Russillo Summer Book Club Part 2: “The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild” w/ Bryan Burrough. Plus Life Advice!

Hey, Rosillo listeners, you can find every episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Feeling lucky? You should be. Meet the new Lucky One Sweet Tea from Miss Peaches, the vodka drink that's positively doing good. Made with real tea and real vodka, non-carbonated, it's 100 calories. And here's the scoop. Their new sweet tea is the only vodka-based sweet tea on the market. Simple ingredients in a smooth, full flavor that makes it taste just like the real sweet tea. Best part? Every can helps rescue dogs find their forever homes as they work to a goal of donating $1 million to dog rescues in 2026. So if you love true sweet tea, this one's a no-brainer. Pick up a Lucky One Sweet Tea today and give back one can at a time. The Ryan Rosillo Show is presented by DraftKings Sports. Today on the Rosillo Book Club, the Gunfighters. Brian Burrow, this is a classic. Get it for your dad or anyone who enjoys the legend of all the great gunfighters. We got Billy the Kid, we got Jesse James, we got Wyatt Earp, and the biggest badass that you may not know, his name. This summer, whatever you're watching, baseball, golf, soccer, racing, DraftKings has you covered for every single moment of it. The DraftKings Sports app is now available, all in all 50 states, bringing the game straight to your fingertips wherever you are, from Florida to Texas to California. You're in on the excitement at the speed of sports. Follow every buzzer beater, every walk-off, every photo finish. Sweat the moments that matter in real time with a seamless experience built for the biggest season of the year. No matter where you're watching, you're always connected and in the game with one app. New DraftKings customers sign up with the code RYAN. Spend $5 to get $150 in rewards within 14 days. This includes all markets. That's code RYAN. R-Y-E-N. In partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours. Bet with DK Sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. 1-800-MY-RESET. Connecticut, call 888-789-7777. Visit ccpg.org. On behalf of Boothill Casino in Kansas, bet tax pass-through may apply in Illinois, 21 and over, Void in Canada. Event contract trading with DraftKings Predictions involves risk of loss. Availability varies. Predictions offer Void in New York. Bet to get bonus bets that expire in 7 days. Trade to get predictions dollars that expire in 1 year. $50 in rewards issued every 7 days via click-to-claim for 14 days. One non-withdrawal. One withdrawalable. Reward redeemable. Terms at dkng.co slash offer. Limited time offer. This book has been one of my favorite reads since I'm on this big, I don't know, Texas cattle thing and settling the West, and there's not a specific list other than I'm just going to share it with you right now. It's The Gunfighters from Brian Burrow, and I think this book is probably one of the best gift ideas because we're just going to run through a bunch of the Texas legends and areas. Outside of Texas, where maybe Texas is the origin of all this stuff. So Brian, it's good to see you. Thank you so much for everything you did on this book. I really enjoyed it. Brian, it's a real pleasure to be with you. All right. So let's start with Texas as the main character like you do in your book because, you know, I've read about the Southern philosophy, the Southern rules, you know, but it was like, hey, the people from the South that sort of went to Texas, like it started in the South, but then Texas, it was so unruly that there was a combination of all these different beliefs and how society should run. So how does Texas become the origin of all of these gunfighting legends? Well, you're right. The first thing you have to realize and remember is that Texas is, first and foremost, especially then, a Southern state. So it inherited a lot of Southern behaviors around male honor. Principally, for our purposes, the idea firmly held in the 19th century, that if you're insulted, if somebody disses you, you not only have the right, you have the obligation to push back with violence, even deadly violence. Then what happened in Texas, Texas was a martial society, one very comfortable with guns because it had to be, not only because of snakes and critters and such, but because they had, you know, they were the only Southern state with two violent frontiers throughout much of the 19th century, the Mexican frontier and the Native American, the Comanche frontier, that cut through. They cut the state in half well into the 1870s. So it was an extraordinarily violent place. And then came the decade after the Civil War, in which Texas pretty much revolted against federal occupation. It was a very nasty, often racist type of violence that permeated kind of the male, you know, the male genes in Texas, if you will. And then the final ingredient in what some people call the code of the West that came out of Texas was the rise of the Texas cattle, which was an extraordinarily off the charts violent business for the simple reason that we're talking open range cattle business. No barbed wire, no fencing. So their primary concern was always theft from cattle rustlers. And there was only one way that Texas cattlemen dealt with cattle rustlers, and that was with a bullet or a noose. Not a lot of rustlers ever found their way to a Texas courtroom, all of which would be kind of interesting local history for Texans, except that Texas cattlemen were not. Texas violence did not stay in Texas. With the rise of the cattle drives and the cattle trails, there was this huge Texas diaspora. 90% of the cattle that came to populate the ranches of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, New Mexico, Arizona, they were Texas longhorns, because that's the only cattle that were out there. And with those longhorns came an awful load of young, violent Texans. And what I argue in the book, gently, is that they were, they were responsible, certainly not for all the gunfighter-style violence in the West, but a disproportionate amount of it. Yeah, that's a pretty staggering number when you lay it out. It's like if you were to look at all of the gunfighting legends, and I know that you even admit, like, whatever's on record versus maybe what had happened, but what is it, a third of the people involved historically over this time frame, like they originated in Texas? I put the number at 60%. Okay. Oh, it's at 60%. If you look at what we call the marquee gunfights, because look, there's no way to really adequately measure all the gunfights in the West. So I'm really writing and addressing those that are remembered, those that made the newspapers, those that I'm able to write out. When you look at those, it's close to 60% of those involved a Texan on at least one side. Let's stay on the Texas thing before we get to the individuals, though, because you, you had to have wanted to maybe be one of these guys to go there in the first place. Now, I understand that there is always man's quest for land. And if you feel like, hey, there's no room for me here in the South, certainly the Northeast, which feels like it's 150 years ahead, even if the calendar says the same time period, just based on the way society conducts itself. But there's a romantic part of this. But there's also clearly the guys that go out. They are to bring their families than the furthest edges of the frontier seem to be accepting the danger that comes along with this. You had to people went out West for a multitude of reasons. By and large, these were not people who were hugely successful back East or wherever they were coming from. They were looking for a new start. There was money to be made in land, in livestock, in the West. It