INVENTING WYATT EARP: His Life and Many Legends
By Allen Barra
Caroll & Graf, 426 pages, $27
`Most western nicknames had nothing to do with the people who acquired them,” writes Allen Barra near the end of this probing, witty work of historical sleuthing. “Wild Bill Hickok wasn’t wild (or) even a Bill (his real name was James Butler). . . . Black Bart wasn’t black; Dirty Dave Rudabaugh was no dirtier than most of his friends; Hurricane Bill Morton was mostly hot air; Indian Charlie wasn’t an Indian; Mysterious Dave Mather wasn’t mysterious; Buffalo Bill didn’t kill any more buffalo than a couple of hundred other men; and Wyatt Earp’s friend, Texas Jack Vermillion, when asked why he was called Texas Jack, said, ` ‘Cause I’m from Virginia.’ “
Wyatt Earp needed no nickname to mint his celebrity. On a chilly October afternoon in 1881, the deputy federal marshal walked with brothers Virgil and Morgan Earp and sidekick John “Doc” Holliday into a gun battle with a gaggle of cattle rustlers at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz., one rough outpost. When the smoke cleared, Earp’s pants were singed by bullets, but he alone among the eight gunmen was unharmed. His brothers, Holliday and one rustler were wounded; the other three thieves were dead (a fifth had fled before the first shot was fired). The legend of Wyatt Earp was about to take off.
Barra is no garden variety deconstructionist. Where some academics have delved beneath the surface text of the Old West’s most famous lawman–the fast-shooter memorialized in TV shows and film–to find a subtext of class warfare and social cleavages (with Earp’s violence a mirror of westward-ho manifest destiny), Barra, who writes a sports column for The Wall Street Journal, lines up the mythmaking process in his crosshairs. Barra is interested in how stories are told, reported and confected. “Inventing Wyatt Earp” is less a biography than an investigation of how the Earp myth emerged from primary sources into articles, books and films.
At times the text sags with so many names, accounts and counteraccounts that one wishes Barra had made more ruthless use of footnotes. Nevertheless, the life of Wyatt Earp, in broad-brush terms, is a grand, often fascinating account of a man who went from small-town Missouri constable in 1870 to a living legend in 1920s Hollywood, parceling out observations to filmmakers about his rendezvous with destiny at the O.K. Corral that windswept day in 1881.
At the time of the gunfight, Virgil Earp was the U.S. marshal for Tombstone, a frontier town where the sheriff, one John Behan, was in cahoots with a group of cattle rustlers. By 1880, Barra says, men who roamed the West stealing cattle had become known, ironically, as cowboys. In the 1950s, when Hugh O’Brian played Wyatt Earp on one of TV’s most popular westerns, millions of kids identified cowboys as good guys. But according to Barra, the term “cowboys” originally connoted criminals–violent, hard-drinking men who raided ranches as far south as Mexico and moved the stolen cattle along Southwestern trails to sell at boomtowns.
By age 33, Wyatt Earp, who was born March 19, 1848, in Monmouth, Ill., had worked in various Western towns as a rancher, hunter, sheriff, deputy sheriff, guard of a Wells Fargo stagecoach and saloonkeeper, which carried an implicit investment in gambling. Cowboys and cowhands (the legitimate ranch workers) drank and gambled in the rough-and-tumble towns; prostitution thrived.
Tensions between the three Earp brothers, Behan and the cattle rustlers were building through 1881. The Earps had investments in local mines and were pulling in profits from real estate and gambling tables. A shadow story of this warrior chronicle was Wyatt’s deteriorating marriage and deepening interest in Josephine Marcus, an adventurous girl from a German-Jewish family, “high-spirited and stunningly beautiful,” who ran away from home in San Francisco, found her way to Arizona and became Behan’s mistress, “a fact she later fought hard to conceal from prying biographers.” That, writes Barra, “is one of the reasons the Earp story would be told for more than half a century without the glittering jewel that was its center.” Barra deems Marcus’ “I Married Wyatt Earp” a shrewdly selective memoir that in the later world of Hollywood exerted undue power over the story. Although she and Earp were together 47 years, no marriage certificate was ever found. Nor were the details of her relationship with Behan given full flesh in her memoir’s accounting of the O.K Corral shootout.
The dead cowboys were buried with a brass-band funeral, a major event in Tombstone, and one indicative of the stark political divisions between the Earps and Behan in a town where partisan newspapers attacked with tabloid readiness. The shootout spelled bad publicity to merchants. The sheriff engineered an inquest, but the Earps were acquitted. One of Earp’s brothers was subsequently murdered. Earp took off on a vendetta ride, stalked the murderer and, Barra argues persuasively, killed him. Earp and Marcus left Tombstone and eventually found their way to California, with stretches in San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles, interrupted by a stint of gold-mining in Nevada.
Legends rise from yellowed newsprint; how the stories followed Earp is central to Barra’s narrative. “What Wyatt couldn’t understand, couldn’t begin to understand, was that he had become the representative figure of an era that Americans would always look to when questions of the influence of the frontier on our national character or the relation of force to law would arise. . . . (His) story was being reshaped with dramatic suddenness in newspapers, magazines, and books.”
The taciturn Earp occasionally wrote to newspapers complaining of inaccuracies. But as he moved on in life, enjoying racetracks and investing and profits from saloons and gambling, the legend of Earp-at-Tombstone, however colored by factual distortion, embroidered his persona. As the film industry burgeoned, Earp and Marcus mingled with stars like Tom Mix, directors like John Ford, writers like Jack London. And so in his sunset years, the old warrior of Tombstone watched the resurrection of his exploits through celluloid. By all accounts he enjoyed himself in Hollywood, where then, as now, people paid for good stories. He died in 1929 at age 81, a happy man, the evidence suggests.
