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Gunfighters — History
Gunfighters

Author Bryan Burrough exhumes the gritty history of Old West gunfighters. From Billy the Kid to Wyatt Earp to John Wesley Hardin and dozens more, this collection of stories proves how very violent America’s nineteenth century frontier actually was, and traces the blood-soaked history of the troubled men who made it that way.

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Copyright: 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc. © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from iHeartMedia

Latest Episodes:

Ep. 02: Wait, Gunfighters Came From Where? Sep 22, 2026

Best-selling author Bryan Burrough explores the surprising origins of Old West gunfights in America’s deep involvement with the duel, a contest used by so many men during the early 1800s, including politicians from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln, chose to settle their disputes by drawing guns and firing at each other. From the duel that left Alexander Hamilton dead in 1804 to the dozens or more that took place every Sunday during the 1830s in New Orleans’ city park, Burrough traces how these bloody contests over honor evolved into the manic gunfights we remember on the post-Civil War western frontier.

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Ep. 01: When Gunfighters Stalked the Old West Sep 15, 2026

Join author Bryan Burrough as he begins telling the epic story of the Gunfighter Era, the years between 1865 and 1901, when Old West figures such as Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp became famous for something unusual in 19th century America: Shooting other Americans. From Wild Bill Hickok to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, learn the true stories of the troubled men who left behind the frontier’s blood-soaked history and in the process created an American legend.

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Introducing: Gunfighters, with Bryan Burrough Sep 08, 2026

Author Bryan Burrough exhumes the gritty history of Old West gunfighters. From Billy the Kid to Wyatt Earp to John Wesley Hardin and dozens more, this collection of stories proves how very violent America's nineteenth century frontier actually was, and traces the blood-soaked history of the troubled men who made it that way.

Follow now on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, and YouTube.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ep. 42: Favorite Films About the West | The American West Aug 18, 2026

Since the 1903 showing of The Great Train Robbery, film has steadily become our primary way to tell the stories of the American West to the larger world. More than a century’s worth of movies and television shows later, in this episode of The American West Dan, Randall, and guest Dr. Sara Dant reveal their favorite films about the West.

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Ep. 41: Favorite Books About the West | The American West Aug 11, 2026

The 1538 distribution of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion about his shipwreck and trek across the Southwest marks the beginning of books that tell the stories of the American West to the larger world. Hundreds of thousands of books later, in this episode of The American West Dan, Randall, and guest Dr. Sara Dant reveal their favorite western authors and book choices.

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Ep. 40: Becoming Natives of Place in the American West | The American West Aug 04, 2026

Two ideas about living in the modern West, bioregionalism and rewilding, emerged in the 1970s and early 2000s, and while neither has gone mainstream they have influenced how residents who prioritize nature have made decisions about a new western lifestyle.

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Ep. 39: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part II | The American West Jul 28, 2026

When the U.S. acquired the West with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched two scientific expeditions to explore it. Lewis & Clark became legendary. The historical fiction that follows indicates that with a different outcome, Freeman and Custis would have been famous westerners, too. Here, then, is Part II.

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Ep. 38: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part I | The American West Jul 21, 2026

When the U.S. acquired the West with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched two scientific expeditions to explore it. Lewis & Clark became legendary. Like Apollo 13, Jefferson’s Red River Expedition into the West was a failure. This is how their story should have gone.

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Ep. 37: The Wolf Returns to the West | The American West Jul 14, 2026

One of the stories that will long define the American West in the modern era is the return of the wolf after a century of wholesale attempts to obliterate it. From New Mexico to Montana and west to the Pacific Coast, a five-million year-old native is on its way home again.

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Ep. 36: Down the West’s Grandest Canyon | The American West Jul 07, 2026

With its many diverse, stupendous landscapes and public lands, the West has long been a region of bucket list adventures. A descent down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon has always been near the top of the list for almost everybody. Here’s what it’s like.

