Growing up we Boomers witnessed the advent of television while being weaned on movies that presented a simplistic, almost childlike, image of what frontier life was like in the American West. The lines were starkly drawn: there were White Hats (the good guys), Black Hats (the bad guys), a saloon on every corner, Indian raids, daily showdowns ending in gunfire that left the villain oozing blood on a dusty main street, and law’n’order triumphant…all in the span of 45 minutes (plus commercials).
The truth ~ as revealed in a riveting 2004 book by professor Steven Lubet ~ on the shootout that launched a thousand TV series (Bat Masterson, Have Gun Will Travel, Sugarfoot, Maverick and, last but not least, The Legend of Wyatt Earp) plus an untold number of B-westerns, was far more ambiguous and vexing than fans of the genre would ever have guessed:
- there were eyewitnesses to the shootout who stated the slain cowboys (brothers Frank and Tom Laury and Billy Clanton) were trying to surrender and never brandished or reached for a gun before the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday sent them to the Promised Land in a blaze of gunfire that lasted less than 30 seconds;
- Doc Holliday was not law enforcement but was apparently deputized by Sheriff Virgil Earp minutes before the showdown; furthermore, Holliday had such a bad reputation as a hothead prone to violence that defense counsel Thomas Fitch (who emerges in the tale as a brilliant trial lawyer comparable to Gerry Spence in the present age) feared Doc’s presence alongside his clients would hopelessly prejudice potential jurors against the Earps who had enjoyed the support of Tombstone’s business class;
- Tombstone’s rival newspapers, The Nugget and The Epitaph, mirrored the deep divisions within the community towards the defendants, the “pro-cowboy” Nugget clamoring for the Earps and Holliday to swing for cold-blooded premeditated murder, while the “pro-Earp” Epitaph championed the lawmen’s efforts to clean up Tombstone and turn it into a magnet for new industry and population growth;
- In the end the defendants were found not guilty thanks to Fitch’s brilliant defense strategy (with some credit going to an inept team of prosecutors that failed to challenge holes in Wyatt’s testimony, while foolishly persisting in the cross-examination of an eyewitness who effectively demolished the integrity of the prosecution’s star witness);
Just as real life is never as neat as portrayed in television and film ~ where the knottiest issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice, are all wrapped up with pink ribbons in a bow within an hour ~ so the lives of those involved never returned to a state of normalcy and balance after the acquittal:
- Justice of the peace Wells Spicer, who presided over the highly contentious hearings that resulted in the vindication of Holliday and the Earps, did not seek re-election and eventually abandoned the practice of law, drifting into prospecting as he chased one mining claim after another with no success, until he vanished into the Sonoran Desert, where he presumably died of thirst or starvation (although alternate theories posit he may even have committed suicide or fled to Mexico to escape mounting debts);
- With fully half the territory fiercely loyal to the memory of the slain cowboys and bitter over the decision in the Earps’ favor, the vindicated brothers spent the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders for retribution to come. And come it did: less than a month after Spicer’s Nov. 30 final verdict, Virgil Earp was ambushed just before midnight on Dec. 28, 1881, by a trio of gunmen as he approached the Cosmopolitan Hotel (where he had moved his family out of fears for their safety); his left arm was almost severed by two loads of buckshot and was only saved from amputation by emergency surgery that removed five inches of bone, leaving that side of his body mostly immobile for the rest of his life. With a stoical humor usually reserved for John Ford westerns, Virgil quipped to his distraught wife, “I’ve still got one arm left to hug you with.”
- Second sibling Morgan Earp was not nearly as fortunate: on the night of March 18, 1882, a Saturday, the deputy was finishing a game of billiards with proprietor Bob Hatch at Campbell & Hatch’s Saloon when two rifle shots smashed through an upper window of the establishment. One bullet harmlessly struck the wall above Morgan’s head, but the other blast found its target, tearing into Earp’s abdomen and shattering his spinal cord in the process. He died in agony an hour later despite frantic efforts by a team of surgeons, surrounded by grief-stricken friends and family including brother Wyatt. His final words were indeed worthy of the silver screen, all the moreso for being unscripted: “Don’t, boys, don’t. I can’t stand it; I have played my last game of pool.”
- The still-unscathed and soon-to-be-legendary remaining brother Wyatt then embarked on what became known as his “Vendetta Ride”. Forming a posse he tracked down three suspects in his brother’s murder (suspects based on somewhat questionable hearsay accounts gathered along the trail), who went by the screen-ready monikers of Frank Stillwell, “Curly Bill” Brocious and the surname-less “Indian Charlie”. Within a week the three were dead at the hands of Wyatt and his squad of summary executioners. (Even Earp loyalists questioned this brand of frontier justice meted out by the lawman whose spotless reputation had originally brought him to Tombstone at the request of city fathers.)
In a final twist of fate, Wyatt Earp’s post-trial life more closely fit the profile of the desperados he pursued as a marshal, than it did that of a straight and narrow lawman: with second wife Josephine Marcus (his first wife Mattie Blaylock died a likely suicide from an overdose of laudanum) he pursued one get-rich-quick scheme after another in the ensuing decades, trying his hand at gambling, gold prospecting, selling real estate and even refereeing heavyweight boxing matches (until a controversial decision of his involving a $10,000 purse awarded by disqualification, ended that career path).
By 1905 he and Josie were living in southern California staking mining claims (that unfortunately never came to pecuniary fruition). It was during this phase that he drifted into the Los Angeles area and became a “technical advisor” to directors of cowboy movies in the then-nascent film industry (some say he was just hanging out on the sets).
Lubet’s convincingly argued and artfully crafted account of Earp’s trial — and of life in western territories on the brink of statehood and civilization — permanently altered my perception of the “Old West”. Where folklore, myth and historical fact first meet then collide, it seems fitting to end with a scene from one of my favorite westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: