| International Standard Book Number |
9781984878908 35.00
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| International Standard Book Number |
1984878905 35.00
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| Dewey Decimal Classification Number |
976.4/05 23/eng/20250226
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| Personal Name |
Burrough, Bryan, 1961- author.
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| Title Statement |
The gunfighters : how Texas made the West wild / Bryan Burrough.
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| Varying Form of Title |
How Texas made the West wild.
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| Publisher |
New York : Penguin Press, 2025.
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| Physical Description |
pages cm.
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| Content Type |
text txt rdacontent.
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| Media Type |
unmediated n rdamedia.
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| Carrier Type |
volume rdacarrier.
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| Bibliography, Etc. Note |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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| Summary, Etc. |
"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Big Rich and Forget the Alamo comes an epic reconsideration of the time and place that spawned America's most legendary gunfighters, from Jesse James and Billy the Kid to Butch and Sundance The "Wild West" gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-pacednew book, there's much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas. Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers turned the heat up further. And the explosion in the cattle business after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the whole of the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable blood meridian. When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning. It's never stopped. The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the mostunhinged tastes. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair-good, bad, and ugly. Like all great stories, this one has a rousing end-as the railroads and the settlers close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South America, ending their era in a blaze of glory. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story"-- Provided by publisher.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Frontier and pioneer life West (U.S.)
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Violence History 19th century. West (U.S.)
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Gunfighters Biography. Texas
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Gunfights History. West (U.S.)
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Honor History 19th century. Texas
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| Additional Physical Form Entry |
Burrough, Bryan, 1961- New York : Penguin Press, 2025 Gunfighters (DLC) 2024054200. 9781984878915
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