seemed easy. It seemed up for grabs. And risk and danger. This is in a society where the average male lifespan might be 50. And anything, you know, a snake could kill you. A million different things could kill you. There was an awful Seth MacFarlane movie from years ago, A Million Ways to Die in the West, which is almost true. So, yeah, but in the pantheon of things that could kill you in the Old West, other white people probably did not rank in the top 10 things that people were scared of going out there. There's also a post-Civil War crisis where you have all of these former soldiers that are a little unhinged coming out of battle. And as you clearly mentioned, which makes sense, it's not like people were diagnosing PTSD back then, but it was so bad. Had there actually been a law that was passed that you weren't supposed to serve veterans of the Civil War alcohol? There were municipal audiences in various parts. I mean, you have to go back to the North, where that type of thing happened. Look, any talk that you and I engage with or anybody does about PTSD after the Civil War, there's never going to be any data to back it up. But it just makes sense that it was a major problem, especially because this was an era in which mental health challenges were just not addressed. So you had a lot of a crime wave that really swept much of the East in the late 1860s. Much of it was blamed on veterans, and it's during those years where we see the rise of this new American archetype out West, the gunfighter. Many of them were, in fact, veterans. Let's start with Wild Bill Hickok. Was he a fraud? He started as a fraud. That is what I argue. Wild Bill Hickok is the first gunfighter. It's not the first time Americans ever had a gunfight, but the gunfight that he engaged with in Killing a Man in Springfield, Missouri in July 1865, It was the first time that the phenomena was written about in a major Eastern magazine. And suddenly everybody was fascinated. And it wasn't just that Hickok killed a man. It was that a writer discovered him. This was a guy from Harper's Weekly, much like the New Yorker. And he writes straight faced that he has no doubt that this Wild Bill Hickok person has killed over a hundred white men. He's absolutely certain of it. Extensive research by others and confirmed by me would suggest the actual number was closer to two. Wild Bill was a human who didn't mind becoming a somebody. And so he continued this charade, if you will, for several years. And the odd thing, Ryan, is that after a few years, various communities led by Abilene, Kansas, a Texas cow town set up for Texans, you know, saw that reputation and hired him. And he was not a great marshal. He killed people who didn't need killing a number of times, most famously including his own deputy. But he did get a reputation for, you know, being a talented gunman. So when I think of Hickok, I think of a guy who started out as a fraud, but kind of grew into the image. Yeah, I think it's a really fascinating part of telling the story because you go through a lot of these legends and it's like, here's what's real. Here's what isn't. And it's a tremendous amount of research. But you do make the point like it's not an attack on Wild Bill necessarily. It's that he's the rarest of cases where he was absolutely a fraud. But then it was almost like because he was a fraud, he felt like he had, I mean, I'm not trying to be insensitive here, but like get his numbers up so that the legend actually matched up. So it was almost like he was chasing his own publicity by going on these sprees of taking guys out. That is very much my sense of the man. Of course, he never admitted it. But Hickok is the first gunfighter. He is very human, in some ways heroic, in some ways sad. But that's the fun of all this. I mean, if you like the old west, trying to figure out what was real of all this, because so much of it will. I mean, the standard thing of any academic who's going to get up here and talk about old west gunfires, for years, they would just say this was all Hollywood stuff. It's all made up. It wasn't. There's a large part of reality that underpins these gunfighter legends. And so for those of us that watch Deadwood, the scene with Wild Bill being shot at a card game, that's 100% what happened, correct? Yes. I'm not remembering the Deadwood episode, but Deadwood got everything right. We'll never understand why that guy came around and shot Wild Bill in the back of the head by all. Yeah. All research suggests that Hickok had actually been nice to him. It slid him some money when he was losing and said, hey, go take a break, get a meal. And I guess the man's manhood was somehow challenged because he did away with Hickok pretty easily. But the sad part of Hickok by then is he was already on the decline. I mean, ironically, what he had lost physically was much of his eyesight. He wore blue-tinted glasses for those last years because bright light tended to bother him. And so he, of course, the gunfights for him had ended in 1871 in Abilene, the last major one being the one in which he killed his deputy by mistake. How does Abilene, Kansas enter the timeline? If you look at kind of the pantheon of great theaters of gunfighter violence, Tombstone with Wyatt Earp, New Mexico with Billy the Kid, it's starts in Abilene, Kansas, 1871, which is really the first moment when a crowd of Texas cowboys led by the most notorious Texas gunfighter of all, John Wesley Harden, arrive in town and start shooting things up. And the reason it became so well-known, the reason that it is kind of the genesis of so much of these legends is the marshal of Abilene. Abilene was the best-known gunfighter in America, really the only gunfighter in America that most people have ever heard of, Wild Bill Hickok. So the shootings, and there were a series of them, like six or seven involving Harden and several involving Hickok, it kind of begins the gunfighter narrative. I refer to this period overall from 1865 to 1901 as the gunfighter era, because that's when every gunfighter you've ever heard of rose and fell. And Abilene is the first theater of note, the first one where marquee gunfights really kind of made the Eastern papers and sank into the history books. That also had a really funny anecdote, like Ben Thompson enters the scene and everybody, it feels like all of our main characters are in Abilene at this point. And they decided, was it that they wanted to mess with Wild Bill when they decided to paint a bull with an erect penis on the side of their saloon and everyone in the town? It's just a bunch of morons back then too. Like you've got all these gunfighters are like, hey, we can't have an erect penis bull on the side of a building on Main Street. Can Wild Bill go handle this? Well, you're right to observe that what made Abilene amazing is the amount of star power, not just John Wesley Harden, not just Wild Bill Hickok, but the Texas gambler and gunfighter, Ben Thompson. And much of the narrative of that summer does begin when Thompson opens a bar for Texas Cowboys, who are, of course, bringing in their cattle to put on trains to go to Chicago. And it's called the bull's head. And he puts an erect bull's penis on his sign outside. And Wild Bill comes in and paints it over. And Thompson is beside himself. So when John Wesley Harden, an 18-year-old young man who has, by my count, already killed about 24 people, comes in, Thompson knows him from Texas and says, he hates the Southerners. He hates us. You know, you should go kill him. And as Harden related, he's our sole source for this. Many years later in an autobiography, he said, Ben, if you want him shot, why don't you do it yourself? But Harden got his dander up. And when Hickok went to seize his pistols, when Harden was in a bowling