Wyatt Earp: in Myth and Legend

"During the past few years, many wrong impressions of the early days of Tombstone and myself have been created by writers who are not informed correctly, and this has caused me concern which I feel deeply.' A photograph of Wyatt Earp spoke more eloquently than one taken shortly after his death in Los Angeles, on January 13, 1929. The image, now apparently lost, showed motion-picture cowboy Tom Mix beside Wyatt's casket, the grim-faced actor holding a Stetson over his sad heart.

How perfect. Here was Mix, who gained fame living a silver-screen myth, next to the body of a man who was about to become one.

Wyatt knew that sooner or later the mythmakers would hunt him down. His peculiar torture late in life was enduring the relentless curiosity of newspaper hacks and writers of every stripe. "Why can't they just leave me alone?" he often lamented to close friends. But his story was just too good, and there was too much money to be made from it. The myth got its faltering start well before Wyatt's Los Angeles years. It was born in newspapers such as the Kansas City Star, which even before 1880 referred to Wyatt as "the famous marshal of Dodge City."

Powerful magazines such as Harper's and the Saturday Evening Post jumped aboard later, publishing stories of Wyatt's exploits in Kansas and Tombstone, which the Post described as "a roaring town that had a man for breakfast every morning." Frederick Bechdolt took a crack at Wyattin his 1922 book, When the West Was Wild, and so did Walter Noble Burns in Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest, in 1927. It's easy to see, reading these sometimes fanciful accounts, the real Wyatt being snatched away. But it wasn't until the 1931 publication of Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal that the mythmakers really went to work. Stuart Lake's best-selling biography was a lightning bolt of a book that brought about nothing short of a resurrection.Back from the grave came Wyatt, wearing a shiny five-pointed star on his broad chest, marching from one frontier town to another, his shoulders heavy with the burdens of order and law. Hollywood loved Lake's highly romanticized portrait. Soon the motion-picture industry clutched Wyatt's ghost to its fluttering breast, and even today it can't let go. The most recent releases are Wyatt Earp, with Kevin Costner, and Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell. Tombstone Law, an NBC TV movie, starring Richard Dean Anderson, who played "MacGyver" on the long-running series, was scheduled to air early this year.

At last count, including another big budget movie rumored to be in development, Hollywood has tackled Wyatt's story, invariably with facts delivered on the wings of angels, about 29 times.

Leon Uris and John Huston wrote screenplays about him. Randolph Scott, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, and Ronald Reagan

WYATT EARP FEARLESS LAWMAN LOYAL FRIEND DEADLY ENEMY

"The most important lesson I learned from those proficient gunfighters was that the winner of a gunplay usually was the man who took his time. The second was that, if I hoped to live long on the frontier, I would shun flashy trick-shooting - grandstand playas I would poison.' FROM WYATT EARP, FRONTIER MARSHAL BY STUART LAKE played him (not to mention Walter Huston, Richard Dix, Joel McCrea, James Garner, and Bruce Boxleitner). Famed director John Ford made more than 80 pictures, but his favorite was My Darling Clementine, starring Fonda as Wyatt.

Television got into the act with a series that put a ridiculously pure and good-hearted marshal into every American living room. "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp" starred Hugh O'Brian and ran from 1955 to 1961. O'Brian also played Wyatt in Alias Jesse James, a goofy 1959 film in which insurance agent Bob Hope hires him to protect outlaw James who has been insured by Hope's company. He recently reprised the role in the TV miniseries "Gambler IV." The list could go on.

In a 1968 "Star Trek" episode, the crew of the Enterprise is shipped back in time - to the O.K. Corral.

Of course the Tombstone lawman never met Jesse James or Capt. James T. Kirk, for that matter. But what possible difference could reality make? Wyatt was long gone by that time, lost in the shadow of an everexpanding myth. In his place rose a folk hero known, literally, the world over.

Earp expert Glenn Boyer tells the story of a confrontation at the United Nations General Assembly between Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who for a year in the mid-1970s was the American ambassador to the United Nations, and his British counterpart.

At one point, the British envoy, denouncing what he considered Moynihan's shootfrom-the-hip attitude, angrily declared: "We're not all Wyatt Earps here!" Every one of the 150 diplomats sitting in that room, from one corner of the globe to the other, understood what he meant because they all knew who Wyatt was.

But why do we still remember and care about this skinny, intensely private, and uncommunicative frontiersman with blond hair and a walrus mustache, who, across the breadth of his 80 years, took part in no event of genuine historical importance?

