters. Hickock, Ben Thompson, the Texan, Butch Cassidy, who did an awful lot of practicing. Billy the Kid practiced daily, as did Hickock. There's not a single story that I could find in any of the 10 Jesse James biographies I read that showed Jesse James ever practiced with a gun, and I think it shows.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  He's the kind of guy that would go out and buy one box of ammo and it would last him 10 hunting seasons.

• 36:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like when I was a kid, if you bought a box of ammo, I was like, yeah, it's good for like 20 shells. You're like, well, that would be good for 15, 16 deer. Every few years, I'll make sure it's my gun's still accurate.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Well, the thing to remember about Jesse James is if he's in a gunfight, he's failed. You know?

• 36:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  He wants to be able to walk into a bank, point a gun, maybe shoot a single shot into the ceiling and get out with the money before anybody notices it. So there's a reason that he probably didn't hone his, his gun skills.

• 37:08Steven Rinella?

  Who wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? It was, uh, he's a real good writer.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Robert Hanson?

• 37:15Steven Rinella?

  Was it Hanson?

• 37:18Steven Rinella?

  Someone type that in, wait.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Didn't read the book.

• 37:20Steven Rinella?

  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It was made into a movie.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  It was Ron, Ron Hanson.

• 37:24Steven Rinella?

  Ron Hanson, that's a hell of a book. Are you, are you much, so, so Robert Ford kills James. Robert Ford kills Jesse James.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Bob, yes.

• 37:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Bob Ford kills Jesse James. Do, do you have you read much about the guy that then killed Bob Ford?

• 37:40Speaker 03

  No, I put it in a footnote. I know that he was killed by a guy that basically walked into a bar he owned or was working in.

• 37:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  10, 15 years later.

• 37:47Steven Rinella?

  Many different versions of what happened. It's agreed upon that he shot him with a double-barreled shotgun.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there is, there is a, there is a fence around this book. There are, there are places that I kind of go up to the fence and going, okay, that's probably a footnote. I'm not going to read through him three more books.

• 38:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, Hanson, Ron, what was his name? Ron Hanson?

• 38:10Speaker 05

  Robert Hanson was the FBI.

• 38:12Steven Rinella?

  No, no, the son of a dick, mole.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  Ron Hanson's the author.

• 38:14Steven Rinella?

  Ron Hanson's the author.

• 38:17Steven Rinella?

  So he writes a novel, but it's like very informed, right? In there, he has this detail that the guy that kills Robert Ford has a coach gun, has a shotgun. And he took a bunch of pipe.

• 38:33Steven Rinella?

  Cut the pipe in little teeny discs and then took a hammer and chisel and cut those discs into little shards and then took a funnel and funneled the shards down into the shotgun. Because when you're reading about the guy that, when you're reading about the guy that killed Bob Ford, everybody talks about he was nearly cut in half. Some say cut in half at the waist, some say cut in half at the jaw, but it's agreed upon that he was very shot up. And I was wondering if you knew about that detail, if that's true or not, about filling that gun full of pipe shavings, which is a dirty deed.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  I don't, and, and I feel like a personal failure that, that I can't address that for you.

• 39:10Steven Rinella?

  But you know what, here's what, here's where you can find cover for yourself. You argue that he shouldn't even be in your book. So the last thing you need to do is spend a whole bunch of time talking about the guy that killed him. What exactly went through the guy that killed him? And then the guy that killed him. It's just getting very removed from the story.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  You know, at some point, you gotta realize people probably are not gonna read the 800-page version of this. So I do have to make, I have to make a lot of calls.

• 39:32Steven Rinella?

  Uh, gunfighters, uh, speed versus accuracy. Yeah. That was the thing that would debate.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  Um, it was typically journalists that would ask them, and we don't have a ton of those interviews and exchanges, but of those we do, Erp was, weighed in on this, as did Hickock, um, those men who lived long enough to tell the story argued strongly in favor of accuracy, that the dumbass thing to do, and you see people doing it repeatedly through the, in this book, is to draw and shoot from the hip, uh, just as, as, as a question of accuracy, especially at distance. Um, that's pretty questionable. In the, in the, in the gunfight that opens the book, in which, uh, Wild Bill Hickock, uh, kills this fellow Davis Tutt at 75 yards.

• 40:20Steven Rinella?

  The Titanic fraud, Wild Bill Hickock kills a man at 75 yards with his pistol.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  That's right. Uh, you know, Tutt fired, fired from the hip. Hickock famously had a Navy Colt. He thrust his left arm forward, placed the barrel of the Navy Colt across his forearm, took what, a millisecond longer than the other guy and shot him in the chest.

• 40:41Steven Rinella?

  Well, there you have it.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Erp did the same thing, any number, you know, any number of people he shot in, in the OK Corral fight, you know, Billy, um, I forget the guy's name, shot, made the mistake of shooting from the hip.

• 40:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and he would draw a bead on them.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:56Steven Rinella?

  Uh, the Colt pistol.

• 41:00Steven Rinella?

  It didn't take, I couldn't believe when I was reading this that it wasn't immediately popular. The Colt revolver, like people didn't want it.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  No, the original was introduced in like, I will say 1837, about a year after the Alma. And it was large and it was unwieldy. And it could take five, six minutes to, to, to, I mean, you practically had to dismantle it to reload it. So while Colt was able to unload some of these onto the federal government and was used, we're told during the Florida's Seminole War in the early 1840s, I want to say. It was not a big deal. In fact, by the time a group of Texas Rangers stumbled upon some of these pistols in 1844, seven years later, Colt had gone out of business. And it was only when the Rangers began using them in firefights against the Comanche, and

• 41:52Speaker 03

  then later in the Mexican War, that one of them, one of the Rangers who used it, a fellow named Samuel Walker, went back east and said, Colt, this would be a great gun if you could just lighten it up and make the reload a little bit easier. And working together, Walker and Colt created the gun that created the gunfighter era, the original six shooter, the Walker Colt.

• 42:13Steven Rinella?

  And some of these dudes, I always thought it was like from just a joke from Westerns, but some of these dudes you're talking about would actually, they would wear two of them and they would rig them for cross draw.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:25Steven Rinella?

  For real.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  That was news to me.

• 42:27Steven Rinella?

  I always thought that was like a, just goofy.

• 42:30Speaker 05

  When I read that detail, I had to figure how that was faster.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Well, me too.

• 42:35Speaker 05

  I mean, I think the idea is like you swing it and you're aiming it in one motion rather than drawing and bringing it up, but.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Well, let's define our terms real quick. Most people who wore a gun wore a single pistol low on their right hip or low on their shooting hip.

• 42:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  It was somewhat rare to wear two guns. We know John Wesley Harden did it, we know Hickock did it. But now what we're talking about is the way Hickock and certain others, Jim Courtney, the Marshal of Fort Worth did it as well. They wore their holsters high on their hip. So practically, you know, with the holster, the northern end of the holster in the stomach. And their argument was that if you are pulling from low on your hip, you've got to pull up and then point. With a cross draw, you pull out and the barrel is already pointed the way it should go.

• 43:25Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  So they would argue, and I am not a shooter, and I've never, and I've never used a cross draw, that it caused, the cross draw worked because it required one less motion.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was doing this in bed the other night. I put my, I put my Kindle down and I was reaching across to this side and.

• 43:42Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Told your wife, go stand across.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  Drawing at the ceiling.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, that was the excuse for all those movements when your wife walked into the room?