alley, who knew they had bowling alleys in the Old West, but they did, Harden and a bunch of Cowboys were making a little too much noise. Hickok went in and confronted him. And this was one of the most famous gunfighter confrontations of the Old West. And he called Harden by a nickname that he had acquired, Little Arkansas, for a shootout that had happened by the Little Arkansas River. And he said, Little Arkansas, you know, I need your weapons. And Harden was wearing two pistols and he handed him butt forward as you do. And then he famously spun them in his hand, a very difficult and self-explanatory action. And that's when you, I mean, Harden had killed so many people so easily, you really expect this to be an historic confrontation. And Hickok, bless his heart, basically says, Little Arkansas, you're mistaken. I don't wish you ill will. I'm not trying to hurt you. I don't know why Ben Thompson has told you. Could we just have a sarsaparilla? And they did. They just sat down and talked it out. It was kind of the most famous non-gunfight of the Old West. Wyatt Earp's background, which has been lost to Hollywood. There's so much to say. There's been a lot of good news scholarship on gunfighters over the last 50 years. In fact, that's one reason I wanted to write this book, The Gunfighters, is to bring it to a general audience. And the single most amazing factoid of all this is that for the length of his time on the Old West frontier, from Wichita, where he began to Dodge City to Tombstone as a lawman, Wyatt Earp was also an escaped federal prisoner. In 1872, I want to say 1871, he was arrested in Oklahoma for stealing a horse. And he may really have done it. Don't really know. Put in a jail in Van Buren, Arkansas, facing a lengthy jail time. When a bunch of guys broke through a hole in the roof and ran out into the night, he ran out too. Two years later, he shows up as a deputy in Wichita. Five years later, he begins entering legend in Dodge City. And even though I offer that, I will tell you that Wyatt Earp is kind of the shining moral symbol of this whole era. In an era where so many of the lawmen, the sheriffs, the marshals are corrupt, drunk, or both, Earp and his brothers, Earp and those he worked with in Dodge City were really pretty darn good. They were hardworking, they were moral. And while Earp obviously did go off the range a little bit as a vigilante in Tombstone, he really had an incredible career marked by unusual professionalism for that day and time. His kill total, though, is what? Looks like two. Looks like two. That he killed Curly Bill, Brocious, in a confrontation in the so-called Vendetta Ride at the height of the violence in Tombstone. And then he probably killed another guy, one of Brocious's partners, both of which Wyatt Earp believed had killed his brother Morgan and wounded his brother Virgil. There was one other guy in Dodge City. There was an 1879 version of a drive-by in Dodge City in which a bunch of Texas cowboys shot up a bar where Earp and Doc Holliday and all of them, that whole crowd, Bat Masterson, were playing cards. And when they rode off, Earp and a number of guys stepped into the street and shot down, shot at the fleeing guys. And one cowboy fell and ultimately died. And that might have been the first person Wyatt Earp killed. When I saw Tombstone the first time, as much as I enjoyed the movie, I was like, man, this has, like, I thought it was over 30 minutes ago. Because the movie just keeps going and it's over. And then once I read. And then once I read all the Tombstone stuff, like, to be fair, I think the movie kind of nails it. Because it just goes on forever between all of these characters and the cowboys. If you haven't seen the Tombstone movie from 1993, it's not only, to my money, the best Wyatt Earp movie. It's got to be one of the three best gunfighter-based movie. It is largely accurate. I could certainly say, point to the initial massacre of Mexican villagers. It's fanciful and standing in for all sorts of real-life violence. And then at the end, where Johnny Ringo is killed, and I believe that's by Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday. And he's the greatest Doc Holliday ever. That didn't happen. We're pretty sure Johnny Ringo killed himself. Wyatt Earp often claimed to have killed Johnny Ringo. But you're right. You know, you think that the climax of this is when Wyatt Earp's two brothers are. One is killed, one is wounded. But that only begins the narrative of this righteous, highly moral lawman who goes vigilante to avenge his brothers. And that's exactly what happened. It was a big deal in Western newspapers. It made some of the Eastern newspapers. And that movie, you know, you have to give a lot of credit for it because it is largely accurate. Yeah, especially when it's what you think is like the historic shootout at the O.K. Corral. And you're thinking, okay, well, this must be this incredible thing. And it is. It's kind of like you can't believe people keep missing. But I think the movie does a good job of keeping it, to your point, like accurate. Because when you start reading about that shootout, and you're like, okay, this isn't. And the legend of it is so much bigger than the actual. It's not like, you know, 100 guys versus 100 guys here. It's kind of the way you think about it the whole time. But here's another thing I thought. Like you have Masterson who, honestly, is like always. Always kind of one of my favorites because he pivots over to boxing. He becomes friends with Teddy Roosevelt. He becomes a writer. He's living in New York City. And that person going into like New York City, like Gilded Age, high society. He must have been like, we have a real like badass that was with Wyatt Earp. As the Northeast, I think, is incredibly enamored with this vigilante lifestyle and all these stories they're reading about. But was it that Doc and Masterson and the Cowboys and the Earps? Is it that they truly are like the legends of their time and they all decide to kind of like link up? Or does that setting with all of these characters there turn them into these legends? Because it feels like we've got a super team of gunfighters. And I couldn't figure out, like, would it be. Would everybody just say, hey, everybody's going to Dodge City this year? Let's go? Or was the city itself building them up? I think that the source of the fame is the fact that. Both Wyatt Earp and his great friend from Dodge City, Matt Masterson, grew to old age. They lived into the 1920s at a time where, I have to say, all of this gunfighter legend was pretty much forgotten. It all was reintroduced by a famous magazine article when someone whose first words were, who remembers Billy the Kid? Which, you know, it's hard to imagine now. But that led in the mid-1920s to the rediscovery of Earp. He was still alive. Masterson had been writing and heralding not just Earp, but Doc Holliday, but the others around him. So that narrative of Wyatt Earp from Kansas to Arizona, climaxing in Tombstone, kind of became the spine of the whole gunfighter era, the whole gunfighter legend. And I think it deserves to be. It's that great a story. But it's also largely a fluke in that they lived long enough to tell it. Something big is coming. On September 2nd, DraftKings Game Day arrives with massive deals, exclusive deals, and an all-day celebration built for sports fans. 