An American Dirty War
Much has been made of Texas exceptionalism. Of the fifty states, Texas is the only one to have defeated a foreign power at war and the only one to emerge as an independent nation as a result. But the state was also exceptional in less flattering ways. 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 Mexican army, and the Native American frontier, the site of hundreds of battles and atrocities mainly involving the Comanche and their allies. What emerged was a highly martial culture.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Texas cowboys, cattlemen, and outlaws took part in, and often initiated, the notable gunfights of Earp’s Tombstone and Dodge City, the frenzied shoot-outs of Billy the Kid’s New Mexico, the showdowns of Hickok’s Kansas, and the cattle wars of Wyoming. And that’s to say nothing of the gun battles in Texas itself, which saw more than any other state. Take away Texans—Texas cowboys, Texas outlaws, and Texas lawmen—and the American gunfighter era shrinks to insignificance.
Bill O’Neal, an author and former Texas state historian, identified nearly 600 major gunfights on the frontier, of which 160, nearly 30 percent, occurred in Texas. “No other Western commonwealth was the arena of even half as many shootings,” he noted. Further, he found, “more gunfighters were born in Texas than in any other state or territory, and more died in Texas than in any other state. . . . Ten of the deadliest fifteen spent most of their careers in Texas.”
The association of Texans and lethal gunfights was established as early as the 1870s. You can find editorials published in New York in 1878 that decried Texas-bred gun violence. “The name of Texas became the synonym for savagery,” the writer Emerson Hough, who moved to the New Mexican frontier in the 1880s, declared in 1907. “So many bad men of Texas have attained reputation far wider than their state that it became a proverb upon the frontier that any man born on Texas soil would shoot, just as any horse born there would ‘buck.’ ”