• 43:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  Everybody had been asleep for hours.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Uh, the dogs.

• 43:55Steven Rinella?

  The guy that kills Buster Scruggs in the very excellent Battle of Buster Scruggs, he's rigged high for cross draw.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 44:04Steven Rinella?

  Um, and Buster Scruggs, I think, carries on his hip.

• 44:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, once these guys got it, they made, they kind of made, the Rangers kind of made it famous in like a particular engagement, right?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:18Steven Rinella?

  And they caught on.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Battle of Waller Creek, 1844, the first time the Ranger took these revolvers.

• 44:23Steven Rinella?

  And they got them like through army surplus or something, right?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Oh, it was worse. And I, it was, I love telling this story in, in Texas because the Rangers, uh, discovered these pistols unused and left over by the Texas Navy. Like, don't you just love that Texas had a navy when it was an independent country?

• 44:42Steven Rinella?

  And then they disbanded it, right?

• 44:43Speaker 03

  They did, because guess what? They didn't need a Texas Navy. Nobody was gonna invade from, uh, seaside. Uh, so these guns were put, I imagine, in some type of surplus warehouse. Where a young Ranger named John, Jack Hayes, found them and took them out that day. He, he had a patrol with 23 Rangers and they ran into a group of about a hundred, best estimate, uh, about a hundred Comanche out in hill country northwest of San Antonio. The Comanche withdrew into a wooded hilltop, as they often do, and, and, and chided and yelled at the Rangers, "Come on, come on, let's fight." Well, for as long as the Rangers had been out fighting Native Americans, the way you charged was you took a single shot with your musket. Put it back, put it back in, in the, whatever you call a musket holster.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  And then you would take a single shot with your flint, with your, your single shot pistol. And then you would go in fighting with knife and sword. And this was the first time in history where anybody charged a group of Comanche uh with single shot musket, put it away, and then, and then six-shot revolver. Um, the numbers that I recall is one Ranger died that day and something like 25 Comanche. And the takeaway quote years later from the Comanche chief who'd been present that day is, "I shall never, I shall never fight that Jack Hayes again, for he has a bullet for every finger on his hand."

• 46:00Steven Rinella?

  That's good. Uh, who's Harden is a guy you spend a lot of time talking about, right? John, is it John Wesley?

• 46:09Speaker 03

  John Wesley Harden, I call him Wes Harden.

• 46:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you spent a lot of time talking about him, like here is a, kinda like a maniacal, indisputable.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Unstoppable.

• 46:22Steven Rinella?

  Gun, yeah, gun fighter.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Well, Wesley Harden, who is probably one of the, the big five, I would call him. And he's certainly more well-known in Texas than he is elsewhere. He's the bridge from the violence that kind of, you know, took over Texas in the decade after the war. He's the bridge into the more, you know, the later area, era of gunfighters that we know. It was, you know, Harden, you know, faced off with, with Hickock and Abilene. Um, one of the things that's, that's startling about John Wesley Harden, if you know nothing about him is, of course, he is credited or with killing between 26 and 42 people.

• 47:00Steven Rinella?

  God, man, yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  By the time he was 21.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  And most of it when, when he was 18. He got into trouble uh at the age of 15, when he killed a black man who he had wrestled with and they argued afterwards. And then was obliged to become a fugitive when federal troops looked for him. And so for the next, how many years? Six years. He kinda wandered Texas and ultimately a little bit into Kansas. And the wild thing about his career is, we call him maniacal, but it's hard to point to a heck of a, a heck of a lot of those shootings that were planned. They were almost always because he got into some type of argument. You remember the most famous one, of course, was he shot another Texas cattleman. Through the wall of his hotel room. Oh, yeah. Four in the morning in Abilene, Kansas. And the story that got told about 10 years later.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Um, is that he did it because the man was snoring. And for about a hundred years, it's been cool to say, oh, that's a bunch of BS. Come on, that's just Texans making up this stuff. But I'm sorry, why else do you shoot someone through a hotel room wall at four in the morning? You think he got into an argument with him? I suspect snoring makes a lot of sense to me.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  I've never done that.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Oh, I am, but I wanted to.

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, I always think about.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  I know my ex-wife did. I always think about opening their throat with a razor blade. Always? When I'm sleeping next to a snorer, like dirt.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Are you just dream of like?

• 48:23Speaker 03

  I just dream of just like very delicate, so delicate, he doesn't even wake up.

• 48:27Speaker 05

  At first I thought you said when you opened his throat, you meant like one of those mouthpieces.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  No, his carotid artery.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  That's why I always make sure I'm sleeping in a different tent than Steve.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  I was about to say, can we rethink that camping trip? I would go up the dirt and I'd be like, sleep, sleep, it's okay. I'd just like take a blade and just open up that artery in there.

• 48:46Steven Rinella?

  He's so nice, I think he'd understand too.

• 48:48Speaker 05

  He wouldn't even be mad.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  It's okay, I'm not mad. It's just I can't handle it anymore.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  I'm sorry.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  I just can't handle it anymore. Um, uh, card games, man. A lot, a lot of bloodshed and gunfighting. Over, uh, playing cards, which I didn't understand because on its face, it doesn't make any sense. If we're playing five card draw, I throw down my two aces and you throw down your two kings. What's to argue about, right? I mean, I just never understood the fact that easily half of the marquee gunfights that I'm writing about here had something to do with an argument over, over cards. Uh, and it wasn't until I started reading about the history of gambling that I realized.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  That things changed in the Old West or in the years leading up to the Old West. In 1843, a riverboat gambler, uh, published a book and then went out on the lecture circuit to explain to Americans how prevalent cheating was and how professional gamblers did it. Whether it was with hidden cards, they hid in their clothes, sometimes entire decks. They would have pulleys and things that they could pull up an ace from their foot. I mean, they had, they would, they would have, they wore rings with mirrors beneath them so that they could see every card that they dealt. So what I argue in the book, and I think I'm on a pretty solid ground here, is that what was different about the Old West? And what explains much of this, uh, this violence is two things. Number one, cheating was epidemic.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  More importantly, number two, now, everybody knew it. So at just about every game of chance on the old frontier, I'm arguing, people were almost as keen to, to, to spot whether other players were cheating as they were to win.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  And of course, any type of accusation of cheating, which let's face it, comes up a lot when somebody loses and is irked about it. Any accusation and certainly any proof of cheating was about as acute an affront to a man's honor as you could get. Um, so there were a lot of gunfights, um, some of them in the moment, some of them, you know, I'll meet you outside, some of them, you know, I'll see you a week later and I'm still pissed and so I'm gonna shoot you. I mean, gambling became one of the main sources of dispute on the, on the old frontier.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Was it also like a major source of income for a lot of these guys? Like, how were they paying the bills? Like gambling, I'm, I mean, some were robbing people, obviously, but...

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Think of, think of the jobs on the old frontier. I mean, schoolteacher, cowboy, barkeep, no, none of these people are getting rich. The old people are getting rich by and large are absentee mine owners and such, cattlemen. Um... And gambling filled two holes there. One, in a, in a landscape that didn't have video games, or internet, or board games, or much of anything. Primarily, it was entertainment. But also, it became kind of the omnipresent gig work of the frontier. Everybody, if you're making eighty percent of what you should make, I mean, you're gonna try to make extra. And the easiest way to do that on the frontier was, was gambling.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  And so, you see almost all the major gamblers, and I think like almost all the men on the frontier, moonlit as gamblers. I mean, the Earps were quasi-professional. They would occasionally set up shop in a, in a casino. And then you had the professionals. Doc Holliday, Luke Short, Ben Thompson, who became frankly, more, more famous as gunfighters, fighting off challengers, as they were as gamblers.

