00:00:04 Speaker 1: 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. He 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. 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. 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? 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, At which point they wheeled around and shot at one another. He 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. England and Ireland. British and Irish immigrants brought the practice across the Atlantic. Dueling, in fact, took root in America from its very beginnings. The year after the Pilgrims first landed, there's a report of a duel in Massachusetts. With swords, but still. Formal duels, though, were rare until the Revolutionary War. When historians tell us, a sort of fad around dueling popped up. During the war, America was crawling with British and French officers who could get pretty touchy around questions of honor. And the rift between American Tories and American patriots had a way of playing out day to day as interpersonal squabbles about loyalty and a man's honor. When Americans saw the British and French stage duels, they decided to try it for themselves. And it caught on. By the time America achieved its independence, the new country had metabolized that old European honor code into an aspect of American culture. Today, because it's such a foreign concept to modern-day mindsets, dueling is often portrayed as this marginal, nutty thing done by a handful of marginal, nutty, mostly Southerners way back in the day. In fact, it was very much a part of a mainstream American life, especially among men with public profiles, those to which an insult could be harder to cover over. So dueling thrived among the wealthy, and especially among the most keenly sensitive class in the public eye, politicians. Sam Houston back before he became president of the Republic of Texas, was a young Tennessee congressman when he engaged in a duel, notable mostly because Houston's shot veered a tad low and struck his rival in the groin area. Andrew Jackson was the only president we know of involved in a duel. After a man named Charles Dickinson insulted his wife and accused Jackson of cheating on a horseback, this was years before he became president, Jackson killed his antagonist but took a bullet to the chest. which remained there the rest of his life. There's a story that other presidents almost had a duel. I love this one. According to one tale I'd like to believe, our fifth president, James Monroe, once tried to duel the second president, John Adams, until he was talked out of it by the fourth president, James Madison. Even Abraham Lincoln got in on the trend, albeit in a very Abe Lincoln kind of way. In 1842, while he was a state legislator out in the state of Illinois... he got into a spirited debate over Illinois banking policy when his opponent got all pissy and demanded a duel. Lincoln accepted, reluctantly, but demanded they use broadswords, and they nearly went ahead with it until their attendants, we call them seconds, talked them out of it at the last minute. By the early 1800s, then, duels had become more or less an accepted part of American life, even though there was a rising set of voices, especially preachers and women, who denounced the practice as barbaric. A turning point came with the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, easily the most famous duel in history. Hamilton detested the practice, And in a letter written beforehand, he told a friend he would aim his gun to miss, that he intended to miss on purpose. This was a very risky strategy known as deloping, from a French word. It was considered by some the height of honor, a way to preserve your own honor while in effect remaining above the fray. And that's what many folks believe Hamilton did that misty morning on the New Jersey shore. His shot sailed harmlessly over Burr's head. Burr, though, shot into Hamilton's body. His bullet struck above Hamilton's right hip, zigzagged through his major organs, and killed him. Even though duels were officially illegal in both New York and New Jersey, New Jersey rarely prosecuted them. It's one of the reasons they staged the duel in New Jersey. So Burr walked away free. But his killing of Hamilton caused such an uproar that duels thereafter pretty much vanished from the North. Not so in the Old South. In fact, it was there in the first half of the 19th century that American dueling reached its apogee. But then the South was always a much more violent area of the country. In Florida's cotton districts during the 1830s, modern analysis shows, the murder rate was something like 50 times that of the Northeast. One English traveler wrote that the South was, quote, Another said, Why was this? I mean, the possible answers are kind of all over the place. Historians have suggested reasons as varied as slavery, or the heap, or the fact that many southerners were descended from the notoriously quarrelsome Scots and Irish. Before cotton took hold, livestock was the biggest southern business. Throughout history, as we'll see, livestock-based societies have tended to be off-the-charts violent, mostly to dissuade and punish livestock thieves. All of which makes sense. a little at least. But I think, ultimately, the Southern tendency toward violence was based in large part on its embrace of a pervasive male honor system. This was something that arose slowly over the years, but certainly by the early 1800s, honor permeated every aspect of Southern society. You can read entire books analyzing this stuff. But in general, the Southern honor codes required a man to be brave, courteous, honest, and most important for our purposes, prepared to use violence, even deadly violence, to defend any challenge to his honor. There's lots of theories why this came about, too, but I think the best one is probably the simplest. It revolved around slavery. With enslaved black people doing almost all the Southern Planner's actual work, you got something new in America, entirely new. An entire class of the idle rich, who looked around for role models and found them in the old European aristocracy. For them, as for European royalty, honor became sacred. Quite simply, it was how aristocrats and southerners kept score and the way any wannabe aristocrats tried to advance in society. You can think of southern honor as a kind of currency almost. Without much of a banking system, it was all many planners had in terms of collateral when they needed a loan. The South embraced honor in almost every