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Well, I mean, the first one, where he, we'll never know exactly what happened, but Wyatt told the story. This was in Dodge City. They had met before and down in Fort Griffin, Texas. And Earp had kind of made an impression on him. And so Holliday, who was a wandering gambler, wandered up to Dodge City. And he clearly admired Wyatt Earp. He saw something that he was not. Earp did have this kind of moral core that Doc Holliday largely did not have. And that night that a bunch of Texas Cowboys in Dodge City were shooting up, a bunch of Texas Cowboys in Dodge City were shooting up a bunch of Texas Cowboys in Dodge City. Earp and his deputies responded. And by and large, they did not engage Cowboys and drunks with gunfire, but with gun butts. And so they start going in and swinging these big, heavy revolvers, braining these guys. And, you know, there's an understanding that nobody's going to pull a gun. We're just going to, you know, we're just going to do this with our fists. One of the Texas Cowboys broke the rules and pulled a gun. And as Earp described it, and I'm doing this by memory, Holliday, you know, basically yell, Wyatt, look out and pull the gun on the Cowboy. Nobody fired, but the Cowboy then did not shoot Wyatt Earp and he was in the back. And it, you know, there is a bond that you see between those men that you see in the good and the bad Wyatt Murphys, in the good and the bad Wyatt Murphys that I think is, was real and it was justified. And here's how, you know, because that the climactic moment when Wyatt Earp and his brothers are about to walk down to the okay corral and try to arrest or fight with this group of Cowboys, Holliday walks up just as they're about to leave. And he says, what are you doing? They explain. And he says, well, you're not asking me. And Wyatt Earp says, this is likely to be a tough one, Doc. And Doc, through multiple sources says, the tough one's the one I like. And he just walked down there and engaged in this gunfight with no skin on the game, except his loyalty to their brothers. I think that's- That's a lot about the man. He comes off as incredibly likable because like you're sort of, as you're reading these different stories and you're trying to get through fact or fiction, there's definitely some ones where you go, oh, this sucks. Like this guy's awful. Not to say like I needed to be convinced that guys that were murdering people were bad people because of further research. But I think Doc holds up really well historically based on the way you present him and backing up a lot of the other stuff, which I think is a perfect pivot into Jesse James, because he is entirely different based on origin. And you even suggest that you didn't even want to put him in the book. No, he, he, he, if I, I, Brian Burrow is writing a book on old West gunfighters. Jesse James is not an old West gunfighter. Two problems. He's not from the old West and he's not a gunfighter. That, that would, that would- But I put him in there because look, anybody- Because your editor said to? People, people expect Jesse James in this book. And I figured that there was utility, there was use in telling his story in a single chapter to show what he was and what he wasn't. What he was, was, you know, the last rebel of the civil war. And the way that he rebelled was through crime. He was not only the first American bank robber, he was the first American train robber. His level of criminality from 60, from 1869 until, 1881 is unmatched in American history. There had never been anything, anything like Jesse James before. And there hasn't been since. He was the first household name criminal. Billy the Kid would probably be the second. And he was, you know, a guy of incredible talent at being a bad guy. He's not a gunfighter because I think of a gunfighter as a civilian who kind of gets in equal fights from time to time. Jesse, James just killed people. Typically bank officers, bank tellers who wouldn't do what he said he wouldn't open the safe. Jesse James puts a gun to his head and kills him. He killed like five people that way. So I don't consider that a gunfighter. Yes, I realize there's no strict rules on this, but it's my book. I can say what I want. To me, that's just a murderer. I was convinced after the Jesse James chapter. And it is interesting how he's held up historically, because once you read your chapter, you're like, okay, well, he's just shooting people. And he's shooting people he doesn't even need to shoot. And at that time, despite what we would grow up thinking about the old west, and again, a lot of his work wasn't even in whatever we would call the traditional old west. People weren't really robbing banks, right? Like this was kind of a new thing where his numbers were like his his usage rate, I would say was a lot higher than anybody has remembered. It's kind of felt like everybody was doing this. No, he Jesse James and his brother Frank really blazed this trail. They may have been the first we don't know the first bank robbed in America in peacetime was I will say 1866. In Missouri, he may have been there. We can't be sure we can't really start pinning him to things until 1869. But the oddball thing about Jesse James, and you put your finger on it, Ryan, is that he was a cold blooded murderer. But Americans never viewed him that way. We've always had a tendency to when we see criminals involved with acts of daring do typically any type of escape, any type of thing where they're fighting against the odds where every bank robber constantly was, we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. We tend to let slide the fact that, yes, Jesse James had some incredible escapes. Yes, he, you know, ran away from all sorts of gunmen and marshals. But just because he was brave and had, you know, daring exploits, doesn't mean he wasn't a cold blooded murderer, too. And given that set of facts with any number of people in this book and others, you know, a different civilization than ours, my painting with a, you know, a black brush, and we never have. Another thing that's easy to kind of forget here, too, is we're not that far removed from the end of the Civil War. And so, if James is fighting for the Confederacy, it would, you know, it's part of his legend is like, well, you know, this is just a southern boy that was still upset about the outcome of the war. And you're like, well, that's excusing a ton of shit. But it certainly was part of his, his motivation, even if he was pretty, like, loose with the idea that this was some vengeance against the North, because it wasn't like he was just going after banks in Pennsylvania here. This is, this is a common theme, though, is that you, you have a lot of lost soldiers that may think people owe them for their service beyond whatever it is that they gained during wartime. Yeah, you see that a lot. You see a lot of angry southerners out on the frontier. Doc Holliday would be one, certainly. If you look at the vast number of, the vast outlaw gang that Wyatt Earp fought in Tombstone, over a hundred guys, they were predominantly Texans. Um, and there were, and certainly in the Kansas cow towns, where a lot of the violence was Texas cowboys, you know, often drunk, fighting it out with Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson or Wild Bill Hickok. All of them had a sense of, well, I'm not going to let some Yankee sheriff take me in. Um, so the, the Civil War certainly fed a lot of this, especially I think in the early years, the late 1860s and early 1870s. If you track the trajectory of Jesse James's, career, he got very much, he loved when a newspaper editor or three called in the last avenging rebel. He ate this stuff up. He, he sent out, you know, notes extolling that he was fighting for the South, yada, yada, yada. When in fact, as you say, this is just an extensive rationalization for the man to keep doing the only thing he knew how to do, which was be an extraordinary criminal, but he very much liked wearing the clothes of, of self-righteousness. Um, but over the, you know, the course of, of his career into the late 1870s, that act increasingly began to wear