• 52:29Steven Rinella?

  But these were guys that were, that were like making their living playing cards.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Yes. They would typically take Doc Holliday. He had come west from Georgia because of his tuberculosis, was thought drier air was good for him. Tried to be a dentist, and he was a dentist, and he tried to open a practice in Dallas. Unfortunately, tuberculosis, the cough, and dentistry don't exactly meet. So, so, you know, he starts, he gets a buckboard, and a, a girlfriend slash lady of the night named Big Nose Kate, and begins basically touring the west. And he would go from the Rio Grande to Montana, stay as long as he felt that there were still suckers to be fleeced, or until he irked someone so bad, he needed to leave town. And it was a thing. It was a type of job.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Gamblers actually talked of a circuit, being up here in the mining towns, maybe in the, in the winter, being in the Kansas cow towns, or in Texas itself, in the summer.

• 53:27Steven Rinella?

  And they would go to towns where there was a lot of money flowing?

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Well, it, it, it was easier to make money in those places than in poor towns, yes.

• 53:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, like gold rush, gold, like, they would kind of follow mining, mining booms and stuff like that?

• 53:42Speaker 03

  And, or, or, you know, the, the Kansas cow towns with, with all the money coming in from, from Texas cowboys during the eighteen seventies. Any place, there was any type of, of boom, whether it was around minerals or cattle, you would find prostitutes and gamblers, because that's where the money was.

• 53:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Steven Rinella?

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• 54:45Steven Rinella?

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• 55:26Steven Rinella?

  it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are gonna sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com.

• 56:01Steven Rinella?

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• 56:43Steven Rinella?

  You're gonna see that my knowledge of your book starts to fade pretty soon because I'm only halfway through. So you'll have to help me.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  It's all right, just talk more.

• 56:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, please. But you lay out this, this deal that like, tell the story of the Longhorns. Cause this winds up having a big part of the book is this, that there's kind of a collapse or a lull in cattle activity.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:07Steven Rinella?

  And then there's a great spike in cattle activity and that pushes out a lot of, that pushes out a lot of gunfighters to the north.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Well, the eating of beef wasn't a huge thing in the Annabellum, the years before, before the war. And 90% of the beef cattle in the country were in South Texas, in the plains on those ranches, famously King Ranch, south of San Antonio. And it was during the war, that trade just stopped because you couldn't anymore get, you couldn't drive to New Orleans to market. There was no more money, not enough money in Texas to, for people to be having beef dinner. So essentially that trade froze in amber. And so, you know, cattle did what cattle do for about five years during the war. They made little cattle. And by the time the war was over, there was something in the order of five million cattle

• 58:01Speaker 03

  roaming free in South Texas.

• 58:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, unowned.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  No, they were owned.

• 58:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they were.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  They just weren't, barbed wire wasn't a thing.

• 58:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  So, this was open range.

• 58:10Steven Rinella?

  So, someone would have claimed ownership of them. Whatever level of control they had over them.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  By branding.

• 58:15Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  So, you would brand your cow and then allow them to run free.

• 58:19Steven Rinella?

  I got it.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  And then, when it was time to go to market, wherever they might be, you had to go out and round, and round them up.

• 58:24Steven Rinella?

  I see. So, during those years, just they weren't, there was nowhere to send them.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 58:28Steven Rinella?

  So, your herd just built to build.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  And what happened immediately after the war in 1865, 1866, was northerners wanted those, they started to open the first ever stockyards in Chicago. Uh, and they, they needed those cows to get north. Unfortunately, there were no railroads in Texas to get them up there. Ipsophactical cattle drives. The nearest railroad, railroads to Texas were in Kansas. Uh, Abilene, Wichita, ultimately in Dodge, Dodge City. And so, the way that Texans and Texas longhorn cattle, and I've argued kind of this hyperviolent ethos of, of Texas gunmen, the way that began to spread across the frontier was first up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas.

• 59:04Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm. And they would come, they, they would establish a point of sale. And then, you'd have all these dudes, lot of money, real, real violent, tearing up the town. And you explain how the towns would sour on this.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Right. There were five principal, uh, Kansas cattle town, uh, from 1869 to 1879, beginning with Abilene, then Wichita, then Ellsworth, ultimately ending in Dodge City. And, and the Texas cowboys would drive large herds up there, uh, to, to each of, each of these towns, they kind of handed it off being the place, like a baton. Because the Texans were so violent and so upris, and the murder rates would go so sky high, that each of the towns, you know, one after another was like, that's it, we're done. You know, you, you would, you know, Wichita, you take these guys. Dodge City, you take them. Um, and that's really where the first nationally famous gunfights, um, occurred, the first ones that we still write about today. We know gunfights happened before that.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  But this was now in the north. This was within range of northern newspapers.

• 1:00:07Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Uh, that suddenly were like, wait, Texans are up here doing what? Uh, and, you know, I, I argue in the book that, you know, this was, this kind of made these Kansas cow towns the Madison Square Garden of the gunfighter era. It's the first place you hear of so many of these police, people from Wyatt Earp on down.

• 1:00:24Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh, Brody had a question about mercenaries.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Oh, well, I mean, it might even relate to like the cattle drives like. It like in western movies a lot, you see where where like someone hires the gang, right? Like, was that a thing where these guys will get hired to do some kind of mercenary work for good or bad reasons?

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  It happened, but I would argue it didn't happen as much as the movies might suggest. The most famous incident that well, first, there's two things we're talking about here. Individual gunmen who are hired as assassins is what we might call hitmen.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  That was a thing. You may dimly remember a pretty good Steve McQueen movie from the seventies called Tom Horn.

• 1:01:08Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  Well, oh, I forget where I am. I'm.

• 1:01:12Steven Rinella?

  He was the last man legally hung in Wyoming.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  And Tom Horn was pretty clearly a hired killer.

• 1:01:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he was a stockman. He was a stock detective.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  He was a stock detective, but I think most people, at least in Tom Horn's case, knew what he was doing, but then there were others like Deacon Jim Miller in Texas, who, when he was strung up, his last words were, let, let, let the record show I have killed fifty-one men. Now, hiring an entire group of hired killers, and I can think of any number of movies where that happened.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  It happened. The most famous one was in Wyoming, Johnson, during the Johnson County War in eighteen ninety-two, in which the Wyoming Stockmen's Association basically judged that Johnson County was allowing rustlers to run free and wouldn't convict them even when they were indicted. And so the Wyoming Cattlemen decided that they were going to invade Johnson County, kill all the public officials, the newspaper editors, and the rustlers. For this, they dispatched a man to, wait for it, Texas, where in Dallas he hired and brought north, twenty-one hired Texas gunmen. You probably know that that story did not end well for the Texas gunman.

• 1:02:24Steven Rinella?

  Uh, can I tell you a funny Tom Horn story?

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Please.

• 1:02:26Steven Rinella?

  We used to hunt this dude's place named Tom Horn. And, uh, he was a rancher and I would, when I would go in, we'd shoot the breeze with him. And I always be like, does he, I always be like, does he know about Tom Horn?

• 1:02:42Steven Rinella?