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Ep. 35: How the Endangered Species Act Saved the West and America | The American West Jun 30, 2026

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of America’s most famous laws and contributions to world culture, yet half-a-century after its passage it has become yet another political lightning rod. But if you value having Thoreau’s “entire Earth,” the ESA is one of America’s best ideas.

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Ep. 34: Big Bend and the Deserts of the West | The American West Jun 23, 2026

In the eyes of the world, the West’s several deserts have become defining landscapes for the modern region. But one of them, the Chihuahuan Desert, has produced the only large public lands found anywhere in Texas. Therein lies a story that shapes a state.

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Ep. 33: Time and Time Again: The Fascinating Evidence from Western Repeat Photography | The American West Jun 16, 2026

Calling on the photographic record made of the American West from 150 to 100 years ago, modern photographers have repeated many of the same scenes and found remarkable differences in the ecology and look of western landscapes. The question is, why such change?

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Ep. 32: Loving the Plains, Hating the Plains, Rewilding the Plains | The American West Jun 09, 2026

While conservation focused national parks creation on the vertical mountains and canyons of the West, the Great Plains ended up de-buffaloed and mostly ignored. But with new, 21st century approaches to reversing that historical slight, the Plains Serengeti is on its way back.

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Ep. 31: Cabeza de Vaca’s Fantastic Journey | The American West Jun 02, 2026

Almost exactly 500 years ago, a shipwrecked Spaniard named Cabeza de Vaca and three companions made the first trans-continental journey in the history of the American West. Then he wrote down his account of eight years in Native America, one of the great First Contact stories of all time.

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Ep. 30: Jesus and Animus Beneath the Bitterroots | The American West May 26, 2026

Religion is often at the center of historical events in the West. The founding of modern Montana, in fact, happened when Native people famously pleaded for Christian missionaries. The question was whether the Christians actually understood what the Indians were asking for.

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Ep. 29: What Were Charlie Russell and L.A. Huffman Trying to Tell Us? | The American West May 19, 2026

Charlie Russell and L.A. Huffman became famous for their nostalgic art about the Frontier world they experienced in the West. But with a fascination with what Russell called “Dreamtime Montana,” exactly what were they trying to tell us about the West’s future?

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Ep. 28: Understanding Nature in a Southwestern State | The American West May 12, 2026

Not only do most Americans misunderstand the great variety in western places, but many westerners are similarly clueless. This episode makes a stab at explaining nature in a part of the West unfamiliar to many, the southwestern state of New Mexico.

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Ep. 27: Messages From the Past - The Rock Art of the American West | The American West May 05, 2026

A tangible and fascinating landscape record of the human past in the West exists in a form barely found elsewhere in America. So-called rock art, images incised and painted on rock faces, still reach out of the past to connect us with the thoughts, dreams, gods, and myths of ancient America.

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Ep. 26: Where the Primeval West Abides | The American West Apr 21, 2026

In the summer of 2019 a small group of us does a 12-day river descent from Alaska’s Brooks Range through the heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, experiencing a preserved slice of primeval western America that seems in perpetual danger of being destroyed by humanity’s relentless addiction to oil.

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Ep. 25: Thinking About Big History in One Western Place | The American West Apr 07, 2026

A road trip with Steven Rinella across the High Plains to the Blackwater Draw Unesco Site on the border of Texas and New Mexico leads to an assessment of 13,000 years of change in one western environment, where people have practiced every kind of life way from hunting elephants to turning the plains into cotton fields and oil country.

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Ep. 24: Getting Over the Color Green and Learning to Love Badlands | The American West Mar 24, 2026

In the 20th century peculiar landforms dismissed earlier in western history with the denigrating term “badlands” became compelling locations for scientists and artists in the West. First passed over as economically worthless, these barren, colorful landscapes were translated by painters like Georgia O’Keeffe into iconic imagery. Now many are national parks and wilderness areas.

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Ep. 23: Golden-Eyed Lightning Rod | The American West Mar 10, 2026

For the first 50 years of the 20th century a new federal agency did everything in its power to disappear all wolves from the West and America. What saved the wolf was its own intelligence in the face of eradication, and the emergence of the new science of ecology, whose practitioners revealed the real animal within the legend.