thin. America, Missouri, it was, was, was all moving on. Yeah. I mean, there's a fascinating entry where he like tells the press like, yeah, the James gang's back and like, nobody even cares. I mean, it feels like an athlete that had retired three years ago and then says, I'm, I'm making a comeback. And it's like, well, no one, no one actually cares. And it just feels like even then society had moved on. Like we're kind of sick of this stuff, which I, I do want to get to kind of the end of this era, but there's still a couple names. Sam bass was not somebody that I was familiar with. Uh, Sam bass has kind of this legend status in Texas. Who was Sam and, and why is he not considered the same way? Some of these other names are. Oh, Sam bass, Sam bass pulled off. Sam bass was a, uh, a Texas cowboy, young guy, illiterate, not the sharpest pencil in the pack. One suspects he, uh, he first rode to something, some degree of fame in Texas as a jockey. And he took some of his winnings with a crooked cattleman, uh, and they bought some cattle, took them up and, and, and, and, uh, uh, sold them either in Kansas or up in Deadwood, but they ended up in Deadwood where they sank their winnings into, they lost their winnings, either in a mining claim or gambling. We don't know. They turned a penny, anti-crime robbing stagecoaches in the Deadwood area. They were awful at it. Like one guy gave them one, one driver gave them peaches and said that, sorry, that's all I got. These were not, this is kind of a game you couldn't shoot straight. And so you can imagine the jaws that dropped across the great Plains when Sam bass and his knucklehead buddies, um, rob a train, uh, in remote Western Nebraska, and they find a shipment from the U S mint in San Francisco. And it is the largest train robbery in American history, larger than anything the James gang had ever did. And of course they're like, oh crap. So anyway, long story short, uh, almost all the, all, almost all his partners are run down and, and, and killed or captured Sam backs. Sam bass makes it back to Texas where, uh, you know, we put a number on like financially, what it, what it meant, what, what this wasn't like the modern day, it would have been like almost $2 million or something. It's like three million, three million dollars. Uh, and by the time Sam, I mean, people are still looking for Sam bass is fortunate because nobody's ever been able to find out how to have old Texas guys, you know, on walkers and oxygen machines with, you know, you know, metal detectors still trying to find Sam bass's fortune. So everybody in Texas, when Sam bass comes back is on the lookout for him and that the Rangers and everybody descends on his hometown of Denton, which is north of Dallas. There's all sorts of chases and escapes and daring do. And eventually gets too hot for Sam bass. So he embarks on a second crime wave, robbing trains in Texas, and then moving south to rob banks. And a funny thing happened along the way. And maybe it was just the tenor of the times in Texas, but there's a, such a thing in American, in academic circles called the social outlaw, like Robin hood, uh, an outlaw that the public lionizes that the public falls in love with. In Sam bass's case, there were a lot of editorialists in Texas that say, okay, he he's robbing these things. He's not hurting us. Why are these bank presidents and railroad presidents and everything going after this poor jockey in Denton? And he got enormous amounts of public support. This did not stop him from getting shot to pieces in round rock, Texas. And I believe it was 1878. This is the town 30 miles up the road from where I live. But afterwards he became a real Texas folk. Uh, there were songs about it that I think you can, if you went to a nursing homes around Texas, you could probably find people could sing you a Sam bass song. And I will tell you without going into it, into a tale, you know, how we know Sam bass is a great story because someone, uh, Netflix has bought the rights to my book and that's the movie they're going to make out of it. It's the Sam bass song. That's incredible. I thought the book would be like a mini series or limited series are almost impossible to get anybody unless like you have a star or somebody signs off on it. But I was like, this would be an awesome TV show to just go, Hey, here's the series. But every two episodes you're visiting and learning about a new character. And like that, we're going to do that in a podcast that we're recording now, as you would expect. Okay. All right. I can't wait to listen to it. Um, before I have some rapid fire stuff, we have to end with Billy, the kid, because it just feels different, right? I don't know why it feels different. I don't know that I'm like re-engineering him being like the first guy I'd ever think of as a little kid. Um, you mentioned at one point, I think there's 50 movies made with his character in the 1940s. And yeah, but in the beginning, I mean, is it really the Lincoln jail escape that starts his legend? Because he's, his story just felt a little different and I don't know. I, it, it just, again, it just felt like a completely different character than some of the other guys. And maybe that's why it's held up. Billy, the kid is fascinating because there I could write 50 books on bill, Billy, the kid, I can give you 50 different Billy, the kids. You can paint him as a hero. You can paint him as a devil. You can paint him as a loyal friend, um, a hero to the Latinos in New Mexico, many of whom he friended and who hid him. I love the story because of the moral ambivalence. He was an orphan. He gravitated into an armed conflict, the Lincoln County War, when he was a teenager. Clearly, he was seeking meaning and guidance, and he got it there. And somewhat like Jesse James, he continued doing what he was good at. After the Lincoln County War, he becomes a cattle wrestler, in essence. He gets into a few gunfights, not a lot. I believe the precise number of men that we can prove he killed is something like three. But there's just so many ways to see his story. The Lincoln County, the Lincoln jail escape is iconic. The most incredible thing is you can still go to that site in Lincoln, New Mexico. It's incredible. You can stand where he shot the deputy below. You can see it all. There's markers. It's wonderful. It's as good a Western history as you find. And then ultimately, to be tracked down and killed by a man he knew, who probably, despite young guns too, was probably not his best friend, Pat Garrett, they clearly knew each other. And the circumstances of that night when Billy the Kid walked into a darkened bedroom and Pat Garrett was sitting on the bed, and the man, the elderly Mexican in the bed, whispered to Pat, it's him. And Pat Garrett just shot in the dark. Bang, bang. The only thing you hear is the fall of a body. Billy the Kid, I've read all the books, and you can't have too many books about Billy the Kid. He's fascinating. Why did this era end? The easy answer is because the Western frontier closed. Most people put the closing of the frontier in the 1890s, a period of time where the Western frontier closed. And the Western frontier closed. And most people put the closing of the frontier in the 1890s, a period of time where the Western frontier closed. And most people put the closing of the frontier in the 1980s, a period of time where the Western frontier closed. And closed. And closed. And closed. And closed. And closed. And they closed. And they ultimately, I end the book with they ultimately, I end the book with they ultimately, I end the book with their decision, pursued by the Pinkertons, and every lawman in the West had seen, they actually did go to New York, they boarded a freighter, and in hopes that they could raise cattle, in