‘Every Account A Little Different’: Who are the real Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday? | books

THere’s a famous line from a Western by John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Mark Lee Gardner is a prominent historian of the Old West, and his new book, “Brothers of the Gun: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and a Tombstone Reckoning,” concerns two key figures in this history. He doesn’t like the Ford line.

“All the historians use him, they beat him to death,” a beaming Gardner says via video from Bozeman, Montana.

“And that’s not really true. I wrote a story. I want people to immerse themselves in that line, but I’m so tired of that line. A myth is a myth. It never becomes true. People can repeat a myth but it doesn’t make it true. It’s just a catchy thing that people internalized decades ago. And you’ll notice I didn’t use it. I mentioned it, but I didn’t use it.”

Brothers of the Gun is both scholarly and engaging, the story of two unlikely but enduring friends, Earp, the complex but upstanding lawman, and Holliday, the reckless gambler, afflicted with tuberculosis.

In Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881, Earp and Holliday engaged in a shootout that became known as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Along with the Earp brothers, the pair encountered the Cowboys, gang members wanted for robbery and robbery. In less than a minute, three of the cowboys were killed and Holiday was wounded, as were Virgil and Morgan Earp.

It was one of countless borderline pieces between lawmen and outlaws, yet it has entered legend, not least because of classic films including My Darling Clementine, directed by Ford in 1946 and starring Henry Fonda as Earp and Victor Mature as Holiday, and Gunfight at the OK Corral, directed by John Sturges in 1957, with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the lead roles.

“A lot of what we know about it is verifiable,” Gardner said of the actual fighting and the aftermath, including killings on both sides. “But I always go back to one of the best quotes, which is a very simple quote. Addie Borland, the seamstress who lives across the street and who witnessed the fight. People would ask for details, and she said, ‘I don’t know.’ “It was all confusion.”

“Even the people there had different stories. I often cite testimony from what we call the Spicer session, which is also confusing. There are people who are friends of the cowboys, so they’re actually lying, and every story is a little different. It’s rare that someone agrees on anything. So I think of Borland’s quote, ‘It was all confusion.’ Even the people involved were confused. So it’s really hard to pull off, and it happened in 30 seconds.”

“And that’s the funny part. I just get angrier every time I think about this. You wouldn’t believe how many books have all these huge diagrams of a gunfight. They’ll show every stage. You know, ‘Doc was standing here, and Wyatt was here, and this is their movement, from Allen Street,’ all the way down, they’re tracking with dotted lines. And then they got diagrams where people were, you know, for 30 seconds…people are very interested in seeing ‘what exactly happened’. Well, I’m sorry, I think I know That, but I can’t give you frame by frame of what’s going on, because even these people, their stories are kind of different.

This is America. Stories have always been a hard currency. Wyatt Earp lived in the Hollywood era, and died in 1929, at the age of 80, after many battles over his story, who should tell it and how. First depicted on a silent film screen in 1923, he went on to become the subject of these two great mid-century Westerns, and in relatively recent years has been played by Kurt Russell (Tombstone, Val Kilmer as Holiday, 1993) and Kevin Costner (Wyatt Earp, with Dennis Quaid, 1994). On the small screen, Wyatt and Morgan Earp appeared in the hit HBO series Deadwood, parts based on their brief stay in the gold rush town.

Gardner practices myth making to find the men beneath them. His books cover the area of ​​the Old West. He was devoted from childhood, and as an adult he wrote for the first time “the definitive study of the wagons on the Santa Fe Road, and indeed the only study of them.” He has since written about Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Jesse James, Teddy Roosevelt and his fellow Roughnecks, and, most recently, “The Land Is All That Lasts,” an award-winning story called “Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation.” His next book will return to James, the Missouri outlaw played by Brad Pitt, and his time as a cutter in the Civil War.

Gardner refuses to romanticize such characters. Earp and Holiday spent time on both sides of the law, in a world of violence and greed.

Born in Monmouth, Illinois, in 1848, Earp was too young to fight in the Civil War, although he tried to do so. When he was 20, he “became a policeman in Lamar, Missouri, this little town, which had no police academy or training. Mistakes were made. White has a tragedy in his life with the death of his wife” – Orilla Sutherland, who contracted typhoid in 1870 – and then, as a policeman, Earp kept for himself the tax money he collected.

“We don’t know why he kept it,” Gardner says. “He runs away, and ends up in Oklahoma. He’s arrested for stealing a horse, and then he’s in Illinois, and he’s running a brothel. I mean, he’s a literal pimp. His wife is a prostitute, or his common-law wife, or whatever else is important, whatever you call it. Finally he heads west, and ends up in Wichita, Kansas, and tries to help the law officer there. There’s a terrible murder, and he impresses the police chief, gets a job and excels at it.”

“Now, here’s the irony: Wyatt Earp is a cop in Wichita, and his wife works in a brothel, and so does his sister-in-law, but he’s an outstanding police officer. Everybody says it. The newspapers, you read the quotes. They’re always praising him in the newspapers. There’s one case where he arrested a drunk and he owed $500. Any other officer might have put that money in his pocket and said he didn’t know what a drunk was. We talk about it but no. Earp keeps the money for drunk and gives it back when he’s released from prison, the same The thing happened in Dodge City.

“He was repeatedly praised as an officer of the law, and later, when White was in [Spicer] At the hearing to decide whether to face trial for murder after the OK Corral, he receives these letters from Wichita and Dodge City, signed by all these citizens, and praising him even to the stars.

Brothers in Arms illustrates this fascinating side of the Old West: the friction between law and lawlessness, or the authorities trying to exert control over newly emerging societies, or those societies trying to govern themselves. The amount of bureaucracy that follows a shootout—hearings, depositions, compensation orders—may be surprising, at least to a reader who grew up on Clint Eastwood films, Men with No Names contemplating vast, terrible lands.

Moreover, as Gardner shows, Earp and Holliday were as involved in hard politics as any prominent American from the nation’s dawn until now. Earp was a Republican. Tombstone Sheriff Johnny Behan was a Democrat and a contender for influence and office.

Gardner’s main characters were very different men. Holliday—born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1851, a dentist, hence “Doc”—was promiscuous but generally not a thief.

“You know, White at least tried to be different than he was when he was young,” Gardner says. “He’s trying to better himself. And in Tombstone, he’s building a house, doing all the right things… I kind of sympathize with him.”

“Now, Doc Holliday, White said, was kind of his own worst enemy. I don’t know that I’m buying into that fatalism”—part of the enduring myth that Holliday’s fatal sentence with tuberculosis is supposed to have sparked a streak of recklessness. “There are instances where he didn’t want to die…but unlike Wyatt, he’s not buying a house. You don’t see these signs that he’s going to settle down. Doc just goes from one gambling place, or boom town, to another, and doesn’t really change. And part of that is his gambling addiction. Part of that is tuberculosis, dealing with it and self-medicating, whether it’s with alcohol or later with laudanum. He doesn’t seem to have that ambition that Wyatt does.”

“Wyatt is ambitious. He wants to be somebody, and he sees these different steps: deputy sheriff, but he wants to be county sheriff. He’s trying to better himself. And I don’t see that with Doc Holliday. He stays the same all the time.”