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Ep. 22: New West, Modern West, Public Lands West | The American West Feb 24, 2026

The Frontier and the freedom it afforded was the shaping influence of the 19th century American West, but life in the Modern West has been formed just as powerfully by the presence of a public lands system American visionaries established a century ago. This is why they did it.

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Ep. 21: How You Create a New West, and a New America | The American West Feb 10, 2026

Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed a lifestyle and political career that made him the most important president in history for the creation of a West and a country centered on conservation. In the process his obsession with nature finally took the U.S. in a different policy direction than the countries of western Europe we had tried for three centuries to emulate.

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Ep. 20: Coyote - America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History | The American West Jan 27, 2026

Like no other western animal the coyote has been a central character in the Pleistocene West, the Native West, and the Frontier. One of the epic stories of the Modern West is how coyotes are transferring their own brand of western survivalism to the entire country. Despite a $500 million-dollar war to exterminate them, the coyote is in fact The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides.

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Ep. 19: Shadows of the Frontier | The American West Jan 13, 2026

When the U.S. Census announced in 1890 that the Frontier was over, America was plunged into a period of anxiety. As evidenced by the grand Indian photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis, western nostalgia became a dominant theme of art, film, and pop culture. Another artist of the age, though, showed that the West endures into the modern age.

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Ep. 18: From Safari American-Style to the Boone & Crockett Club | The American West Dec 30, 2025

When the long-term market exploitation of wildlife was joined by a form of elite safari hunting known as “field sports,” a massive destruction of western animals threatened to destroy millions of years of North American evolution. Teddy Roosevelt’s and George Grinnell’s Boone & Crockett Club wasn’t perfect, but it helped government usher in a new stage before Wild Wild West anarchy could run its course.

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Ep. 17: What Really Happened to America’s National Mammal? | The American West Dec 16, 2025

America’s national mammal possesses a troubling story in western history. For a century writers have presented the fate of the buffalo as brought down by a federal conspiracy that plotted the animal’s demise to undermine Native cultures. With an animal this important to American and western history, understanding the more realistic and accurate version of its 19th and 20th century story seems a critical step as we figure out how to go forward in returning America’s most iconic mammal to the modern West.

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Ep. 16: A Dream of Bison | The American West Dec 02, 2025

Present on the continent for nearly half-a-million years, the American bison’s numbers and near perfect adaptation to the Great Plains made it one of the evolutionary marvels of Earth. For more than 10,000 years, Native people in the West had intertwined their lives with bison herds to create the longest sustained economies and religious traditions in American history. Then over two centuries of whirlwind change in Native America, the bison was suddenly and mysteriously gone from the wild.

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Ep. 15: The Most Dangerous Beast? Or the God of the West? | The American West Nov 18, 2025

Grizzly bears emerged in North America nearly two-hundred thousand years ago and became the Lord Beast of the American West. Native people regarded them as formidable animal gods. Europeans and Americans thought of them as wildlands monsters that needed to be eliminated. Saved before they disappeared, today grizzly bears are surviving, spreading, and distinguish the Mountain West from all other regions in the Lower 48.

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Ep. 14: Wolf West | The American West Nov 04, 2025

As a native family of American animals, for more than five million years wolves of various kinds have been keystone predators of western ecologies. Before humans arrived they shaped the West more than any other mammal species. Numerous, nearly tame, and admired by Native people, wolves continued this role until the arrival of people from the Old World initiated a continent-wide war against wolves. While wolf pelts became a target of the western market hunt, into the early 20th century most wolves were destroyed by bounty hunters and “wolfers,” who trapped and poisoned hundreds of thousands of wolves at the behest of livestock associations and state governments.