South America, they went to Argentina. And that seems to be the place to end the era. I love that movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sun Can't Dance Kid from 1969. If you haven't seen it, go watch it. Butch Cassidy and the Sun Can't Dance Kid from 1969. It's still good. It holds up well. It's Redford at his best. And that was, strangely, the movie that got me all started when I saw that when I was like 11. So I think that's, those are the factors that led to the end of the story. Certainly, you know, gunfighting and gunfights continued in parts of the West into the 20th century, but they were no longer really part of the zeitgeist. They were, you know, not no longer celebrated, they were frowned upon. And so I felt that was a fair place to end the story. Rapid Fire. I don't know if deadliest is the same as toughest, the most brutal, scariest, but if you had to pick one, who is it? John Wesley Harden of Texas. Who would be the most likable? Byter. Who's the biggest fraud? It's a toss up between three. Wild Bill Hickok, who we've discussed, a guy in Texas named Wild Bill Longley, who claimed something like 38 killings. The exact number would appear to be four. Or the other guy that we mentioned from Tombstone, a Texas gunslinger named Johnny Ringo, who got terribly famous in the 20th century, I think mostly because he had a cool last name. And there's no sense that the only time we ever know that he drew a gun for sure was twice. He shot a minor in some type of drunken brawl, like winged him. And the other time, he shot himself because he committed suicide. Who designed these prisons? Prisons kind of were a lagging indicator of technological expertise in the Old West. My favorite ones were the first jails in Texas, which were essentially holes dug into the ground and the jailer would sit on a chair, you know, beside it and look down. That was the jail. Look, it just, of all the things that needed to be built in all of these new towns that were built, you know, the first thing you're going to do is build a jail. The second thing you're going to do is have, you know, some housing, a hotel, maybe a saloon, jails, you know, especially in small places, and even prisons. They're just, there weren't, the legal system wasn't robust enough. There was a huge demand for putting people up behind bars. The gap between how we romanticize this era versus the reality, I try to think of like other time periods, because I think most of us realize like, hey, if you were walking around medieval times, it probably wasn't that great. So I guess I'll end here. Was it actually an awful time and an awful place to live? I don't think you can say that it was either a one or a 10. You know, it was, it was what it was, meaning this violence was not in your face. You didn't live with it. You didn't live with gun violence every day. That's an overstatement. On the other hand, we now know from new, you know, big data techniques that the Old West really was as violent as we always thought it was. But Ryan, where I come down to end on that is just, you know why it was awful? No electricity, no toilet paper, no deodorant, no feminine products. It was a different level of hygiene than we accept. This was barely 150 years ago is still jarring for me to grasp. There's so much more in this book. There's so many names that I didn't touch on. Because I mean, again, we could do it forever. And I'm not surprised you're gonna have a podcast series on all of these different characters. So about as fun a time as I've had reading in a long time. So thanks, Brian. I'm honored and pleased. Thanks, man. Whatever the day throws at you, stylish and ready for anything. Equinox handles your commute, weekend trips, and even those last minute tea times easily load up your clubs and gear with plenty of cargo space plus hidden storage under the rear floor to keep things neat. And with a big standout touchscreen, the Equinox puts all your tech right where you need it. Bold and confident. Equinox looks just as good on the road as it does down the back roads. From the first drive to the final putt, Equinox is built to do more so you can focus on it. You want details? Buy. I drive a Ferrari 355 Cabriolet. What's up? I have a ridiculous house in the South Fork. I have every toy you could possibly imagine. And best of all, kids, I am liquid. So now you know what's possible. Let me tell you what's required. Life advice. Life advice. RR at gmail.com. That is the email. Let's get to it. here you know it's not a thing we do all right speaking of the lettuce virus by the way i died my wife got mad at me yesterday because i didn't wash i did i had a salad i didn't wash i didn't know i'm not aware of what's going on so i bought lettuce yesterday i had no idea people looked at me like i was buying crack yeah like why are we selling exactly if it's so dangerous what are we selling it yeah why is it here all right take it off the shelf what do you want me to do i gotta find i like i've been making like a chopped salad where i'll just we got a great store adams near us and i'll like instead of buying like the bags of lettuce the triple wash or whatever i'll just get like looks like it just came out of the came out of the back of the truck and uh i find that hard to wash i really do so i've been i've been taking chances yeah i had a iceberg in there and it chopped yeah a lot or uh yeah romaine some just the like the and it's like way bigger than you think the ones you see in the store are like you know skinny this is some healthy lettuce but i just find it hard to get in there and watch i've ate my way through decades of lettuce crises so i at this point just you know from like gum i've swallowed from uh like the ages 8 to 12 i mean so much so much dude we didn't need that i guess all right we knew what you meant what the hell bro whatever not all of it but yeah you're good chewing gum just one last time one last time oh man good washing lettuce it's such like a subtle whatever was going on in your brain when you did that it'd be like my dude's swallowing gum dude yeah make sure they know it's yeah what's he doing whatever what did he say i'm like sweating over here now i don't even think i didn't even say anything crazy but i don't even want to do the sweating over here uh what was this guy who's thinking about studying maxing something yeah yeah all right so uh here we go i haven't been in a relationship for about two years my ex broke up with me which is relevant because i initially broke up with her and she did everything besides cheat on me as far as i know and then she broke up with me and i broke up with me and i broke up with my ass okay i've recently gone on two dates with two beautiful women i've kissed both of them no big deal but i'm not sure if i'm scared of another relationship or i'm just bored and want companionship woman number one let's call her doja cat okay she's tall yeah yeah now we got the giggles it's gonna be tough yeah this is gonna be tough it's all right we need it sometimes uh she's tall and i find has a great sense of humor however as a lax finance bro it seems to me she does not have lofty goals in her future woman number two let's call her ann hathaway she's also tall and super into being active and lifting which i love however she's poor at communicating no comma my ex i can't sometimes you guys however she's poor at communicating my ex and i were somewhat long distance and i know i have a fear of her and i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to keep up with her in the future but i have a fear of long distance again not only have i kissed both of these women on back-to-back days yes dude but as a finance bro who lives in new england i eventually want to move to the south and build a family down there love