The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American

This caught my eye the last time I swung through the library because I really didn’t know the story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral. Mary Doria Russell’s Doc piqued my interest in the subject.

Doc was a fictionalize exploration of a man usually portrayed as a cold-blooded killer. Ms. Russell traced his childhood, young adulthood and the course of his tuberculosis and alcoholism, and questioned whether Doc Holliday wasn’t motivated by friendship and self-preservation far more than ill tempered malice. Doc focused on a period preceding the O.K. Corral gunfight by a number of years.

Mr. Guinn’s slant is much more traditional, and presents the “Shootout” as his centerpiece. His attention is on the Earps, whom he presents as complex, ambitious men. He dismisses Doc Holliday as a gun-toting brute. Ike Clanton, on the other hand, is portrayed as a blowhard – a stupid and cowardly drunk who inadvertently set the massacre in motion yet escaped with his skin whole. The political aspirations, feuds, ambitions and greed of these and other men precipitated the gunfight, Guinn argues.

Many of the primary sources were familiar from Ms. Russell’s volume. This volume offers a background of the forces that created the “Wild, Wild, West”, and of the (mostly men) that populated the deserts and cow-towns – miners, farmers ranchers, drovers, merchants, bankers – and Wells Fargo. Tombstone itself was founded by a prospector who made a big strike after being told that he was prospecting for his own tombstone.  

In Guinn’s view, the main motivator of the actors – male - was raw ambition. Women barely exist except for whore and wives (who are sometimes the same women),and  lack all agency. The sole exception is the “difficult” (a familiar caricature) Josephine, who took up with Wyatt Earp in a tempestuous relationship after he left Tombstone.

I found the extensive discussion of the legal repercussions of the shootout fascinating (I would) and the post-history engaging. It’s a detailed look at how the machinations of publicity seekers can change the perception of an event and the people involved. (“Cow-boy”, for example, began as a potent insult implying criminality, not a description of a hardworking ranch hand or good guy.) Guinn traces how Wyatt Earp emerged as a kind of hero post-Tombstone, the “source” for many a cowboy story and movie.

(not crossposted)