Ep. 02: Wait, Gunfighters Came From Where?

Gunfighters

Bryan Burrough explores the historical lineage connecting early 19th-century dueling to the later era of Old West gunfighting. He traces how t

Key takeaways

• The 1804 duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr serves as a primary example of how formal dueling was used to settle public disputes.
• Dueling culture in America was heavily influenced by British and Irish immigrants bringing European honor codes across the Atlantic.
• The Southern honor system was deeply intertwined with the social hierarchy and the existence of slavery in the antebellum South.
• Figures like Jim Bowie and Alexander Keith McClung represent a transitional period between formal duelists and frontier gunmen.
• Wild Bill Hickok's 1865 confrontation with Davis Tutt is identified as a pivotal moment marking the shift from the 'co-duello' to modern gunfighting.

Main topics

• Origins of American gunfighting
• The Hamilton-Burr duel
• Southern honor codes

Notable quotes

A duel was basically a gunfight by appointment.

Conclusion

The episode provides a fascinating historical context for why the Amer

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Speaker 2 (0:38) At dawn on the morning of July 11, 1804, boats brought two gentlemen through a heavy mist across the Hudson River from Manhattan. On the far shore of the New Jersey shore, in a field beneath a bank of towering bluffs that still line the river today, seven or eight of their friends got to work clearing brush to stage the event they had come for. When they finished, the two gentlemen took positions ten paces from each other. One of these men was Alexander Hamilton, a former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. The other was Aaron Burr. That morning, as he stood facing Hamilton, Burr was Vice President of the United States. A shiny wooden box was brought forward and opened. From it, Burr and Hamilton lifted out identical English flintlock pistols with 9-inch smoothbore barrels. Burr didn't own guns. These were being furnished by Hamilton's brother-in-law. The two men intended to fire them at each other. This was to be a duel. Burr and Hamilton had exchanged insults for much of their public lives. He'd finally come to this. Accounts of what happened next vary, but most agree that one of their friends, maybe the young doctor, explained the rules and watched as the two loaded their pistols. Then, once they were ready, he shouted the word, present, as in present arms. What happened next was something no one could have expected. It would rock the country and change the history of how Americans handled their disputes. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tecova's. Good boats for good times. Hey, y'all, it's Brian again. And today we're going to talk about the origins of Old West Gunfighters, which is exactly the kind of nagging mystery that really gets me excited, because it's not at all obvious where these people came from. Speaker 2 (2:40) There were no broadly famous American gunmen or even lawmen before the Old West. There were frontiersmen and a bunch of nasty river pirates out on the Mississippi, but nobody was getting famous for firing guns. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett became famous enough, legends even, but no one ever called either one of them a gunfighter. They killed far more bears and indigenous folks than fellow settlers. Even after the first revolvers appeared in the 1830s, No one was getting famous for shooting people. I mean, seriously, you look at the history, and it seems like gunfighters kind of just came out of nowhere after the Civil War. Suddenly, there were just these, you know, guys running around the Western frontier shooting each other. At least at first glance, it wasn't the kind of behavior you saw much of, at least in the newspapers, before the war. Speaker 2 (3:33) So I began to search for a place gunfighters may have come from, and I ended up somewhere I never expected. It's not where any other authors or researchers have gone either. So first off, let's note that this is not a question a lot of people have actually delved into. Let's face it, serious-minded college professors don't give men like Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holliday a ton of attention. So the question of origins isn't something that's even addressed in most of the gunfighter books you can pick up out there. But if you're trying to take this topic seriously, I think you have to go there. From the beginning, I sensed the answer had to do with the behaviors inherent in gunfighting. I wanted to first understand why the Old West was so incredibly violent. In the last episode, we talked about how modern data techniques have now established beyond any serious debate that the Old West really was as bloody as a lot of people used to think. Once you've proven that, the nagging question becomes, why? Which takes me to the most basic question you can ask here. Why shoot a man in the first place? And why did it happen so often on the old frontier? Historians have actually been debating this for years. And at a glance, it would seem easy to explain. Wide open, unsettled spaces usually means less law enforcement. So there are fewer consequences for any kind of violence. Worse, frontiers all over the world have always tended to draw restless, unstable young men. who are inclined to alleviate the boredom of undeveloped space with alcohol, which has to explain a lot of it, right? But as I first mentioned in my book, The Gunfighters, How Texas Made the West Wild, too few sheriffs and too much booze doesn't explain why people shoot each other. There has to be a reason, even a stupid one. Was there a distinct reason so many men shot each other in the Old West? Was there something unique about the time and place? because the phenomena of the gunfighter didn't happen everywhere, not in Canada or China or scads of other frontiers. What was it about the Old West in the late 1800s? Speaker 2 (5:39) I came to believe the gunfighter era was the product of an unusual intersection of new technology, commerce, and American culture. Culture, I think, is the underexplored variable here. A gunfight, after all, was a product of certain human behaviors, mostly the whys and whens of personal violence during the 1800s. Today, when we have a dispute, we turn to the police or a lawsuit or the Internet. In the Old West, yeah, not really. In the Old West, I came to believe... Customs revolved around the best ways to settle disputes. Long story short, they often did it with violence. With extrajudicial violence, that is, violence outside the legal system. Which could include all sorts of things, right? Vigilante justice, men in hoods, lynchings, you know what I'm talking about. And increasingly after the Civil War, that meant using guns. Dispute resolution with guns. This got me thinking. And that's where I stumbled onto the obvious answer. If you can't find gunfighters before 1865, before the gunfighter era, could you at least find gunfighting? And the answer was, of course you can. It was called dueling, something that American men had been using to settle disputes for generations by that point. This kind of thing is totally new to you. A duel was basically a gunfight by appointment. Two men with pistols meeting up, typically in a field somewhere, just as Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had. commonly facing away from each other, taking a few steps, until one of their friends yelled something like, fire, at which point they wheeled around and shot at one another. It was all very civil. I mean, until someone fell over dead. A duel could be held to settle almost any kind of disagreement, but was commonly associated with matters of honor. You know, like where one gentleman insulted another gentleman's wife, or his hairstyle, or his politics. Back before the 1800s, In those years before formal law enforcement had spread throughout Western countries, dueling had been terribly popular in Europe, especially amid the upper classes, the aristocracy, including in the two countries that sent so many people to American shores,