  And one day, I'm not kidding you, man, I'm talking to him, was like, we'd hunt rabbits on his place.

• 1:02:49Steven Rinella?

  So as a joke, one day, we give him a carrot cake. Okay, we give a carrot cake, and it's got like little rabbits and carrots on top of it decorated. And we go and we give him the carrot cake, and I'm trying to ascertain if he like, is getting the joke. Like, he gave us rabbit hunting permission, so here's a carrot cake. And I'm also wondering, like, does he know about Tom Horn? And I'm looking through him, and like, right off of his right ear, I realize on his shelf is a book, is Tom Horn's book. I'm like, oh, good. He knows he gets the carrot cake joke, but he does at least know that there's, that there's another very famous Tom Horn.

• 1:03:27Steven Rinella?

  When you say it doesn't go well, explain what happened. Doesn't go well for the Texas gunman.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  The Texas gunman, uh, uh, you know, they come into Cheyenne and they start riding up to Johnson County. And at one point, when they're just on the edge of the county, a scout comes in and says, wait, wait. The king of the rustlers and a couple of other three bad guys are nearby on this ranch. Let's go over and get them first. Big argument breaks out, the Texans go over and get this guy, they surround this cabin. I think two of the bad guys get away, and two of them are killed. One of them, the so-called king of the rustlers at this time, and it speaks to the pervasiveness of Texans, even in Wyoming, was a Texan named Nate Champion, who, you know, wrote in a journal as they were, you know, shooting into the, into the cabin and then starting to burn the cabin down.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  He ultimately ran out into their pistols, à la Butch Cassidy, and was killed. But that gave the locals time to raise a super posse, which was about twice the size of the incoming invaders. The incoming invaders withdrew to a ranch, called to the governor for help, he was in on it. The governor called to the White House, who called in the 7th Cavalry, who rescued the poor Texas invaders about three days later. They all went away to nice Wyoming prisons and were quietly allowed to go on their way.

• 1:04:43Steven Rinella?

  You know who, in reading, uh, in reading your book, you get into Billy the Kid.

• 1:04:50Steven Rinella?

  And throughout the book, uh, at least the half I'm reading, I'm reading little bits that I'm like, this is kinda like from Young Guns, but the movie Young Guns, they, they make a real popery out of a ton of different shit.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:04Steven Rinella?

  Like, what are they even talking about in that movie?

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Look, I would argue that as bad as-

• 1:05:09Steven Rinella?

  Are you familiar with this movie? The Young, Young Guns?

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  And the sequel.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  I've seen it twice. Now, look, let's-

• 1:05:14Steven Rinella?

  Like, what are they, like, the whole story-

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  Let's not, let's not go be dissing-

• 1:05:17Steven Rinella?

  You're talking about shit from all over the West, man.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Well, that is kinda what Hollywood does. They take the best. Look, Young Guns is not awful. There are worse. Including Young Guns 2 is much worse.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  I, I-

• 1:05:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Young Guns 2, well, the beginning was pretty sweet.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  You mean it's not bad in that it's not as inaccurate as you might think?

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  I'm not judging it on entertainment value.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  But on factual-

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  There was some real history in there.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, Young Guns-

• 1:05:46Steven Rinella?

  Like, Bon Jovi was not there.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Really? No?

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  You're crushing me. Um, you know, I thought Young Guns' contribution, the original, um, to Billy the Kid was that I don't think Billy the Kid was the most stable of, of- And Emilio Estevez did a good job of suggesting there were moments when he wasn't all there.

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  And I, that-

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  He ain't all there.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  That spoke to me.

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

  That's in the movie.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  And the idea that, that these, it was a small group of, of gunmen in this feud, kinda being chased and dominated and overwhelmed by a larger criminal group-

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  And it was what, the Lincoln County?

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Lincoln County War, 1880, 18, 1881. That felt right.

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  But I mean, I'm, they started to lose me a little in Young Guns during the, the great peyote sequences.

• 1:06:35Steven Rinella?

  But they were kinda mixing up their landscapes too, right? I mean, like-

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Remind me, it's been a few years.

• 1:06:41Steven Rinella?

  Well-

• 1:06:43Steven Rinella?

  So the link, where was the Lincoln County War? Where did the Lincoln County War occur?

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  It's all New Mexico. Billy the Kid is all New Mexico.

• 1:06:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay, alright. So they, so that was, alright. Cause I thought they were borrowing stuff from the, the sheep, the fence cutter wars up in Wyoming.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  Well, I, I can't, I can't speak to that. Um, uh, I mean, the thing about Billy the Kid is...

• 1:07:03Steven Rinella?

  Let's just talk about the real Billy the Kid. Tell the story of the real Billy the Kid. Never mind Young Guns.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  Well, the, the-

• 1:07:08Steven Rinella?

  As good as it is.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  The problem with Billy the Kid, if you're an author or an historian is, I can take the accepted facts of Billy the Kid, and I can write 10 different books that would take, that would, the, the, the book one would be of him as the worst villain and murderer you've ever read about, all the way to book number 10, which would be what a sweet, misunderstood guy is. Because the elements of this guy's career and his personality could back up almost anything. You know, from the kind of the dastardly point of view, he was a murderer and a cattle rustler. Okay? From the good point of view, even then, people admired his daring, his bravery.

• 1:07:45Steven Rinella?

  Like in real time, like in the news, like-

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  The news, the, the New Mexico newspapers, at the time that he was at the peak of his regional fame for about a year, were split. Some of them said he was a demon spawned from hell, others said, "Well, you know, you can understand why he's doing this. He's outnumbered," that type of thing. Billy the Kid was an orphan, uh, raised and kind of escaped from Silver City, a town down in southwest, uh, New Mexico. He went out into Arizona, which was remote and undeveloped, and came back, having killed a man who picked on him because he was so small. Um, he was 17 at the time, and he was, he was a small kid. And in the West, by the way-

• 1:08:23Steven Rinella?

  They're all small.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  And they're all called the Kid. Like, I can give you 15 guys named the Kid. Harry the Kid. I mean, just, you know-

• 1:08:32Steven Rinella?

  But some of these guys in this book are 125 pounds.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  Well, I, I, I think that, uh, American men were smaller back, back in those days. Billy the Kid was what? 5'7", 125, something like that?

• 1:08:43Steven Rinella?

  Probably malnourished for a while, while he was young, maybe.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  Billy the Kid's career is, is neatly cut into two, into two parts. The first is, as you, as you mentioned, the Lincoln County War, where he had gone to work for a, a cattleman who got into a big feud with the local members of power. And, uh, Billy the Kid was on the losing side and hounded out of that, after two or three years in which he killed two or three people. After that, he went, he moved over- Uh, up toward Las Vegas, Las Vegas, New Mexico, northeastern New Mexico, and became, the fancy word for him, people will say he was an outlaw, outlaw, schmoutlaw. He was a cattle rustler. That's all he did was buy and sell cattle. And, and he, he, he rose to fame when New Mexico, New Mexico cattleman came after him.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Uh, and ultimately, uh, they, much as the governor of Texas in the 1930s brought in Frank Hamer to chase down, uh, Bonnie and Clyde, the, the cattleman of eastern New Mexico, almost all of whom were originally Texans, brought in, uh, a young fella named Pat Garrett, who was known, uh, he, he, he was little known for anything beforehand. He'd basically been a bartender, but his one claim to fame seemed to be-

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  Garrett did some hide hunting?