that i love that you've got you already got it figured out first question am i a whore you guys want to take that one no no short answer no yeah you're good i don't even think you've uh qualified i think yeah i don't think you pay people that maybe you do pay people to kiss you or whatever but i don't think i don't even think you've uh you've entered that if wimbledon were a whore tournament you wouldn't even have a number next to your name yeah dude don't worry you don't even need a shower after what you've been up to yeah second should i continue to play this slow and enjoy the opportunity i created lastly i could be wrong feel free to call me misogynist but don't women parentheses generalization have an idea of the men they can date as options or at least have a plethora of men to have to not be lonely um he's attached a picture of himself having a brewski with the boys nice sounds like he's just dating right i mean with everything i've heard i don't think there's i think this back-to-back kissing is just really just messed with his chemistry here right he's he's on like a time time release lock and he's like it's too early yeah the neutrons are just buzzing around in there uh honestly i think this email kind of means that like if you're you are not the thing you think you could potentially be all right uh it's okay you're a young guy you broke up with somebody you kissed doja cat then anne hathaway back to back guys would write a book things are going they were able to pull that yeah so i don't i don't other than you being like caught up a little bit and your momentum here and then being bummed out about it i would say you're you're what you need to do on your to-do list is is to think the opposite of yourself with this just be happy you know just be happy that people are interested in you be happy that um be nice to my friend yeah yeah right like don't get in your head about this shit i mean of all the things you can get in your head about and waste a ton of time with a little voice in there this is not one of them you'll look back and laugh at yourself and you'll be like oh my god i'm so sorry i'm so sorry for even sending in this email in two years guaranteed 100 i actually have nothing to say about this other than um anne hathaway you guys seen the pictures uh i've seen well she's pregnant the lebron james of actresses has been thrown around she's one of one goddamn i don't hear yeah i mean i i'm not just saying because she's in inception or excuse me interstellar yeah my bad and the odyssey woman too yeah and the odyssey looks great looks great good for her um yeah i think this guy's gonna do well in the south he's got morals clearly so i think once he finally heads down south i think he's gonna have a great family knew that was coming it's such a great line it's such a great line and the look he gives him back yeah you'd like probably you do very well there i think that's the line all right uh wife wants me to get a vasectomy 39 six foot 185 poor man's kelly olenek with a jalen brown-esque one-handed handle no impressive gym stats but i did complete a tough mutter in 2013 and ran the falmouth road race shadow cape cod as a road runner on a whim in 50 minutes in 2017 the morning after working a restaurant shift i think this guy's i think it's okay to say this guy's quote built different and quote as the subject line states my wife wants me to get a vasectomy some background we've married nearly seven years together for 12 we have a three-year-old daughter a three-month-old son and any uh an 11-year-old golden retriever during the birth of our son she had to have an emergency c-section because he had a 95 percentile head size and weight potential future nfl left tackle everything turned out something yeah what do you want a regional percentile here or you want a global one no i think that's a good question i think that's a good question i think that's a good question i think that's norwegian i thought so right oh you said norwegian yeah i was stuck on the region thing after that i was watching deadwood not too long ago and they would call those guys blockheads i don't know if that was like big squarehead or maybe that meant something worse but i just googled country with the biggest heads i'm not sure i want to read the answer so okay don't leave that alone okay all right back um everything turned out fine both mom and baby are happy and healthy okay well that's great to hear the other night after a few drinks following a family outing to a summer concert series along the cape cod canal my wife brought up me getting a vasectomy in a half joking but also very serious way that women often broach these types of conversations the topic has been brought up before i'm just not into it at all i tell her that we've only ever gotten pregnant when we've planned to and we've never had any scares her line of reasoning is that she's gone through it all one traditional birth a miscarriage last summer followed by the c-section birth this april and everything that's going on in her life and she's gone through it all one traditional birth everything that comes with it weight fluctuation hormonal imbalance breastfeeding pumping and rebuilding her abdominal wall yeah man she's making some pretty good points um and me getting vasectomy would be a sign of my appreciation for all she's done for our family i deeply love her and our family and forever grateful for the amazing mother why she is she's the best but i don't want any type of elective surgery done on my boys she's tried shaming me calling me scared or wuss that's probably fun um again half joking but very serious tone and that tactic just makes me double down on my stance i kind of agree a couple we got a couple competitors going out of here uh i avoided a potential slightly buzzed argument by leaving it off with i'm open to learning more about it but the reality is i don't want to do it i don't think it's necessary i think it's a false equivalency to compare childbirth and a vasectomy as it's natural c-section aside though it's very common and a vasectomy is not it's not about the same thing it's about the same thing it's about the same thing it's not about me wanting to have another kid down the road i don't okay i was wondering if that was floating around back there um but what is getting through to me more is the sacrifice that she's made and if vasectomy is a sign of appreciation slash in kind gesture to my close high school friends who've had vasectomies and have said it's no big deal and everything works the same oh he says two of my close friends have uh just no bullets in the gun so to speak but i don't um i still won't see it that way i simply don't want to go through the rest of my life neutered am i being an asshole if i continue to hold my ground should i appease my wife's wishes to get a vasectomy i need some advice on how to approach the inevitable next conversation about this and if i should change my stance on this big fan of the pod i mean i have one um oh yeah i don't think i would have gotten it if my wife didn't want it but i also you got it if she was taunting you about not getting it or do you think no i think i would have dug my heels in but totally that's the biggest bummer here but she was like hey i you know we had not you know some sort of i don't know how to say this there were some things about there were some complications with just the pregnancy in general nothing like super insane but something that we had to like be aware of and it made sense to get a vasectomy afterwards we only wanted two kids um and i got the rubber band vasectomy too which is like not the not there's no wear it all the time yeah they just wrap it real tight um which is like so supposed to be pretty like not evasive whatever and it wasn't a big