The Gunfighters

How Texas Made the West Wild

By: Bryan Burrough

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

"One of the most important books written on the American West in many years." - True West Magazine

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-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers turned the heat up further. And the explosion in the cattle business after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the whole of the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable blood meridian. When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning. It’s never stopped.

The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the most unhinged tastes. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly. Like all great stories, this one has a rousing end—as the railroads and the settlers close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South America, ending their era in a blaze of glory. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.©2025 Bryan Burrough (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“The Gunfighters has all the propulsive energy and high tension of a Wild-West yarn. But it has the distinction of being (mostly) true. Burrough takes on the mythic characters of the West with his characteristic wit, thoughtfulness, and eye for the absurd. He tells this story as only a loving—but conflicted—son of Texas could.” —Beverly Gage, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“In The Gunfighters, Bryan Burrough takes dead aim at one of America’s greatest foundation myths. The result is a blood-spattered narrative that starts with hyperviolent men shooting each other and ends as a transcendent portrait of the Old West.” —S.C. Gwynne, author of New York Times bestsellers Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell

“A harrowing look at the killers who operated on every possible side of the law during a time that has been heedlessly sealed into legend. For anyone who has ever been curious about the real stories behind Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, Jesse James or Sam Bass, The Gunfighters is a masterful example of one-stop shopping.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo