Arthur Morgan is a killer, whether the player goes for high or low honor. Despite being one of Red Dead Redemption 2's most likable characters, even at his best Arthur is responsible for the deaths of plenty of people. No matter what the player does, Arthur still commits some heinous acts. He even beats a sick, charitable man to near-death, contracting the tuberculosis that he suffers from for the rest of his short life.
Many of the characters in Red Dead Redemption 2 are based on famous on-screen gunslingers, many of whom are also based on some of the larger-than-life personalities who really did rob and shoot their way through the old west. Compared to Arthur, however, the amount of people these real-life figures killed may be surprising. Here's how Arthur stacks up to the most famous outlaws of his time.
Calculating Arthur's Kill Count
Calculating Arthur Morgan's kill count poses some huge challenges, not least that the player has a huge say in how many people Arthur kills. In fact, the player can pretty much rampage across Rockstar's fictional United States, leaving hundreds of bodies in their wake. With that in mind, there are a few ways fans can breakdown the rough number of people Arthur has killed.
There are times where killing people is optional, like the man who recognizes Arthur in Valentine. Even players who take the High Honor route throughout Red Dead 2 will find that Arthur has usually killed around 900 people by the time of his death. Under the generous assumption that all of Arthur's kills outside of the main story are non-canon, Arthur still kills well over 100 people during the events of Red Dead 2 alone.
If only non-optional named character kills are counted, Arthur's victims include Sheriff Leigh Gray, Alberto Fussar, and Colonel Henry Favours. The problem is there are also plenty of times in the main story when Arthur shoots multiple unnamed people at once, such as when saving John Marston during the stand-off in Valentine by taking out Leviticus Cornwall's men. It's hard to write off these encounters as non-canon in the same way players might with random encounters in the game's open world. The story of Red Dead 2 makes no sense unless Arthur has killed hundreds of people, regardless of how players approach the game. That fact alone puts him in stark contrast with many real-life outlaws.
Comparing Arthur's Kill Count To Real Gunslingers
Jesse James, one of America's most famous gunslingers, only ever claimed to have killed 17 people over his 16-year career. It's possible Jesse or subsequent storytellers exaggerated this number, but it seems unlikely that he murdered more people than he laid claim to, although this number doesn't include the Union soldiers he killed while fighting as a guerilla during the US Civil War. It already hints at the trend, however - if Arthur Morgan was real, he would be one of the single most prolific killers not just in the Old West, but in the entirety of American history.
Billy the Kid supposedly killed 21 people before he turned 21 years old, though other estimates put that number closer to 9. If Billy really did kill 21 people, he did so between the years 1877 and 1881. That means he was killing around 5 people per year. Arthur Morgan's kill count may dwarf Billy the Kid's, but Arthur Morgan died at 36. Assuming Arthur killed roughly the same average number of people per year and started at the same age as Billy, he would have killed almost 50 people by the time he died, which would still make him one of the most prolific killers in American history.
Arthur's kill count may be far closer to John Wesley Hardin, known for being one of the Wild West's most dangerous outlaws. Hardin's total kill count is subject to speculation, but by his 21st birthday he is claimed to have killed 27 people, and killed dozens more over the course of his violent life. The total number of people he killed is believed to be around 40 or 50.
Clearly Arthur Morgan killed far, far more people in 1889 alone than even America's most infamous outlaws managed over their entire lifetimes. Looking into the kill counts of America's most wanted Wild West criminals, however, and another trend becomes clear. Many of the murders committed by famous outlaws were subject to exaggeration. Men who would become known as iconic gunslingers often only had a couple of kills to their name. Even Doc Holliday, immortalized in the movie Tombstone, is only confirmed to have killed 2 men across 8 shoot-outs over his entire life.
Red Dead Redemption And Realism
Arthur kills a ridiculously unrealistic number of people, but that's part of the point. Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't just take place in a world where people like Dutch van der Linde are obsessed with mythologizing the Old West; it takes place in a world where much of the mythologizing that period of history has undergone is in fact real to a degree.
The game plays with the tropes of the genre from the inside out, accepting what it knows to be several false premises. The version of the Old West that Dutch longs for is tinted by nostalgia, but through the game's most outlandish elements, Rockstar reminds the player that even the events they're directly witness to are taking place in a version of the Old West that never existed at all.
Perhaps that's part of the point of Arthur's own eventual death. The idea of a man who killed hundreds of people finding redemption through a few good acts seems ridiculous when fans do the math, but when Arthur dies, perhaps a romantic version of the west where such feats and acts of redemption are possible is supposed to die with him. It's certainly when Dutch's dream of recapturing the past success of the Van der Linde gang dies, even if he can't bring himself to change his ways.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.