The Gunfighters

Burrough sets out to dismantle the Hollywood-built myth of the quick-draw cowboy hero, tracing how dime novels and the studio system manufactured gunslinger legends that had little to do with the messier, more squalid reality of frontier violence. His conversational, quip-heavy style makes the debunking go down easily, though some readers have found the asides distracting from the historical argument itself. The subtitle's claim that Texas specifically "made the West wild" is the book's weakest thread, reviewers have noted the connective tissue between Texas and the broader gunfighter myth is asserted more than demonstrated, but as a corrective history of how legend outpaced fact, the book does what it sets out to do.