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Ep. 13: A Western Geography of Hope | The American West Oct 21, 2025

Dramatic and inspirational western landscapes have been a powerful feature of western history throughout time. During and after the Civil War, a group of adventuring artists and photographers helped divert America’s gaze from the horrors of war by seeking out the most dramatic western landscapes and painting or photographing their scenery. By the 1870s most Americans and many people around the world knew about the Wind River Range, Yosemite, the Colorado Rockies, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, and other iconic features of western topography. As Dan relates, since Albert Bierstadt and other adventurers first portrayed them, all those places and many more in the West have never lost their magic and now make up some of the most famous scenery in the world.

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Ep. 12: John James Audubon and Vanishing America | The American West Oct 07, 2025

Before 1850 the artist and naturalist John James Audubon was America’s most famous celebrity. His Birds of America was widely regarded as “the greatest monument ever erected by art to nature.” But like Thoreau, Audubon was also a witness to the growing destruction of wild America. That was particularly evident when he and his sons journeyed up the Missouri River in the early 1840s to finish Audubon’s book on the mammals of America. Stunned at the staggering diversity and abundance of wild creatures visible in the West, Audubon soon despaired at the wholesale (and to him) senseless destruction he saw, a disturbing insight into human nature on a continent Audubon loved and tried to preserve in paint and words.

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Ep. 11: Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses | The American West Sep 23, 2025

When the western artist George Catlin journeyed to the Southern Plains in 1834 the animal that caught his attention there was the wild horse, which covered the country in immense herds. Little known to Catlin, or to Thomas Jefferson, who longed to know about horses in their natural state, horses were so successful in the western wilds because they were original natives of North America. Eventually a trade in wild horses dominated the southern West the way the fur trade did in the North. Native people initiated the trade, Hispanics in Texas perfected the art of capture, and from 1790 into the 1850s independent American traders captured, traded for, and drove wild horses east to supply the advancing American frontier. Little known in western history because until the 1920s it lacked a corporate player, the wild horse trade was an unexpected success and mustangers a working-class phenomenon of the West.

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Ep. 10: Start of the Endgame for the Ancient West | The American West Sep 09, 2025

When Lewis & Clark saw the West in the first years of the 1800s it still preserved the healthy biodiversity of Native-managed ecologies in place for 10,000 years. Within thirty years, everything had changed. Americans arrived in the West with religious traditions that taught animals were created solely for human use. And they introduced an economic system that made western animals commodities in a global market, an economy that snagged Native people in the trade and created the first American millionaires. By 1840 ancient western ecologies evolved around sea otters, fur seals, beavers and many other species were collapsing in both the interior and on the coasts. For some the period produced romantic figures like the mountain men. Witnessing such destruction, however, even some of their peers saw the casual loss of the ancient West very differently.

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Ep. 09: Catlin’s and Bodmer’s "Time Machine Visuals" | The American West Aug 26, 2025

Landscapes, wildlife, and Native people dominated the fascination with the early American West, but imagining that world is not easy. Fortunately, two talented and committed painters, one American and one European, left the future a rich and varied body of “Time Machine Visuals” of the Missouri River West in the 1830s. George Catlin was a Pennsylvanian whose life’s work was to be the historian of Native people. Catlin was a Romantic who believed preserving the West’s landscapes, animals, and Indian peoples was essential to the future. Karl Bodmer was the supremely talented painter on a Prussian prince’s 1833-4 journey up the Missouri, whose marvelous paintings have enabled modern Native people and Hollywood to re-discover the early West. Both men are celebrated now for their visual portrayals of a lost world.

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Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries | The American West Aug 12, 2025

Despite an ancient Native inhabitation and recent European settlements and forays around the perimeter of the West, in the early 19th century much of the interior West was still a place of conjecture, rumor, and mystery. What was out there? What kind of never-known phenomena did the West hold? For the brand-new United States and its Indian Agents, winning the western tribes with trade was essential geopolitics. But as happened with John Colter’s “Hell,” the future Yellowstone Park, those traders often returned with accounts that were hard to believe. Like Colter and in the same years, a trader named Anthony Glass in the southern West convinced the Comanche and Wichita Indians to reveal to him an astounding western mystery that excited the Southwestern frontier for three decades. Hauled to civilization, it would stand as one of America’s most intriguing contributions to global science from the early West.

