On the Trail of Truth out in the Wild West

What famous American has been played on film by Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Hugh O’Brian, George Montgomery, Joel McCrea and Burt Lancaster? The answer, of course, is Wyatt Earp, and the intriguing aim of “Inventing Wyatt Earp” is to find out who the lawman really was and how he became a legend of the American West.

Earp’s fame rests on 30 seconds of rapid gunfire on a street in Tombstone, Ariz., on Oct. 26, 1881. At first, and for a long time, the exchange between lawmen and cattle rustlers was known as “the gunfight in Tombstone.” Now it has become, in the words of a movie title, “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

It wasn’t actually at the O.K. Corral, just near it, but the O.K. Corral has a nicer ring to it than Fly’s Photography Studio, next to which the shootout took place. (The studio has its own claim to history: Camillus S. Fly probably took the famous photograph of the three cattle rustlers killed in the shootout, laid out in their coffins side by side. Fly also took the famous photograph of the Apache chief Geronimo, then at war with the United States, holding his rifle.)

Disentangled from a forest of details, conjectures and rumors, the story of Wyatt Earp’s life emerges in Allen Barra’s book as a window into the turbulent years of the American West from the end of the Civil War to its final settlement in the 1880s and 1890s. A sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Barra rarely tells his tale in a straightforward way but leaps forward and backward across the changing American frontier, with its drifting host of gamblers, thieves, Indian tribes and pioneers.

Born in 1848 in the little town of Monmouth, Ill., Earp and his several brothers were dragged around the West by their itinerant father. By the end of the Civil War, they landed in San Bernardino, then a boomtown larger than Los Angeles. Earp did or did not (Barra reports that the record is unclear) drive a stage between San Bernardino and Los Angeles, but he did drive teams with freight wagons elsewhere in the West and also worked for the railroads.

In the 1870s, Earp was in Wichita, Kan., working as some kind of law officer pursuing and catching criminals. Then he moved on to Dodge City, Kan., the West’s “wildest cow town,” Barra says, where Earp also worked as a lawman. His claim to fame was that he never shot anyone, but was so brave and resolute that the outlaws fled before him. It may have helped that he also was known for “buffaloeing” crooks--hitting them smartly over the head with a gun barrel.

Then it was on to Tombstone and celluloid immortality. Tombstone, in arid southeastern Arizona, was the site of a silver mining strike. It soon became a typical mining town, male, brawling and lawless. On his reputation for rectitude, Earp became a lawman.

On the famous day that Earp, his brothers and partners faced down a group of cattle rustlers, Earp, for the first time in his life, fired his revolver in the ensuing 30-second gunfight. At the end of it, three rustlers were dead.

Bad blood ensued. Earp was charged with murder, but an investigating judge cleared him. The rustlers and their friends threatened and harassed the Earps, and then brother Morgan Earp was shot to death. Earp set out on a vendetta ride in pursuit of the killers and killed their leader.

This ended Earp’s career as a lawman. He moved to California, fell in love with a woman from New York (there is no record that Wyatt and Josephine Earp were ever married), and spent the rest of his life as a businessman and promoter. In 1896, he refereed a boxing match in San Francisco and earned notoriety by stepping into the ring wearing a revolver. He died in Los Angeles in 1929.

Barra’s book is full of such details, most of them interesting, some of them confusing and many tangential to his central story. But to understand the legend, Barra pursues many leads and is not against including all of them here.

And where did Earp’s legend begin? Barra credits Stuart Nathaniel Lake’s 1931 “highly fictionalized” book, “Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal,” with the creation of the now firmly established Earp legend. It is a legend, Barra argues, that has suited the needs of Americans for heroes, for avengers, for honest, uncomplicated lawmen, for symbols of rugged independence. As Barra writes, looking at the enduring nature of Earp’s legend: “When another eruption of violence fuels our ongoing debate over law and order, he will be back, reinvented in exactly what way, as enforcer of the law or avenger, we cannot now say. But he will be back.”