aspect of society. For one thing, before the Civil War, a lot of the South was still a frontier society. And without anything like functioning law enforcement, all you had was the honor code. People paid more attention to insults and honor, in other words, than laws written down on faraway books. That's how people enforced justice. And absent any real law enforcement, it's what led to the Southern penchant for extrajudicial violence, also known as vigilante justice, also known as people taking the laws into their own hands. Historians traced the first vigilantes to South Carolina in the 1790s, in fact. Vigilanteism is important here because, if you think about it, it's the foundation of all gunfighting, people taking the law into their own hands. Everybody defines this kind of thing differently, but in general, vigilanteism meant that if a man was accused of theft or murder, his fellow citizens might shoot, burn, whip, or hang him in public. Lynching, often targeting black people, was a mainstay of Southern society for two centuries. In 1835 in St. Louis, a black man accused of murder was chained to a tree and burned alive while a thousand people watched and cheered. And of course, that's just to name one of many, many such incidents. Honor also explains the Old South's penchant for feuds. When a whole family came to finance Honor besmirched, that's when you got feuds. The Hatfields and McCoys, most famously. with lots of lesser known affairs as well. The Tutts and Everetts in Missouri, the Turks and the Joneses in Arkansas. These were common across the antebellum South, and almost anything could start one. Politics, gambling, personal insults, whatever you like. These things could go on for years, and as we'll see, though it's not generally appreciated, the greatest feuds of American history happened not in the South, but out in the old West, on the frontiers. So I think that's the why of Southern violence. The how of it, an awful lot of the time, was the duel. Next to an Old West gunfight, the Southern duel was typically a much more formal thing. There were roles to play, designated dueling grounds, and even written rules. This was especially true for upper-class Southerners and in cities like Charleston and New Orleans, which remained centers of dueling culture long after it vanished up north. The dueling craze peaked between 1834 and 1844, Many cities actually had unofficial dueling grounds. Outside Washington, you had the Bladensburg dueling grounds in Maryland. Outside St. Louis, there was a sandbar in the Mississippi River they called Bloody Island because of all the duels there. A future U.S. Senator, Thomas Hart Bitton, killed a man there in a duel in 1817. In New Orleans, the oak trees at Esplanade Avenue, where City Park is today, used to be the busiest dueling ground in the country. During the 1830s, according to one local paper, scarcely a day passed without duels being fought at the Oaks. One Sunday in 1839, there were ten separate duels, though I'll say, in a very New Orleans twist, most of these duels were done with swords, not guns, so they were far less deadly. Generally, these affairs ended once a participant became bloody, became cut. Those oaks still stand, by the way, and it's just beyond cool to walk beneath their limbs, and I've done it, imagining these guys lining up for sword fights on a Sunday afternoon. As the years wore on, pushback to all this did rise. Clergymen got a little louder and got a few more laws passed here and there. For a long time, dueling was seen as a sort of release valve to maintain public order, to give angry and aggrieved people an alternative to lawless murder. This was a notion pushed by a lot of prominent Southerners, in fact, congressmen and governors and such. A pamphlet written in 1838 outlined the rules for the formal duel. It was written by the governor of South Carolina, of all people, who based it on an Irish code from 1777 known as the Code Duelo. Every duel, of course, began with an insult to a man's honor, commonly a spoken comment, even a single word. This was literally a trigger word. The author Barbara Holland in her excellent book, Gentleman's Blood, lists words such as liar, poltroon, coward, puppy, fornicator, madman, and bastard. Burr killed Hamilton over despicable. Hamilton's son, Philip, was killed over damned rascals. There were also duels in the literature prompted by allegations of incest, treason, and, wouldn't you know, devil worship. If you felt you'd been insulted, your first step was to send a letter asking the offender basically to take it back. If he refused, then you could challenge him to a duel. Sometimes these challenges were given in person, but you could also post a written challenge in a public place, at a tavern, on a street corner, or even in a newspaper in the classified ads. Your rival was almost certain to accept. To do otherwise was considered social and political suicide. At that point, your next step was to agree on a time and a place for the duel and decide the weapons you'd use. In the Antebellum South, this typically meant single-shot flintlock pistols. Next, you and your rival would each choose a second to accompany you at the duel. The job of the second was to keep their cool and, if possible, negotiate a truce. If that failed, you'd typically begin the duel by facing your rival, or you might face away from another and take 10 or 20 paces. the signal would come from one of your seconds. Usually they'd shout fire. If you shot before that, your opponent's second was typically allowed to shoot at you. If you and your opponent both missed your shots, and this actually happened a lot, you could try again if you wanted, or you could just leave it there with your honor totally intact. An awful lot of the time, in fact, both shots missed. It's always more interesting, though, to me at least, to hear about all the times when the rules broke down. which was like all the time. There was a duel where one of the duelists claimed he was nearsighted, so the two guys faced off just five feet apart. When they reached out to fire, their guns actually overlapped. As you can imagine, in that case, nobody missed. Both men died instantly. Seriously, you cannot make this stuff up. The lower social classes got into fights over honor, too, of course. But here, things tended to be a little less, shall we say, genteel. Formal duels among poor folks were rare. Instead, what you got was hand-to-hand fighting of the nastiest kind. Crotch kicking, arm breaking, leg breaking, mouth tearing. Men