deal it's also reversible right it is reversible so like i so him saying like for the rest of it his life like they basically make that very clear when you go to the doctor's office i had a lovely time there was a great experience in and out um i feel nothing different at all uh afterwards after like you know a week full of ice packs down there so i i think you're being a little bit of a deep as when i met you though to be honest i'm just here we go here we go my muscle mass is now it's never been high so i guess i'm just kidding it's any lower now but no there's like there's just nothing bit there's just there just isn't a it's just not a big deal at all like i didn't i didn't know what you expect going in it was super easy the recovery was nothing and again they told me a thousand times if you want to reverse this you could reverse this so i feel like you're right kyle like if she was a dick about it to me i'd probably be like a little bit more you know defiant but she wasn't and i got it and i have no regrets yeah it sounds like we skipped over the on the understanding part from her where it's like yeah this is kind of a big move growing up this seems like a thing that you'll want to protect with your life you know what i mean you survive the part where your friends are always hitting each other in the balls and now it's like now we're gonna like change them fundamentally i think like telling a dude a youngish dude that is like yeah there might be something he's got to get over mentally there but it seems like we just rushed to the like oh what you're so scared and you don't appreciate me and like and the digs it's that's tough that's really tough i don't like that he's 39 though oh and he says he doesn't want another kid yeah and he can sit there and say hey we've it's only happened when we've planned it but i had that thought too but like it's it it is hard as especially as you get older to get pregnant i like it's always funny like we talk about this like in high school you're like oh man if you like look at a girl the wrong way she you can get her pregnant it's like i know it's actually kind of hard to get pregnant there's like windows and different things like you just don't know that probably smart to tell them that it's easy to get pregnant when they're younger but so yes i understand what you're saying like you can be very uh deliberate about when and how you do things like that's totally true but again if your wife wants it it is it is fair to like you know my wife didn't have a c-section but you know went through different things that that were obviously difficult and you're kind of just sitting there being like okay so all i have to do is just you know this one part and she does all the rest of the stuff and like it does i don't want to say there is a fairness element to it but if it's the one thing that she's asking for and it's not that big of a deal and it's reversible i'm not telling you what to do dude but like it just seems like something that's pretty yeah and the guy version of this is like 25 times easier than the the woman version of this right too so you don't have that tubes yeah you don't have that in your corner um yeah i don't know like i don't think you can say like you know what maybe i would have been more receptive but you just been really nasty about this like i don't think i think you're waiting a year too i think you even lose points there too so this is a tough one i don't know i mean maybe you could do the march madness thing just hold her off till till those two weeks but i don't know this is this is a it's tough because like your pride's involved in multiple ways uh so i don't i don't know i think eventually i would have done it i don't understand how like guys would be like oh you're less of a man like i i don't i don't understand that because guy humor is not understand that intelligent humor it's just like oh you're totally just like guys making fun of each other i'm just saying like this guy clearly thinks like hey i i would be less of myself if i had a vasectomy which i just don't really understand like what do you what do you want to go around like you if you wanted to go around spreading seed you couldn't again it's reversible like i don't know i don't know what you're talking about like how big of a deal this is but he doesn't even want to do that that's not even part of his argument i gotta tell you man you're not making a great case in this email and i will tell you of every one of my friends that has had it anyone that even had anxiety about it was like i can't even believe i had any anxiety about this whatsoever it couldn't be simpler so there's that i mean when you lay out that she is sitting there saying hey i went through this i went through this i went through this i would like you to do this for me it's gonna be hard for like maybe the like absolutely not bro you know hold the line yeah uh i don't you you have not made if i were a judge and these were the two cases that were presented here i don't know that you would win her negotiation skills suck if we want to give him some credit it's like she's now i don't want to do and i definitely don't want to do this for you because it sounds like what did she call him she called him a pussy a baby like a bunch of like that and like from your wife i could just imagine it's gonna be in your head maybe that could stop yeah yeah no i mean you can't ask her that's the other thing too you've known her this long okay you've been together you love this person you want to spend the rest of your life with them but now she's bullying you yeah but but here's my my question to you are you less likely to get it because you don't like her approach like the fundamental thing you would be more willing to say yes to that she desperately wants if she sold it better or differently well that tells you you should probably do it then if that's part of the resistance no i agree but i mean there's i'm not going to say there's no one you get madder at than your specific than your significant other but there's a certain lane that of like anger and frustration that you can only have with somebody who knows you so well and can get to you so well you know what i mean this thing doesn't last forever but i'm saying there's a certain way like sort of how like steve says when he's like driving in the car it's like that's there's only a certain type of mad i can get driving in the car and mad may not be the right word but like i could see this be fitting into that perfectly like she's taunting me about this thing that i am for lack of a better word scared of doing and feel uncomfortable about it and she's like now resorted to like bullying me and like a 13 year old's version of bullying so i could see how that's like a recipe for frustration but i think it should probably end and probably ends with you you losing this one maybe you just don't tell her about it you just do it on your time although i guess you'd have to have the recovery so she would know but kyle had that that brings up a good point do it around a time where like you want to just do nothing and sit on the couch for a weekend that's the best way to do it when they're going to visit her folks camping trip you're like yeah sorry dude you know and i just yeah it's the only weekend they had i'm gonna miss church group yeah yeah pantry thing best of luck yeah yeah that your family reunion in in washington i don't i think i'm busy that one damn it yeah that would be kind of the ultimate get back if it's about the competition pick the weekend you desperately don't want to do something that she wants to do and go all right you get one you get one all right that'll do for the show thanks kyle thanks steve thanks tom kevin the ryan russo show barstool sports show barstool sports