The answer lies partly in the truth, of all places. In some ways and at some times of his life, Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp, born in Monmouth, Illinois, on March 19, 1848, really did live a heroic life.

In his early years, he typified the adventurous man of action at the center of every great Western story. He hunted buffalo, helped build railroads, joined in gold rushes, and risked the dangers of hauling freight In wild and wicked cowtowns of Wichita and Dodge City, he confronted conditions that were extraordinary for their violence, and he not only survived but prevailed. If there are two constants in history's assessment of Wyatt, one was his ability to control men. He was strong, a trained boxer who was better with his fists than he ever was with a gun, and, most importantly, he was a master intimidator. One of his enforcement techniques was slapping drunken cowboys across the face, literally humiliating them to the point where they no longer posed a threat and could easily be arrested. Another method was "buffaloing," which he once described as "bending a six-gun over a man's head" to subdue him. Wyatt was effective at keeping order without resorting to gunplay, precisely what the saloonkeepers, merchants, and bankers who ran Western boomtowns wanted. They knew that dead cowboys made lousy customers. The second constant was Wyatt's physical courage. He never backed away from anyone. Bat Masterson, a fellow Dodge City lawman who became Wyatt's best friend, described him as the bravest man he'd ever known, bar none.

'It takes more guts to arrest a desperate man peaceably than to shoot him and discuss the case later,' Bat Masterson said. 'No other man I ever heard of did things day after day

as Wyatt did and lived.'

Over mostly unknown terrain between California and Prescott, Arizona.

But it was in his work as a lawman, beginning with his election as constable in Lamar, Missouri, at age 22, that Wyatt gained his most significant renown. In the "It takes more guts to arrest a desperate man peaceably than to shoot him and The real or imagined escapades of Wyatt Earp spawned a stream of motion pictures. (ABOVE, FROM LEFT) Kevin Costner plays Earp in the latest film, Wyatt Earp (1994). BEN GLASS/WARNER BROS. Tombstone (1993) stars Kurt Russell as the lawman. JOHN BRAMLEY/HOLLYWOOD PICTURES & CINERGI PRODUCTIONS Hugh O'Brian, left, starred in TV's "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp," 1955-61. In John Ford's classic My Darling Clementine (1946), Henry Fonda, center, played Wyatt. Ward Bond, left, and Tim Holt were brothers Morgan and Virgil. Walter Huston, left, played the Wyatt Earp inspired role of Frame Johnson in Law and Order (1932), adapted from W.R. Burnett's novel Saint Johnson. ALL FROM EDDIE BRANDT'S SATURDAY MATINEE (RIGHT) In 1883 the Dodge City Peace Commission included, back row, from left, W.H. Harris, Luke Short, Bat Masterson, W.F. Petillon; front row, Charlie Bassett, Wyatt Earp, W.F. McLain, and Neil Brown. CRAIG FOUTS COLLECTION

I was dealing faro bank in the Oriental at the time [of a stagecoach holdup in Benson in March, 1881], but I did not lose a moment in setting out on the trail, although faro bank meant anything upwards of $1,000 a night, whereas manhunting meant nothing more than work and cold lead. You see, an affair like that affected me in a double capacity, for I was not only the Deputy United States Marshal for the district, but I continued in the service of the express company [Wells Fargol as a "private man."

FROM AN ARTICLE UNDER WYATT EARP'S BYLINE, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, AUGUST 9, 1896 discuss the case later," Masterson said. "No other man I ever heard of did things day after day as Wyatt did and lived. It often seemed he led a charmed life."

Another characteristic the mythmakers loved was Wyatt's ironclad devotion to friends. Masterson was among a group of men, including John P. Clum, onetime owner and editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, and George W. Parsons, a famed TombTombstone pioneer, with whom Wyatt maintained lifelong relationships.

The respect Wyatt earned in Kansas followed him to Tombstone, where he arrived on December 1, 1879. His reputation extended even to the brigands and cutthroats who populated the southeastern portion of the Territory at that time. It's no coincidence that Wells Fargo stages, a popular target for holdups, went unmolested during Wyatt's tenure as a shotgun guard.

When it came time to use a gun, Wyatt was more than able. In this arena as well he seemed to live a blessed, bulletproof existence - perfect fodder for the mythmakers.

At the shootout near the O.K.

