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Bryan Burrough's new book is The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. Below, the Texas-raised author of Barbarians at the Gate, Public Enemies, and two other nonfiction national best-sellers names six of his favorite books about Old West gunfighters.
'I'll Die Before I'll Run' by C.L. Sonnichsen (1951)
Sonnichsen was a Harvard-trained historian teaching in El Paso who almost single-handedly recovered the stories of the great feuds that wracked Texas for a decade after the Civil War. If you believe, as I do, that the hyper-violent ethos of the postwar frontier first rose in Texas, this book is the story of how it happened. Buy it here.
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'The Gunfighters' by Paul Trachtman (1977)
Lavishly illustrated and leather-bound, this entry in the Time-Life Old West series is a classic that found its way onto the bookshelves of many teenage boys like me during the 1970s. I still run into men of a certain age who rhapsodize about it. Buy it here.
'Southern Honor' by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1982)
This pioneering study of Southern honor codes is not an easy read, but it is a crucial one— the final word on why honor mattered so much in the antebellum South that men stood ready to kill one another in defense of it. Buy it here.
'Wyatt Earp' by Casey Tefertiller (1997)
History has been kind to Earp, a onetime pimp and escaped federal prisoner who, in the Hollywood films of the past 75 years, has found the widespread adulation that eluded him in life. Tefertiller's book, a definitive biography, is a reminder that Earp's career is open to wide interpretation, not all of it favorable. Buy it here.
'Jesse James' by T.J. Stiles (2003)
Putting aside the argument whether James could be called an Old West gunfighter—I say no, he was a Mid-western bank and train robber—this book is a cut above almost everything else in the genre. In fact, it may be the single best biography of an American criminal I've read. It brings an enveloping academic rigor and a propulsive drive to a field of study that too often lacks both. Buy it here.
'Ride the Devil's Herd' by John Boessenecker (2020)
Earp's battle against outlaws in and around Tombstone, Ariz., gets a new book almost every year or two. This is the best I've read, which isn't surprising. Boessenecker is by far the most talented author writing about gunfighters today. His encyclopedic knowledge is evident here on almost every page. Buy it here.
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