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Yep. He did, as a matter of fact. He was really tall. He was six- at a time, I think the average American male was like 5'8", 5'9". He was 6'4".

• 1:10:05Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  And Pat Garrett, uh, was symbolic of the changes over, over going frontier law enforcement. Uh, you know, up until those years, in the early years after the Civil War, you could kill almost indiscriminately. It was pretty unusual for somebody to get put away for murder. But in the 1870s, you start to see lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett, who are notably more professional. You know, until then, you had a lot of drunks, a lot of corruption, um, and after that, less. And Garrett, you know, famously tracked Billy down to the town where pretty much everybody knew he was hiding, Fort Sumter, and, uh, went in one night with two other, with his two deputies, both Texans. And, uh, they, they surveilled the town. There was nothing going on.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  So they knew the jefe, they knew the, the mayor, uh, and they, uh, after midnight circled around to his house. And, uh, while the two deputies sat out in the yard, uh, Pat Garrett went in through the open door, sat on his friend's, um, bed and woke him up and started to ask him, you know, have you seen Billy? Is he ever around? And at that moment, Billy the Kid walked over from his mistress's house, which is about 50 yards away, uh, came into the yard. He had a butcher knife in his hand and he was gonna cut, uh, a steak off a, a beef that was hanging from one of the eaves, um, when he saw the two-

• 1:11:24Steven Rinella?

  So relatable.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  When he saw the two men in the yard-

• 1:11:27Steven Rinella?

  I mean, not the mistress.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  The mistress happened to be Pat Garrett's sister-in-law. Uh, but that's another, that's another story. Well, Billy walks into the yard and sees these two strangers and he's speaking only in Spanish. He demands, who, who are they? Who are they? And the, uh, Garrett's two deputies are so stunned, they don't even know what to do. They certainly don't know that this agitated young guy is Billy the Kid. There's an open door there into the bedroom where Pat Garrett is sitting in the bed. And Billy has his two, uh, uh, pistols out, pointing at the deputies. He backs into the open door into the darkened bedroom where the mayor is laying there in bed and

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And Garrett's sitting on it. Garrett sees a shadowy figure come in. Billy sees a shadowy figure on the bed. Nobody knows who anybody is. And that's when the mayor, whose name is escaping me, basically says two words. He says, "El fue, it's him." And Garrett, with, on, on only that, fires two guns into the shadowy figure. He hears gurgle, gurgle, fall, walks out to clear the gun smoke, walks back in, and he realizes he has in fact killed Billy the Kid.

• 1:12:36Steven Rinella?

  Well, he didn't though. He let him go. And that's young guns too.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  You don't understand how, there, there are entire towns, including the town of Haiko in Texas, that have built museums around Billy the Kid, who, the Billy the Kid that actually lived into the 1930s. We know our Uncle Jesse was.

• 1:12:59Steven Rinella?

  So you explain, I haven't gotten that far in the book. You tell that story about cutting the beef steak and getting shot by Pat Garrett in the book?

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Chapter 13.

• 1:13:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, God, I can't wait.

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  It's a good chapter.

• 1:13:07Steven Rinella?

  Um, that's how that happened?

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  Am I giving, am I giving too much away?

• 1:13:11Steven Rinella?

  No, hell no. There's no such thing, man.

• 1:13:14Speaker 04

  You, uh, you mentioned like Pat Garrett being more of like, whatever, kind of a straight-laced lawman. Um, or, you know, like.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  Better than the one, some that had gone before him.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  But what, like, was it also a thing where, like, at any given time, some of these gunfighters would be on one side of law?

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  Like, you, you hear that a lot, you, you know, that's portrayed.

• 1:13:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, that's, that's the thing that comes out as kind of weird is like the fluidity. You even make jokes like a guy like does all these criminal acts like and of course his next job was sheriff.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because in many cases, communities didn't especially care about their moral character and they also didn't have a ton of people willing to take the job. There weren't a lot of people out. I mean, a lot of these places were pretty small, but what they were looking for, and you saw this time and time again, they were looking for somebody with bravery and a reputation that might dissuade criminals and in the end who know how to use a gun. So you absolutely saw people who had been wrestlers or criminals of some type who would go be a marshal for a season or two and then go back.

• 1:14:18Steven Rinella?

  You know, I've often argued that Shakespeare stole a lot of his stuff from the show three's company. But there's a time problem there. I feel like Billy the Kid, they kind of stole stuff from your book a little bit because even though that came first, because he even uses that flip move, which you explain in great detail, the border flip.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  That's Harden. Harden does it twice.

• 1:14:44Steven Rinella?

  No, no, and sorry, this is the last mention of Young Guns. In Young Guns.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Oh, you're right. He does it in the movie.

• 1:14:52Steven Rinella?

  Billy the Kid does that little, a little move where he's like going to hand a gun handled. Someone's like, hey, give me your pistol. And he goes to hand it to him and then flips it on him.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, we don't know that he ever did that in real, but John Wesley Harden did.

• 1:15:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Twice.

• 1:15:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so I'm done now talking about Young Guns. It's dumb. It doesn't make any sense because it's a movie, but in your book, you give name to that move and talk about, it's called like the border agent or the border flip.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  Some people, I've heard it seen the border role, I think more, more commonly it's called the road agent's spin.

• 1:15:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And it's a thing. It was a real like.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  It was a thing, but one wonders if it was a thing people bragged about doing more than they actually did.

• 1:15:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Can you explain it?

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  Well, you would. There were two instances of it in Wes Harden's career. One that he told of later and one that we know actually happened. The one he told is the classic one, when Hickok went to disarm him at a bowling alley in Abilene, because as we all know, bowling alley, bowling was the sport of the old west.

• 1:15:56Steven Rinella?

  I had no idea.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  True. Um, you know, uh, he was causing a ruckus, uh, for over what we don't know. Hickock went in with his guns drawn, knowing full well who he was and demanded his guns. And Harden turned around and realized, okay, I'm not going to win this. The guy's already got his guns out. So he said, moving very slowly, pulled both his guns. He wore two and handed them butt forward toward Hickock. Hickock then put his guns down and reached for Harden's, at which point Harden spins them. And thus that, that the barrel is now, is now pointing forward rather than the butt. And he's got Hickock, you know, right where he wants him. At which point you would think gunfight, right? No, that didn't happen.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  Harden actually shoot off his buddies and said, nobody, nobody shoots, shoots this man but me. And then a strange thing happened. Um, you know, Wes Harden was 17 at the time.

• 1:16:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Hickock was in his 30s. And Hickock, we don't, we don't have the exact words, but clearly said something like, dude, chill, come on, let's go have a lemonade. And basically talked him down.

• 1:17:01Steven Rinella?

  A little seltzer on there.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  The sense you get is Harden was so stunned.

• 1:17:08Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  He didn't really know how to do it. Uh, didn't know what to do. Oh, he could have just, if he wanted to shoot Wild Bill Hickock, he could have done it right there.

• 1:17:15Steven Rinella?

  God, wow.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  And then he, we also know that Harden successfully used, um, the spin. It's documented in the killing of a Texas state policeman, uh, later that same year.

• 1:17:27Steven Rinella?

  Hmm, hmm. The border agents flip? What, what was it called? What in your book you call it?

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  The border roll or the road agents spin?

• 1:17:36Steven Rinella?

  The border roll.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  I've never been able to do either.

• 1:17:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I've experimented.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  No, me either.

• 1:17:44Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household. If you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got weather tech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault. It's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put weather tech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com. You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on

• 1:18:28Steven Rinella?

  the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications. So you get the alert

• 1:19:13Steven Rinella?

  the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. What if you could save up for that new car or vacation just by buying the stuff you're already buying? With the OnePay Banking App, you earn 3% cash back on up to $150 in monthly spending in categories you choose. So it's easy to save. So what are you saving for? Maybe you got your eyes on a new truck or a new boat, or you're saving up for your first house. Download the OnePay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

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• 1:20:14Steven Rinella?

  Journalists. Here's a part that's so confusing. I mean, I accept that it's true, but I just can't picture the sort of thought process. If there's a guy in one of these towns, and he gets in some skirmishes, he gets in some of these shootouts over card games and whatnot. And they're always getting cleared, like, oh, self-defense, or there's no witness, therefore, we're going to let you go. Or it's unclear what happened, therefore, we're going to let you go. And then journalists want to come then talk to them.

• 1:20:51Steven Rinella?

  And interview them about their disputes like again and again and again.

• 1:20:58Steven Rinella?

  Uh, and they kind of like craft these sort of through these articles craft these personalities. And you talk about a, a, a unique aspect of a lot of these gunfights is there are many eyewitnesses. So you can really late in the later years, there's very detailed descriptions of he said this, he said this, he did that.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Steven Rinella?

  He did that. At times you find that there's, there's contradicting details. But it's just like, can, can you address that a little bit that like, how were they sort of arguing that this was, how, how were journalists arguing that this was like productive? Or serving the public good or whatever to kind of like, profile and make heroes out of people that we would today recognize as just like flat out murders?

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  In large part, the press accounts don't, um, rise them up as heroic, as unusual, yes, as in Hick, Hickok's thing. But I, you don't find a lot of moralistic commentary, except to the extent that they're saying this is bad, this is murder.

• 1:22:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Um, uh, I will say that to the extent that you, that you do find just the fact that writing about them at all glorifies them. It reflects a fascination with them at the local level. We know that the first and greatest fans of gunfighters were the people who lived in their communities. They didn't have a lot else to talk about. Mark Twain tells a great story of going out west. And there was a gunfighter, um, I'm forgetting his name at the moment, who was prevalent in the, in the civil war years. And he said, you know, as he, as he rode out on the, on, on the stagecoach for Nevada, it was the only subject that anybody wanted to talk about was this guy, and he killed somebody recently. There wasn't a lot of news out there. So gunfighters were news.

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  Um, I, I think the worst that you could say about the journalistic coverage, um, is that it ended up being pretty gullible. I'm thinking of, uh, I'm thinking of a character named Wild Bill Longley, who was arrested in 1877 in Texas and claimed to kill something on the order of 42 people. This was like a year or two after Harden had been. Arrested and imprisoned for murder, murdering a ranger. And so this guy Longley went to the gallows having claimed to kill something like forty-two people. And he got written about by a lot of journalists. And later in the 20th century, there were books and even a TV series about this guy in the in the 1950s, which was kind of the high watermark of what of fascination with these type of people.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  And it wasn't until the 1990s when the retired district attorney in central Texas set out to write a new biography that he was unable to find evidence of maybe five or six of these forty-two killings, all of whom were men shot in the back, or in other words murdered, rather than any type of contentious gunfighter situation. So there were a number of kind of bogus counterfeit gunfighters. Longley would be one. Johnny Ringo, who kind of is often seen as one of the major guns up against Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, is often represented, you know, as one of the great gunfighters. In fact, he never fired a shot in anger.

• 1:24:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I haven't gotten there yet, but tell what happened at OK Corral and and and and why is it still so debated? Like, you know, like every night on some cable network, there's a thing about, me and Randall were joking about this. You could spend your whole life just watching shows.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:24:35Steven Rinella?

  Arguing about who did what at OK Corral.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  You know, OK Corral, which we should, of course, if we were going to get super accurate here, we need to be calling this the gunfight beside the OK Corral.

• 1:24:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  Because it wasn't it wasn't in the Corral, it was in a vacant lot next to it. Well, I think most people probably understand, if you've ever seen the movie Tombstone, the 93 Kurt Russell, I while it opens with a fictitious massacre, it's pretty darned close to accurate, as is the the Kevin Costner Wyatt Earp, although from a year before, which puts me to sleep. Long story short, Wyatt Earp was an occasional lawman there. His brother Virgil, who had come to town, and his brother Morgan were actual lawmen who had come to town. And they, they came to Tombstone from various places in the West to make money. In a new boom town where silver had been found.

• 1:25:23Steven Rinella?

  They wanted to make money gambling?

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  They wanted to make money any way they could. They first, they tried it, they put their initial capital into buying vacant lots and into mining claims. When mining claims and vacant lots are not the greatest sources of immediate cash flow, they all actually had to find jobs. And so they, you know, worked different things at different seasons, typically as lawmen, assistant US Marshals, saloon keepers, and most commonly gamblers. They then came into conflict with what is now generally acknowledged to be the largest outlaw gang of the Old West, more than a hundred strong centered there in southeast Arizona. It did most of its work stealing cattle in Mexico.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  Above the border, they were known as the Cowboys, typically cow hyphen boys. But below the border in Mexico, they were known as the Tejanos, because so many of them came from Texas. And over time, the Earps came into conflict with this, with this group. And the key thing that happened, we now know, was Wyatt Earp wanted to be marshal. He'd been a very successful lawman in Kansas, and a somewhat successful lawman in Missouri. But he felt like people in Arizona didn't really know him, so he needed some type of achievement. There was a, there was a, the Cowboys, from time to time, robbed stages.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  And he thought, everybody thought they knew who was behind a big stage robbery. And so Wyatt.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  Approached the most prominent of the cowboys, a guy named Ike Clanton, and said, "If you'll set this guy up for me so that I can arrest him, I'll give you the three hundred or, I think, I should, I think it was three thousand dollar reward." And Ike agreed to do this. Unfortunately, the guy that they sought was killed in the interim. And afterwards, Ike realized he was in serious trouble. Because if Wyatt Earp or any of his buddies spread the word that Ike Clanton was going to rat out and set up one of his criminal brethren, Ike Clanton's lifespan could be measured in days. And so that's what happened, that windy day in October. Ike and two, several other cowboys came into town.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  They accused Wyatt Earp and his brother Virgil and Doc Holliday, their friend, of starting to spread this story, which was a true story, that he was a rat. And it went on most of the night, and it didn't get bad. It, meaning Ike's behavior, didn't get bad until after dawn that next morning. By which point, all the Earps and other, and everybody else involved had been up all night playing cards. They were all out going, having naps that morning. When Ike Clanton started going, um, saloon to saloon casino, casino there in Tombstone, saying that the next Earp, that any of the cowboys saw in the street was going to be killed. And he didn't announce why, he just said, you know, "They were skunks and bad guys and such."

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  And so what happened was, everybody then rushes to each of the Earps' homes and wakes them up by noon. And like, "You gotta stop this, something bad is gonna happen." And Virgil, who was the marshal at the point, realized he had to go disarm them. Uh, there was a, as in Dodge City, as in Abilene, there was a municipal ordinance against open carry, and Ike and the cowboys were seen, uh, carrying their guns. And so Virgil and, and Morgan and Wyatt all woke. And there's this wonderful moment where they're standing at the edge of a saloon about to go down to this vacant lot to disarm the cowboys when, out of nowhere, Doc Holliday walks up and says, "What's going on?" He'd been asleep, he didn't know of any of this. And Wyatt said, "Well, we're getting ready for a fight."

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  They used the word "fight" to call, uh, for a gunfight. As if by then there was no other kind. If I said, "I'm gonna fight you," it was understood it would be guns. And, and, and Doc Holliday, who kind of worshipped Wyatt, that part of the movies is pretty close to accurate, I'd say. He says, "Well, I, I'm offended that you," he was a Southern, I'm gonna put on my fake Southern accent. "Well, I'm offended, I'm offended. Why would you, why would you not be, be asking me to help out?" And Wyatt's, "Well, it's gonna be a tough one." And Doc Holliday actually said, "Well, those are the kind I like the most." And so, the four of them, actually like a Western, it's, you know, we have eyewitness account, begin walking, shoulder, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, four guys straight across, down to this vacant lot where Ike Clanton and five of the other cowboys were

• 1:29:53Speaker 03

  waiting, uh, and had been overheard cursing and threatening the Earps. Long story short, all four of them walked down there, they come up, they come up to this vacant lot, and it's small. It's the size of, you know, a big living room. It's like seventeen feet across. There's six cowboys, uh, tending two horses, and there's three Earps and, and Doc Holliday, they come up, four against six. All that happens, the only thing that happens that triggers it is Virgil sees that they're, they're carrying their guns and calls for them to disarm, to give up their guns. And the cowboys that were, that were present, it was almost like they didn't hear, hear the words, they just saw Earps and guns.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  And they pulled, and they drew. Three of the cowboys, uh, did not. They backed off, hands up, like, "Ah, we don't want, want any of this." So they immediately lose the numbers game, so suddenly you now have four Earps and Holliday against three bad guys. And two of the bad guys are holding horses, which immediately start to buck at the first, um, first gun, gunshots. What we know is it lasted about thirty seconds, at the end of which, and I could take you through the second, my second, unfortunately, this is what I get paid to do, um, all three, all three cowboys were dead or dying. Uh, Virgil had a bad, uh, uh, had been shot in the, in the calf of his right leg. Morgan had been shot badly through, a bullet went in his right shoulder and went across his back.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  Uh, Doc had been grazed, and Wyatt Earp was the only one, um, that was not hit.

• 1:31:26Speaker 00

  Unscathed.

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  But anyway, you talk about the controversy. The controversy is not about O.K. Corral. That by and large is considered by observers and by newspapers of the time to have been a pretty fierce fight. I mean, after all, the Cowboys shot first, shooting, as we know, from the hip, stupid. The controversy becomes after, in the months that follow, phantom unidentified gunman, badly wounded Virgil, and kill Morgan. And it's then that something inside Wyatt or breaks. Like, he'd always been a pretty much by-the-numbers lawman, certainly by Old West standards. But by then, you know, after Morgan's death, Morgan died in his arms, shot in the back

• 1:32:09Speaker 03

  at a pool hall as he was shooting pool, that Wyatt said he was gonna go get him. And he did. He's, that's what started what's classically called the Vendetta Ride. It lasted, what, I want to say, three or four days in which Wyatt put together a group of five or six other riders, and they went out and they killed three or four of the Cowboys, including their acknowledged leader, currently Bill Brosius. At which point, they washed their hands of Tombstone, and they rode off never to return. But, you know, they left a big controversy and an American legend in their ways.

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  So how's your book end?

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Literally, how does it end?

• 1:32:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what happens in the end of the book?

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  Well, the last chapter of action has to be the last marquee outlaws of the Old West. That's Butch and Sundance. So the narrative of the book, before an epilogue, the narrative of the book begins with these guys saying, "It's no good being an outlaw anymore. The lawmen are out there, and the Pinkertons are everywhere." And so Butch gets this idea that he's gonna go to Argentina and set up a cattle ranch. He does the famous thing that we see-

• 1:33:23Steven Rinella?

  I've been a bunch of those little sites down there.

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Steven Rinella?

  Every place claims to be some Butch Cassidy thing down there in Patagonia.

• 1:33:30Speaker 03

  He was down there for seven years until they finally got him. And then there's an epilogue that basically goes through whatever happened to everybody, what their graves are like now. I take readers on a little tour of Dodge City and Tombstone and Lincoln, just to get a sense what that world is like these days.

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So the last gunfighters, as I'm reading along, I'm gonna find that a case to be made that Butch Cassidy-

• 1:33:57Steven Rinella?

  According to your definition is the last of the gunfighters. Is that true?

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  I would say he's the last of the prominent ones. Look, nobody would ever argue that gunfighting or criminality, but law, you know, ended in the Old West in 1901. But I do think it's that moment that a lot of those activities started moving from the headlines into history.

• 1:34:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  Um, so I thought, you know, you've got to end it somewhere and that that felt that felt fair to me. The penultimate chapter, the one before that would be a much more deadly group of fellows. The Dalton Gang in in Oklahoma.

• 1:34:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. Yeah. I know that name, but I'm excited to read about those guys.

• 1:34:35Speaker 03

  It's a pretty good story.

• 1:34:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I'm gonna keep reading this book even though I already talked to you.

• 1:34:39Speaker 03

  Well, I will. One of my best friends, who is um, kind of a pacifist guy, doesn't like guns. He said, well, I'm gonna try to read this.

• 1:34:50Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  And he, like my wife, got exactly halfway through the book, about 10, 11 chapters. And he had to put it down.

• 1:34:55Steven Rinella?

  I have that problem with my wife.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  Just too much, just too much killing. And he went back, he went back afterwards to read it and he said, not only did he like it, but that he thought initially that the story of gunfighters would just be one of chaos. Just people getting drunk and shooting each other. And there's plenty of that. But he said he he found a real moral component, a real sense of right and wrong by the time he get done. He got done. So I'll be, I'll be deeply curious what you think.

• 1:35:21Steven Rinella?

  Well, now, what was your wife's gripe with it?

• 1:35:24Speaker 03

  Well, my wife grew up on ranches in West Texas. And she shot her first deer when she was like 12. And by 15 or 16, she'd had enough and it just still, she's just queasy with killing.

• 1:35:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Got it.

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Steven Rinella?

  But, you know, I don't know, man. It's like, it's like, it's not like a sociology book, but it's, it's like, uh, it just does a great job of explaining like a period in history. I don't think it's like, I don't think you have to read it because you want to celebrate people dying. It's just like, it's an explanation of stuff that happened.

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:35:57Steven Rinella?

  And like why it happened.

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  Well, that certainly.

• 1:35:59Steven Rinella?

  And why it stopped happening.

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  Well, that certainly was my point of view. I didn't write this because wow, it would be great to write about 1,100 murders. I wrote about it because it was, I wanted to understand why it happened in this period of American history. But I can also acknowledge and appreciate that there are people um, to whom. Blood and gore and killing is just hard to read about.

• 1:36:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you know, you know, that whole genre of talent, like do doing documentaries, whatever about like serial killers. Right. You could try to dress that up as being that it's something other than just,

• 1:36:34Steven Rinella?

  you know, reveling in like some, yeah, reveling in someone's sadistic behavior like there's not like, it's not history.

• 1:36:43Steven Rinella?