Corral, he stood his ground and was the only member of the lawman's party which included his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and Doc Holliday to emerge unscathed. Three months later, the cowboys retaliated by shooting through the window of a Tombstone saloon, killing Morgan as he played a game of pool.

But the assassins wanted Wyatt's hide, too, and they nearly got it. A bullet popped into the wall above his head, missing him by inches.

Perhaps his closest call came as he headed a posse in pursuit of Curly Bill Brocius, one heel of Wyatt's boot, and a third tore off his saddle horn.

What did it take to finish this man? Crazy rumors began circulating that Wyatt wore a steel vest as protection against bullets. The Tombstone Nugget even reported that the marshal had been killed.

That was mere fantasy. Not only did Wyatt survive, but he leveled his shotgun and cut Curly Bill in two. Then he shot up Johnny Barnes, one of the outlaw's allies, who died about a month later.

The mythmakers knew they could hardly do better than that. But in their desire to sculpt a pristine hero, they chose not to take up the grubby and inconvenient facts that tainted Wyatt's life.

He was, by all accounts, a womanizer. He reportedly married three times. While living in Tombstone, he publicly humiliated his second wife, Celia Ann "Mattie" Blaylock,

While living in Tombstone, he publicly humiliated his second wife, Celia Ann 'Mattice' Blaylock, by taking up with a tempestuous beauty named Josephine Sarah Marcus.

of the men behind Morgan's murder. (See Arizona Highways, November '82.) Wyatt unwittingly rode smack into the cowboy camp at Iron Springs, 30 miles from Tombstone, and was met by a storm of bullets.

Curly Bill got off two shotgun blasts that shredded the tails of Wyatt's coat, but drew no blood. Another bullet lodged in the by taking up with a tempestuous young beauty named Josephine Sarah Marcus, the daughter of a San Francisco merchant.

Josie became his third wife, and he spent nearly 50 years with her. But Mattie, still despondent over her breakup with Wyatt, committed suicide in Pinal, Arizona, in 1888.

His work as a lawman, the centerpiece of the myth, was merely a sideline. In truth, Wyatt was a professional gambler and speculator whose primary motivation throughout his life was to get rich.

One of the first moves he made upon arriving in the newly created silver town of Tombstone was to file several claims for water and mineral rights. Eight months later, he sold a mining claim for $6,000, a huge sum in those days.

Wyatt sought the job of sheriff in Cochise County not out of any great devotion to the public peace, but because of the pay. Counting fees for collecting taxes and serving 'When Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury drew their pistols, I knew it was a fight for life. Billy Clanton leveled his pistol at me, but I did not aim at him. I knew that Frank McLaury had the reputation of being a good shot and dangerous man, and I aimed at Frank McLaury. The first two shots were fired by Billy Clanton and myself, he shooting at me and I shooting at Frank McLaury. I don't know which was fired first. We fired almost together. The fight then became general.' FROM WYATT'S TESTIMONY AT THE O.K. CORRAL INQUEST legal papers, as well as a cut of each arrest, the job paid more than $30,000 a year. Most of Wyatt's money was poured back into gambling. At Tombstone's Oriental Saloon, he worked as a bouncer and owned several faro tables, which could yield $1,000 a night at the height of the silver boom. Many years later, in California, he hung out at boxing matches, sometimes with his pals, former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and silent-film actor William S. Hart. He was a fixture at the Santa Anita racetrack, and he speculated in real estate in San Diego and mining all over the country. It seemed that no rush for metal - from Gunnison to Coeur d'Alene to Tonopah and up to Nome - could take place without Wyatt packing his wagon and joining in. Several times in his life he amassed sizable fortunes. In 1901 he returned to California from Nome with $80,000 in his pocket from the sale of the Dexter saloon. But with his generosity in lending money to friends and his compulsive gambling, his stash never lasted long. Gambling also brought him into a tangle with police. In Los Angeles in 1911, while keeping company with a notorious character named Death Valley Scotty, Wyatt was arrested at the scene of a crooked faro game. He claimed not to know that the game, which had yet to start, was rigged. The cops released him for lack of evidence, even though he'd given a phony name: W.B. Stapp. Sympathetic historians argue he did that to avoid an avalanche of bad publicity. The faro bust wasn't his first. Oddly enough, Virgil Earp, also a Tombstone lawman, once arrested Wyatt for disorderly conduct and fighting. He was fined $25. Wyatt jumped bail on a charge of horse theft in Arkansas in the early 1870s, and The Arizona Daily Star reported that he was arrested for burglary in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1885. The facts in the latter two cases still puzzle historians. So does a highly publicized incident in San Francisco in 1896, when Wyatt refereed a boxing match between heavyweights Tom Sharkey and Bob Fitzsimmons. The event's promoters, seeking to hire a referee of unquestioned integrity, chose Wyatt. In typical fashion, he bulled into the ring before more than Were it not for a gunfight that lasted mere seconds, the Clantons and McLaurys would not have earned a footnote in history books. From left, William H. "Billy" Clanton, and brothers Frank and Thomas McLaury. All three died in the shoot-out. ALL COURTESY ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

