Earp Lives

Fred Yale looks like a righteous killer behind his lawman’s badge. He’s actually a high school math teacher.

Although his students probably see little difference between the two, there’s a larger issue at play here. It has to do with the reinvention of one’s identity, and the West as the place where Americans play out the second acts of their lives.

Yale began his second act in August 2004, when, at age 51, he moved to Tombstone and within days was wearing a pistol and performing in re-enactment shows at the O.K. Corral.

As changes go, this one was Grand Canyon-sized.

He went from teaching at a private school in Connecticut to Tombstone High. He traded in his sleek Ford Expedition for a clunky pickup truck. As for guns, he never owned one before coming West, but now he fancies them. His weapons count has reached 12.

Think of it as keeping up with the Clantons. By the way, the character Yale is most comfortable playing is none other than Wyatt Earp.

“Nobody back home believes that there’s really a place where you can walk down the street wearing a cowboy hat, boots, a sidearm and carrying a shotgun,” says Yale, a former competitive bodybuilder and former owner of a professional wrestling school. “Or that you can tie your horse up in town and go run errands. I’m still amazed you can live like this. You can relive what you haven’t done.”

That latter bit of wisdom goes a long way toward explaining the re-enactment business. It’s an odd racket, a mixing of eras and life stages that almost always begins with a childhood fascination with the Wild West.

Then the demands of real life commence, and the future actor walks around for a decade or two feeling that something’s missing. The discovery of what that something is often happens by chance.
 

In 1999, a friend suggested that Robin Friestad sign on with the Highway 50 Association Wagon Train, a group that for 58 years has been putting on eight-day, authentic frontier-style wagon trips from Nevada to Old Hangtown in Placerville, California.

From dawn till dusk, Friestad took care of 20 pack and saddle horses, and rode ahead to block traffic on busy roads to let the wagons pass.

“Whoa!” he’d shout at oncoming cars. Then he’d sit atop his horse in satisfaction as wide-eyed drivers watched time roll backward past their windshields.

Friestad had found his missing piece. He signed on with the El Dorado Outlaws, a gunfighting re-enactors group out of Placerville, and by the time he landed in Tombstone in January 2000, his identity had changed from disabled Navy veteran to Buffalo Bill Cody.

With his wavy blond hair, curling mustache and theatrical goatee, Friestad bears a striking resemblance to the Old West’s greatest showman.

Friestad stepped out of his 1966 Dodge van in Tombstone that day wearing a cowhide jacket decorated with beads and conchos, and his stage hat. He looked around, drew a satisfied breath and thought — I’ve walked into a cowboy storybook.

“Sometimes you can’t find the words,” says the 55-year-old Friestad. “But it was an elated feeling.” Within a month and a half, he was packing heat at a Tombstone theatrical venue called Six Gun City. His skill as an actor eventually drew the attention of Allen Dickson, an English pub owner who invited Friestad to his home in Derby, England, for a two-month, all-expenses-paid tour of duty as Buffalo Bill.

Friestad hung out at the Navigation Inn, traveled to Liverpool, North Wales, Cambria and elsewhere, and generally had a blast reliving what he’d never done to audiences of ordinary blokes who’d never done it either.

“For two months I was a celebrity over there,” says Friestad. “I never signed more autographs or had more pictures taken.”
 

The experience taught him something about the worldwide power of the Old West, thanks in part to the real Buffalo Bill. As irony would have it — or is it fate? — Bill performed in Derby on Oct. 22, 1903.

The re-enactment game naturally creates such odd bedfellows.

For almost three years, David Weik performed at Tombstone’s Helldorado Town, playing a comedic Western character named Percy, who was much like the character of Gilligan on the old “Gilligan’s Island” television show. Weik based this goofy figure on Billy the Kid.

“Billy laughed at the system and so does Percy,” says Weik. “Percy dresses like the Kid, laughs like the Kid, wears two guns and has fun just like the Kid did. I was able to make people laugh, and that’s what I love.”

How strange is that? Weik turned a real-life murderer and adolescent outlaw icon into Gilligan — and made it work.

This gets better. In one of his previous lives, Weik belonged to the U.S. Figure Skating Association and was good enough on the ice to win medals in regional skating competitions.

Which raises a question: What would Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday say if they had to share Tombstone’s testosterone-soaked boardwalks with a figure skater?

“They’d probably say I was a wus; maybe even a huckleberry,” says Weik. Then the 46-year-old chuckles and adds, “Hey, I used to operate a front-end loader, too.”

Re-enactment work breeds high turnover, because it’s hard to sustain the energy over time, and the money is too low to provide much of a sweetener. Fact is, the chances of hanging around are better for women who work the saloons.
 

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Vinnie Jordan spends weekends serving food and drinks behind the bat-wing doors of Big Nose Kate’s on Allen Street, and although waitressing isn’t exactly re-enacting, in Tombstone it nudges right up to it.

The job requires explaining to customers the history behind the saloon and wearing those come-hither Wild West-style getups. The saloon used to be the Grand Hotel — the McLaurys stayed there the night before the infamous O.K. Corral gunfight.

So the tips are pretty good, and Jordan, a 43-year-old single mom, could use the pocket cabbage. During the week, she teaches in Sierra Vista.

But she still has her eye on hitting the jackpot and thought the Western myth might be her ticket. When she applied for a spot on the television show “Survivor,” Jordan dressed in her saloon outfit and taped her application video inside Big Nose Kate’s.

“I said I was a schoolmarm by day and a floozy by night,” says Jordan. “I told them I’ve worked as a chef, lived on the beach and grew up as the only girl in a house of four boys, so I’ve been on ‘Survivor’ all my life.”

She didn’t get the call. Jordan remains one of Tombstone’s brassiest saloon girls. And Fred Yale is still a weekend Wyatt Earp on the West’s grandest stage.

“I’ve always wanted to play cowboy at the O.K. Corral, but never thought I’d get to do it,” he says over the afternoon din at the Crystal Palace Saloon. “You know when I was getting ready to leave Connecticut, one of my friends said, ‘What’s the name of that godforsaken place you’re going to?’ ”

Yale nods and glances over at the dirty boots, floppy hats and big holstered guns of the gang gathered at the Crystal’s bar. He smiles under his drooping white mustache and doesn’t say a word. But this Wyatt Earp understands second acts as well as anyone.