  You know, the when I watch those things, I hate watching the ones I have seen. It's like, it's not even masquerading as like history or sociology, like little serial killer series. Like they're kind of disgusting, I think. But this is, I mean, this is explaining, explains like this really important part of American history. And, and we tend to go like, okay, the Civil War happened and then the Civil War ended and that was it. Right. But this is about, well, what of those people? You know, what of those habits? What of those technologies? And here's sort of what they did. And then it touches base with perhaps you've heard of blank, blank and blank. You know, you've probably heard of Billy the Kid. You've heard of Doc Holliday and people have, but people don't know, I'm saying like people in general,

• 1:37:28Steven Rinella?

  don't know what they actually did and who they actually were.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  Well, from a purely commercial point of view, if you, if I can apologize for this, I thought that would be one of the appeals of the book is that there's a lot of people out there these days. They didn't grow up on these stories the way I did 50 years ago.

• 1:37:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  But know the names, but you're probably not going to go buy a 450 page book about Billy the Kid and drill that deep in.

• 1:37:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  But if you want like an introduction to all these guys, and by the way, you know, a suggestions of other books to go read about each of them, this is a really good place to start.

• 1:38:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you're very generous with citing, with putting out source material and recommendations for further reading.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  I just assumed that people were going to want to know more. And so I, I, I take great joy in saying, well, it's a great book. Go read this, go read that. Don't read this.

• 1:38:13Speaker 05

  I liked your, I liked your footnotes because they're very conversational. Well, there, I could like get a sense of your personality from your footnotes.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  I have a lot of challenges and personal problems in life, but enthusiasm for my material is not one of them. I, I, as I said at the very beginning, I, yeah, I had a heck of a lot of fun doing this. And, uh, I hope it, you know, I mean, the one thing you worry about, like, I really worried about this is, okay, I'm a 63-year-old white guy writing a book about, in which 1,100 people are killed, and it's the 21st century, and oh, by the way, it's conversational and almost a little humorous in places. What could go wrong?

• 1:38:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  And so I've been, you know, obviously, the reviews, the reception's been very generous, and that's been, it's been one among, I thought this was a prime candidate to be canceled.

• 1:39:04Speaker 05

  Well, it's, it's, I mean, I think there's, there's a lot of, um...

• 1:39:08Steven Rinella?

  It's a new era, though, man. This has been a vibe shift.

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  You're not the first person to say, "Great time for this book."

• 1:39:14Speaker 05

  There's like a very simplistic, uh, understanding of this era where it's like, people move out beyond the reach of the law, and then the criminals do what they want, and then there's this class of heroes that rise up and, and sort of, that's what naturally happens when people are out in the wilderness, right? And I think what's, what's very, what I really appreciate is how you set it up with these cultural undercurrents that come out of the Civil War and come out of Southern culture and either even come from Europe, um, that just adds a texture to it, but then at the same time, it's very funny and it's very readable.

• 1:39:56Steven Rinella?

  No, you're a funny writer, man.

• 1:39:57Speaker 05

  Like, there's a depth, there's a depth of analysis that's, that's very satisfying, but then it's also very funny.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  Well, and, and, and the thing there is, you don't, look, I, I wanna, I wanna give, the challenge for me is, I wanna give the reader kind of the most up-to-date academic thinking.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  But you don't want to get all fusty and fuddy duddy and academic about it.

• 1:40:19Steven Rinella?

  No, you avoid all that.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  So the idea is, yeah, I mean, if you're going to read one of my books, if nothing else, it's, I always say, I want, I want, I want it to be an easy read. I want it to be friendly. And if at the end of it, you, you learn something, okay, that's great, but I'm not going to tell you what it should be.

• 1:40:35Steven Rinella?

  Most academic writing isn't boring because they want it to be boring. They're not good enough to make it interesting.

• 1:40:41Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:40:42Steven Rinella?

  But you're like, you're like, it's like they like, it's not like they decide.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  They can't speak the language.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  Yes, they decide to have it be unapproachable.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a class of academic that just loves being obscure or difficult to get through. That's like a point of pride.

• 1:40:55Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Do you know Corrin McCarthy wrote a thing about like advice to academic writers?

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  I, I didn't know that, but I would, I would go pick it up within 20 minutes of leaving.

• 1:41:06Speaker 04

  I got to ask you one question before we finish up. Since it's a Texas book, we were talking about a lot of the bad guys. Um, did the Texas Rangers like, did they, did they earn their reputation as like someone these guys didn't want to cross?

• 1:41:21Steven Rinella?

  Should they have a baseball team?

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  Texas Rangers existed, they were, they existed like three or four different times during the 1900, during the 1800s. And Texas, the chaos in Texas got so bad after the war that they were reintroduced in, I want to say 1874. And I, my judgment is rarely in American history have we set a more effective introduction of a law enforcement entity than, than the Texas Rangers. When they came into being, the state was overrun by random bad guys, a lot of feuds around cattle, just a lot of violence. And that stuff, that stuff just pretty much ends in four or five years. And I think that as much as anything is, is

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  a moment where the, all the frontier begins to realize, hey, this, we don't have to live with this level of chaos, this level of criminal now, now of violence. And, you know, Texas was not a perfect place thereafter, but I, I think that the worst of the chaos following the war began to ebb with the introduction of the Rangers. They were the real deal.

• 1:42:25Steven Rinella?

  He's got a, there's a quote in there, uh, from you where he says something like the Texas Rangers set out to clean up some town and then Brian writes, and boy, did they.

• 1:42:41Steven Rinella?

  Alright, everybody. The Gunfighters. How Texas Made the West Wild by Brian Burrow. Holy smokes, it's a good book. Thank you. I've been reading it on my phone, but I'm gonna switch over. Can you sign this for me? Happy to. Here, watch. Phil will cover this. We've got it. Let's do a little lesson. Is it okay to use, or somebody got something? I've got a Sharpie right here. That's what I need. This is the page you're supposed to sign. If you sign the wrong... They used to call this page... There was one page that they used to call the bastard page. You ever hear this? I have not. In book publishing? There's a page that doesn't have the publisher. And they would call it the bastard page. Or maybe I'm mixing up, it doesn't have the author. Like, see how here, there's a title?

• 1:43:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But maybe this is the bastard page. It's a fatherless book. That makes sense, yeah. It's a fatherless book. But then you get to this page. Title, author. Publisher. So sign that page for me. You got it. Say, uh, to the... To my favorite man.

• 1:43:51Steven Rinella?

  It's the best gunfighter I know.

• 1:43:56Steven Rinella?

  He's going, "My favorite man." Practice your border roll.

• 1:44:02Speaker 00

  We should do some kind of video thing where you practice the moves.

• 1:44:05Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:44:06Speaker 00

  You look real cool doing it.

• 1:44:07Steven Rinella?

  With one of those five-pound pistols up in my... I'm probably gonna break my finger. Um, thanks, man. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure. I hope people check out the book. I think they'll get a real kick out of it. Thanks again.

• 1:44:45Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. Time out in the field is not free, okay? Every time you go in the woods, there's a

• 1:45:29Steven Rinella?

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• 1:46:10Steven Rinella?

  Easy. The One Pay Builder Card. It's simple and smart. One Pay is the banking app trusted by millions of Americans. And the One Pay Builder Card is an easy way to build credit. Just use it to make everyday purchases, build your credit history, and then you can work up to the big milestones. Buying a new car, or a new house, or hell, maybe something I'm always thinking about, which is another boat. Those moments start with small, consistent steps with the One Pay Builder Card. Download the One Pay app. Or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

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• 1:47:02Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.