Dark Dialogue: Gallows and Gunfights
Step into the courtroom of the Old West. Dark Dialogue: Gallows and Gunfights puts America’s frontier legends on trial — not the polished Hollywood myths, but the real men and women who blurred the line between lawman and outlaw. Each episode is a case file: we cross-examine sheriffs who bent the law, outlaws who wore badges, and entrepreneurs whose empires were built with bullets as much as ledgers. From Billy the Kid and Doc Scurlock to Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, and the Murphy–Dolan monopoly, the West’s most infamous names take the witness stand. The format is testimony. The evidence comes from court records, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and the blood-stained paper trail they left behind. You, the listener, are the jury — asked to weigh truth against legend, justice against survival. If Dark Dialogue uncovers modern mysteries and Rocky Mountain Reckoning revisits frontier cold cases, Gallows and Gunfights is where history itself is indicted. The verdict? That’s for you to decide. Subscribe and join the trial of the American West — where reputations hang by a thread, justice is slippery, and myth finally faces cross-examination.
Episodes
The courtroom of the Old West is open — and our first witness is Billy the Kid.
In the debut of Dark Dialogue: Gallows and Gunfights, we strip away the dime-novel myths to uncover how Henry McCarty — a bright, polite boy from the slums of New York — became William H. Bonney, the young Regulator at the center of the Lincoln County War.
This episode follows his journey from crowded tenements in Manhattan to the rough mining town of S...
The roll call of the Regulators is not complete. In this second installment of Dark Dialogue: Gallows and Gunfights, John and Angela return to the witness stand of history to finish the testimony of the men who stood with Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War.
Bound together by the cold-blooded murder of John Tunstall, the Regulators were ranch hands, drifters, and lawmen who became vigilantes in a county where the law itself...
Before Billy the Kid ever drew his gun, before the Regulators ever swore vengeance, Lincoln County was already lost—sold, signed, and sealed by a handful of men who turned commerce into tyranny.
In Dark Dialogue: Gallows & Gunfights – The House Always Wins — Until It Doesn’t, John and Angela open the record on the empire that ruled the New Mexico Territory through ledgers, credit, and fear. From Lawrence Murphy’s mercantile mon...
Power didn’t die with the gunfights in Lincoln County—it just learned how to legislate.
In this installment of Gallows and Gunfights, we peel back the curtain on the Santa Fe Ring, the shadow government that turned the New Mexico Territory into its personal empire. These weren’t outlaws in dusters—they were judges, governors, and businessmen whose weapons were contracts, decrees, and seals of office.
Host John McColl and Angela tra...
Billy the Kid wasn’t born a legend — the road made him one. In Billy the Kid Part 5: The Road to Lincoln – The Return of the Kid, Dark Dialogue: Gallows & Gunfights rides straight into the violence, betrayal, and frontier politics that pushed a teenage ranch hand into the center of the Lincoln County War.
This episode dives deep into the pivotal stretch of 1877–1878, when Billy fled Arizona, returned to New Mexico, and walked r...
When the sun rose over Lincoln on July 15, 1878, the town wasn’t waking up — it was bracing for war.
Billy the Kid, Doc Scurlock, Tom O’Folliard, Jim French, and nearly sixty Regulators fortified the McSween home and Tunstall store, carving rifle portholes into adobe walls as they prepared for the inevitable clash with Sheriff George Peppin, The House, and their hired guns.
Across the street, Peppin and James Dolan transformed the ...
On the second day of a siege, the gunfire matters less than the waiting.
Day Two of the Battle of Lincoln (July 16, 1878) does not erupt—it calcifies. The town seals itself shut. Civilians barricade behind adobe walls. Gunmen hold positions they cannot abandon. And law enforcement, unable to compel surrender, begins looking upward for force it cannot legally command.
In this episode of Gallows & Gunfights, we examine Day Two of...
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