20,000 spectators with a pistol bulging from his back pocket.

He nearly had to use it. In the eighth round Fitzsimmons knocked Sharkey out. But Wyatt gave the fight to Sharkey, contending Fitzsimmons threw a low blow. The mob was apoplectic. Charges flew that Wyatt had taken a bribe to hand the fight to Sharkey. Nothing was ever proved. Wyatt paid a $50 fine for carrying a concealed weapon.

But Jack DeMattos, author of a book on the incident called The Earp Decision, says it's likely Wyatt was in on the fix. "It fits the pattern of his life," says DeMattos. "Wyatt was a guy on the make. He wanted money, and whether he made it honestly or not didn't matter. The fight was just another speculative venture for him."

Wyatt might've inherited a larcenous streak from his father, Nicholas Porter Earp, a veteran of the Mexican war who had a fondness for bootleg liquor and rubber checks.

Boyer says that Wyatt was driving an ice truck one day during Prohibition when he got into a confrontation with another man. The Burt Lancaster, right, offered his version of Wyatt, with Kirk Douglas as Doc in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1956). In Lancaster's Gunfight, the Earps and Clantons approach the infamous shoot-out. Randolph Scott blazes away as Wyatt in Frontier Marshal (1939). ALL FROM EDDIE BRANDT'S SATURDAY MATINEE old intimidator wisely chose not to knuckle it out with his younger opponent. Instead he grabbed a pair of ice tongs from his truck, beat the man over the head with it, and for his trouble spent 10 days in jail.

"There are more corpses in Hamlet than there was in the O.K. Corral, and with less reason. We didn't kill none of the wrong men like Hamlet done to poor old Polonius.... He was a talkative man and wouldn't have lasted long in Kansas.... The men we killed there had to be killed. They were bad, and if any part of the country lets itself be stampeded by bad men, it will infect the whole shebang before it's through.... That fight didn't take but about 30 seconds and it seems like, in my going on 80 years, we could find some other happenings to discuss."

FROM AN INTERVIEW DONE LATE IN WYATT'S LIFE AND PUBLISHED IN THE AMERICAN WEEKLY MAGAZINE, MAY 22, 1960 The Earps were a clannish bunch; they stood by each other and their friends. From left, Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Doc Holliday. COURTESY ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, EXCEPT WYATT, CRAIG FOUTS COLLECTION; AND DOC, BUFFALO BILL HISTORICAL CENTER, VINCENT MERCALDO COLLECTION

'I did not want to do it in the first place, but I am in now and will have to swim out.'

"It was a dispute over paying for the bootleg booze Wyatt was hauling," says Boyer, author of Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta. "That SOB was no daisy."

Such explosions of temper were uncommon for Wyatt. He was known as a man of unusual self-control, able under most circumstances to keep his smouldering anger in check. But when he made an enemy it was for life, and he could never forget a slight against his character or that of his family. Once Wyatt became enraged by an article about him and his brothers in the Los Angeles Times. The story basically said the Earps were outlaws and cowards. It also said that Wyatt was dead. Seeking to prove all three statements wrong, the old gambler, then in his mid-70s, discovered where writer J.M. Scanland lived, kicked in his front door, jammed a pistol into his gut and declared: "I'm Wyatt Earp!"

The stunt had three immediate results: it proved that Wyatt was very much alive; poor Scanland, a down-on-his-luck writer of Western potboilers, undoubtedly lost a few years off his life; and Wyatt got his retraction.

But no event better displayed Wyatt's true character - his toughness, temper, loyalty to family, and, most of all, his vindictiveness - than the feud between the Earps and the outlaw-cowboys of Tombstone.

The hatred between the two factions exploded on October 26, 1881. The famous street fight with the Clantons and McLaurys made a splash in newspapers nationwide, and there were sporadic bursts of publicity in the decades following. But it was largely forgotten until Stuart Lake's Frontier Marshal.

