Meet the unhinged killer cowboys who made Texas legendary and the Old West wild

As much as the “Gunfighter Era” of the Old West was characterized by shoot-outs in the streets, so too was it known for tall tales and quick quips.Consider the case of Pink Higgins.Higgins stumbled upon a cattle rustler who had just killed and butchered one of his herd, so he shot the man dead and stuffed him inside the steer.As Bryan Burroughs recounts in “The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild” (Penguin Press, June 3), “then [Higgins] rode into town to tell the sheriff he should come see a miracle, a cow giving birth to a man.”The first nationally known gunfighter was “Wild Bill” Hickok, whose fame was cemented by a Harper’s Weekly profile in 1867 that claimed he’d killed “hundreds” of men.

While that number was laughably exaggerated, Wild Bill killed plenty.The first was at a Nebraska stagecoach station in 1861, when Hickok was told to butt out of a loud dispute because it was none of his business.“Perhaps ’tis,” he was said to nonchalantly reply, “Or ’tain’t.”  Then he drew his pistol, killing one man and wounding two others.    But to live by the “Gunfighter’s Code” of the Old West was to die by it, too.As a Kansas marshal in 1871, Hickok shot dead a cowboy who’d unexpectedly fired on him, but then when his own deputy came racing around a corner with guns drawn “Wild Bill” accidentally killed him, too.

Then in 1875 in Deadwood, SD, a man Hickok had beaten at poker executed America’s most famous gunfighter with a cowardly shot to the back of his head.When gunfighters weren’t killing or being killed though, a lot of time they were cracking wise. Clay Allison was a fearsome “shootist” likely suffering from Civil War PTSD, who once rode his horse through a frontier town wearing only a gun-belt.Before shooting one of his victims, Allison first invited him to dinner — the two eventually exchanging bullets right at the table.

Asked why he would invite his victim to share a meal before killing...