got their ears and noses bitten off. Some lost their eyeballs. Eye gouging actually got so out of hand, they had to pass laws against it in Virginia and Kentucky. Georgians especially were renowned for this kind of thing, like for growing out their fingernails and sharpening them. Some in Tennessee took a bit of a shortcut and just clipped on metal devil's claws, which were said to take off half a man's face in a single swipe. The nature of all this changed as the South began to grow toward the West. Dueling spread with the frontier, and it was usually this scrapping, ultra-violent flavor of duel that took hold. The type of folks who'd risked it all on the fringes of the new country did not tend to be overly concerned with formality. It's here in early Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, early Tennessee, early Missouri, that you can begin to see dueling evolve into gunfighting. The wearing of guns was much more common on the southern frontier, the honor code a little more intense. Dueling turned to killing a little more easily. The writer William Oliver Stevens put it like this in A History of Dueling from 1940. The farther one traveled toward the western fringe of the southern states, the more artillery a man needed to stuff into his pockets and belt. Every man was his own officer of the law, judge and executioner. And any personal affront, real or fancied, was a crime. So I've got to tell you about two of these guys. kind of illustrate this transitional period. The most infamous is probably Alexander Keith McClung, who was known as the Black Knight of the South, which you just have to love. He was raised in Kentucky, and I think I can safely say the man had issues. He was from a prominent family, the nephew of a Supreme Court justice. McClung first joined the Navy, but was tossed out after he injured a man, you guessed it, in a duel. So he went home. There he killed a cousin of his, He had a duel. At that point, he had to leave home, and so set up shop in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which was a hotbed of frontier duels. That's where McClung made his reputation. He became a lawyer and an editor, known for his flamboyant look, he liked to dress in a cape, and for his fits of rage. Of his many duels, the most famous was the one in 1834, when he shot another lawyer in the mouth from over 100 feet away, at the time an informal distance record. McClung went on to serve in the Mexican War, then was appointed to a diplomatic post in Bolivia, dueling all the way until he committed suicide in 1855. I imagine if he lived a little longer and moved a few states to the west, he'd easily have been known as one of the first gunfighters. Another output into this category is Jim Bowie, the Texas hero who died at the Alamo. Bowie is the epitome of the many violent, honor-sensitive southerners who moved west to the frontier. In his early days, he was a slave trader who, along with his brothers, they ran a swindle involving bogus land claims in Louisiana and Arkansas. Bowie first became famous in an 1827 duel they called the Sandbar Fight on a little island in the Mississippi River. The duel itself was no big deal. Both guys fired, both missed. But afterward, a brawl broke out. Bowie was there as a second. The job of a second, you'll recall, is to keep cool. In the post-duel brawling, though, Bowie was repeatedly shot and stabbed. He got the better of his attacker with the help of a massive knife, more like a short sword. Somehow the papers back east heard about all this, and overnight Bowie and his giant knife became celebrities. The Bowie knife became a popular weapon in duels in the frontier south and further west. There are entire books you can read just about Bowie knife duels. Along with many more debt-ridden and distressed Southerners, and in his case, eager to avoid federal investigations of his land fraud, Bowie went west himself into Texas. And there, after surviving gun battles with Native American tribes, he became a leader of the revolt against Mexico and famously died at the Alamo. With the rise of the legal system and the beginnings of actual law enforcement, dueling began to tail off during the 1850s. By the end of the Civil War, it was actually pretty rare As you heard in the last episode, though, the duel that marks the beginning of the gunfighter era is Wild Bill Hickok's face-off with Davis Tutt in 1865. It was, in almost every respect, a classic Southern duel, only this time the two men used revolvers. Hickok might not have taken out a newspaper ad or posted his challenge at the tavern, but he clearly did announce his challenge. The run-up to the fight was all very public. The only thing missing from the classic duel structure were seconds. the historian Dick Stewart has written that, quote, no Western figure better epitomized the transition from duelist to gunslinger than Wild Bill Hickok. The fight, he wrote, marked the transition from the code duello to a new and far more lethal form of personalized combat. Duels actually weren't that common in the Old West. Even then, Westerners had little patience for rules and formalities. What the frontier had a lot of, though, and this is really a kind of casual duel, were disagreements or arguments that escalated into something more, often after what sounded like a throwaway line, but was actually effectively an invitation to duel. It often used the word outside, as in, let's take this outside, or I'll see you outside. You see a lot of that in the literature. It wasn't the rules of the duel that flowed from the Old South to the Western frontier. It was the causes. The heart of so many gunfights, just like duels, was so often about settling a challenge to a man's honor. You'll remember it was the necessity of defending his honor that Hickok cited for his gunfight in Springfield. In the 1800s, thousands of Southerners went west. Many of them didn't have much, but they did have their honor codes. And they had the understanding they'd grown up with, that lawless violence was a permissible, even acceptable way to resolve their disputes. On its way to the cow towns of Kansas and the mesas of New Mexico, this mindset hardened in a particularly violent place that produced so many of the gunfighters of the Old West. That place was Texas. Thanks for dropping in. I'm Brian Burrow, and this has been Episode 2 of The Gunfighters. In the next episode, we'll take you into the dark days of Texas after the Civil War, where much of the Old West's penchant for gunfighting was really born.