“Cock-Eyed” Frank Loving – Dueling Gunfighterįrank MacNab – Killed in the Lincoln County War

Wild Bill Longley – A Dangerous Man in Dangerous Times “Buckskin Frank” Leslie – Another Tombstone Rowdy John Wesley Hardin & The Shootist Archetype Wyatt Earp – Frontier Lawman of the American West Pony Deal – Outlaw & Gunfighter of the Southwest Index and Summaries of Old West Gunfightersīud Ballew – Gunfighter & Lawman of OklahomaĮmmanuel “Mannen” Clements, Sr. © Kathy Weiser-Alexander/ Legends of America, updated November 2021 “Never run a bluff with a six-gun.” – Bat Masterson Most of the shootings occurred in Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, California, Missouri, and Colorado during these violent days. However, those gunmen who used their skills on the side of the law would persistently live longer lives than those who lived a life of crime. Though about a third of the gunman died of “natural causes,” many died violently in gunfights, lynchings, or legal executions. In many cases, these violent men could move quickly from fighting on the side of the law to utilizing their talents in a life of crime. It was often difficult to sort out the gunfighters, whose occupations ranged from lawmen to cowboys, ranchers, gamblers, farmers, teamsters, bounty hunters, and outlaws. Other lesser-known shootists that saw just as much, if not more action than their well-known counterparts were men such as Ben Thompson, Tom Horn, Kid Curry, Timothy Courtright, King Fisher, Scott Cooley, Clay Allison, and Dallas Stoudenmire, to name a few. Such was the case with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok.

In other cases, their reputations were enhanced by self-promotion. In many instances, their reputations developed from one particular instance, and as the rumors grew, so did their prowess with a gun. Of those that fit more easily into the perception of the “gunfighter,” rarely did they kill as many men in gunfights as most were given credit for. Most of these were fought over land or water rights, some were political, and others were “old Hatfield-McCoy” style differences between families or lifestyles. In actuality, the “real” gunfights of the Old West were rarely that “civilized.” Many of the men listed on our Gunfighters pages fought in the many range wars and feuds of the Old West, which were far more common than the “stand-off” gunfight. No, they didn’t squarely face off with each other from a distance in a dusty street, like movies and television would like us to believe. Though our Complete List of Old West Gunfighters provides the names of hundreds of gunmen, many might not term them true “gunfighters” in the widespread sense of the word today. That being said, Bat Masterson, a noted gunfighter himself, who later became a writer for the New York Morning Telegraph, sometimes referred to them as “gunfighters,” but, more often, as “man killers.” During the days of the “real” Wild West, men who had gained a reputation as being dangerous with a gun were more commonly called gunmen, pistoleers, shootists, or bad men. It’s a colorful story-but the truth is even better.ĭrawing on new material from private collections-including diaries, letters, and Wyatt Earp’s own hand-drawn sketch of the shootout’s conclusion-as well as archival research, Jeff Guinn gives us a startlingly different and far more fascinating picture of what actually happened that day in Tombstone and why.The terms “ gunfighter” or “gunslinger,” as they are most often called today, are actually more modern words utilized in films and literature of the 20th Century. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons became the stuff of legends, symbolic of a frontier populated by good guys in white hats and villains in black ones. Corral would shape how future generations came to view the Old West. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, a confrontation between eight armed men erupted in a deadly shootout. A New York Times bestseller, Jeff Guinn’s definitive, myth-busting account of the most famous gunfight in American history reveals who Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons and McLaurys really were and what the shootout was all about-“the most thorough account of the gunfight and its circumstances ever published” ( The Wall Street Journal)

Osketch of old west gunfight