They were called gun-men, gunmen, shootists, man-killers, and gunslingers, but the Western press eventually settled on the all-inclusive term “gunfighter.” By definition, they were “anyone in the Old West who took part in one or more notable exchanges of gunfire among civilians, not involving Native Americans or the military.” The Gunfighter Era lasted nearly 40 years, roughly from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1901, when the two outlaws Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh (The Sundance Kid), to avoid capture, boarded a steamer in New York headed for South America.
Surprisingly, most of those men who made their living dealing death with a firearm—handgun, rifle, or pistol—hailed from just a handful of southern states, but one state in particular led the way. “Texas … produced far more gunfights and far more gunfighters than any other,” writes Bryan Burrough, author of the new book (2025) The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild.
He continues, “Of the fifty states, Texas is the only one to defeat a foreign power at war, the only one to emerge as an independent nation as a result. During much of the nineteenth century, it was the only state with not one but two violent frontiers—the Mexican border, where Texans fought bandits and the incursions of an embittered Mexican army, and the Native American frontier, the site of hundreds of desperate battles and atrocities involving the Comanche and their allies, which cut the state in half on a diagonal into the 1870s.