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Ep. 07: Jefferson’s "Other" Lewis & Clark | The American West Jul 29, 2025

Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U.S. scientific exploration into the country’s new Louisiana Purchase. Just as compelling to him was a second major expedition into the southern reaches of Louisiana, for which he chose two leaders – Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis – who had a similar opportunity to become famous early American explorers into the West. Dispatched up the Red River of the South in 1806 with a bigger party and twice the congressional appropriation of Lewis and Clark, Freeman and Custis suffered a very different fate, one that assigned them to the dustbin of American history and made Jefferson’s “Grand Expedition” a forgotten western story.

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Ep. 06: Survivors From A Lost World | The American West Jul 15, 2025

America’s pronghorn antelope has long struck observers as a beautiful feature of western landscapes, but as an enigma. Why does it run so fast? Why can’t it jump obstacles? And for those who really know its biography, why did its population fall from 15 million to a mere 5,000 over the course of a single century? This episode answers all those questions by arguing that the pronghorn is an American original who, like us, is the sole remaining member of a large, ancient family of animals. And that it seems enigmatic only because it is one of the few survivors of America’s Pleistocene extinctions, with behaviors strongly shaped by the vanished world to which it evolved.

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Ep. 05: The Wild New World of the American Serengeti | The American West Jul 01, 2025

In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remarkably different from those of the East, the Great Plains and its wildlife seemed the most fascinating part of the West, an “American Serengeti.” Commencing with Lewis and Clark’s adventures and their attempts to catalog western wildlife, it took the entire 19th century for American explorers to introduce to science the staggering biological diversity Native America had bequeathed the United States. Accounts from Lewis and Clark to Stephen Long to C. Hart Merriam give us inspiring descriptions of what the Natural West was only two centuries ago.

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Ep. 04: Old Man America | The American West Jun 17, 2025

Thousands of years ago Native people in the West chose, among all the possibilities, the coyote as the deity animal in their various stories of North America’s creation. Then they proceeded to fashion thousands of stories around “Old Man America,” the oldest literary figure in America. Long described as a Trickster, the deity Coyote actually was a human avatar whose stories richly conveyed human nature in both its admirable and not-so-admirable forms. As part coyote and part human, deity Coyote stands in a progression of human gods, one whose insights into human nature have allowed him to survive into the modern age.

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Ep. 03: Raven’s and Coyote’s America | The American West Jun 03, 2025

For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their concrete reasons for why, and how, Native America achieved this kind of environmental success?

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Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful | The American West May 20, 2025

Thirteen-thousand years ago the first human culture to colonize all of North America, in this case from Pacific to Atlantic shores, was the Clovis culture of highly-proficient Siberian hunters. While they may not have been the first humans in America, the 1930s discovery of this “Clovisia the Beautiful” launched a century-long debate about their role in a remarkable series of extinctions – the loss of most of America’s African-like megafauna – coinciding with their arrival. Are Clovis and later Folsom cultures the American architects of the early stages of today’s Sixth Extinction?

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Ep. 01: West of Everything | The American West May 06, 2025

The American West fascinates people from around the world, but there are many different kinds of iconic western stories. Author Dan Flores has spent a career writing about what he calls the Natural West, stories about nature, animals, and people that span thousands of years of time in the western half of America. Although we reflexively think of history in America as new, this first episode emphasizes the West's true age by focusing on the great Chacoan Empire of a thousand years ago and what happened among its refugees in the Southwest in the wake of Chaco’s collapse from environmental causes.

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Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores Apr 29, 2025

New from the MeatEater Podcast Network: Long-time western author Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you've never encountered. Covering a vast time span in a western America whose landscapes and wild animals drew people from around the world, this podcast tells a new story of our most fascinating region.

Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't miss episode one coming out May 6th!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050
iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/
Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west

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