It’s the first collaboration between MeatEater and Bryan Burrough, an award-winning journalist at The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and Texas Monthly. Bryan is also the author of eight books, four of them New York Times best-sellers. This new podcast is based on his 2025 book, The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild, published by Penguin Press.
In the podcast, Bryan tells the narrative history of what he calls The Gunfighter Era, from 1865 to 1901, the thirty-six years between the first post-Civil War gunfight to receive national acclaims and the moment the frontier’s last two outlaws of note, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, boarded a steamer in Brooklyn to flee to South America. It wraps the stories of all the great Old West gunfighters, from Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok to Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday, into a single overarching narrative story.
Most episodes focus on a single gunfighter or a single incredible exchange of gunfire. You can watch the trailer below for more information.
“This is the first podcast I’ve done like this, and I couldn’t be more excited to be doing it with MeatEater,” Bryan said. “This is based on research and reading I’ve been doing since I was like eleven years old. These are just great American stories, crucial little building blocks in the cultural structure America has become. Just to be able to exhume these stories and present them in the freshest way possible, to give them the attention and the context they deserve, I mean, it’s a real honor.”
The first episode of Gunfighters, with Bryan Burrough, debuts Tuesday, Sept. 15th. New episodes will drop weekly. Get notified when the first episode drops by following the show now on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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