Lake, a journalist, aspiring screenwriter, and former press secretary to Teddy Roosevelt, took care of that. He popularized a name for the shoot-out that was pure magic: "the fight at the O.K. Corral."

Never mind that the action didn't take place at the O.K. Corral. It was about 90 feet away, in a narrow alley between Harwood's boardinghouse and Fly's Photographic Studio. It's tempting to speculate how well history would remember, 113 years later, an incident that lasted less than 30 seconds and was called "the disagreement at Fly's studio."

Leaving aside the O.K. Corral fiction, the fight was a corker. The Tombstone Nugget described it as "one of the crimson days in the annals of Tombstone, a day when blood flowed as water."

Three in the cowboy party were killed - brothers Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clantonand in the ensuing months their confederates set out to even the score. In December, 1881, Virgil was shotgunned in the back and left a cripple, and Morgan was assassinated three months after that. Morgan was Wyatt's favorite brother, and his death was a crushing blow. It came after a four-month period during which Wyatt arrested several of the men involved in Virgil's ambush, only to see them turned loose by a sheriff and judge in cahoots with the cowboys.

He resented being defined solely by his bloody Tombstone days, 29 months in a life of nearly 81 years. 'He didn't want to be thought of as a bad man. He wanted vindication.'

"Wyatt's last words to Morgan were a promise to get the men who shot him," says Lee A. Silva, a California writer who recently completed a 1,400-page book on Wyatt. "He wasn't going to take any more prisoners. That's when he threw the book away and went on his vendetta."

(LEFT) In 1925 Wyatt Earp looks beyond the Colorado River to Arizona, where the incident that shaped his life played out. Wyatt died four years later in Los Angeles. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred in Josephine's family tomb in a Coloma, California, cemetery.

Some historians call it Wyatt's Ride, and they still debate how many men he killed. Most agree that he got Curly Bill and Johnny Barnes at Iron Springs, and probably Johnny Ringo some months after that, although that killing is less certain.

But no doubt exists about the fate of cowboys Frank Stilwell and Florentino Cruz. Wyatt simply gunned them down. According to the coroner's reports, their bodies were riddled with bullets. Thus was this respected letter-of-the-law marshal transformed into a cold-blooded avenger out to keep a promise to his little brother.

For writer Jeff Morey, Wyatt's Tombstone story is drama on an epic scale, and it is the reason he is still remembered today. "It's basically about revenge, and revenge stories are a strong tradition in our culture," says Morey, who is finishing a book on Wyatt's Tombstone war.

"Wyatt presents an ethical paradox because we don't know whether to honor him for what he did or condemn him. For that reason he'll always be an object of curiosity, and people will continue to make movies about him and write books."

What splendid bounty Wyatt represents: a fearless marshal or devil with a badge, peacekeeper or murderer, hero or scoundrel. He invariably lands squarely in one category or another, but there's no question which interpretation wins with the public. Writers who've sought to demonize him have met limited success. Only a handful of motion pictures have portrayed the dark aftermath to the O.K. Corral honestly, and these movies died at the box office.Wyatt is not allowed any of the shades of character granted real men. But he was a complicated personality. His final days, especially, are testimony to that.

Knowing that one way or another, by friendly or hostile hand, his story would be told, he decided to tell it himself. He agreed to an interview with a modest young writer named Stuart Lake. Wyatt's motives were contradictory, both noble and crass.

He wanted to tell what he considered to be the truth about his life. He resented being defined solely by his bloody Tombstone days, 29 months in a life of nearly 81 years. "He didn't want to be thought of as a bad man," says Morey. "He wanted vindication."

But he also hoped for a cut of the proceeds, possibly from a screen version of Lake's work, and that meant pumping up the story. It galled him that others made money by crafting wild exaggerations about his life while he and Josie survived on an allowance given them by Josie's sister.

In what has to rank as the supreme irony of his life, Wyatt himself became a mythmaker, leading a sympathetic Lake through a sanitized version of his times, remembering the bright and shining deeds, and skipping over the rest. The tragedy for Wyatt was that he never got any money for his Lake collaboration. The West's most famous peace officer died two years before Frontier Marshal came out.

But such complex facts will probably never penetrate America's consciousness about Wyatt. The folk hero will go on. The myth will stand. He will always be Burt Lancaster in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, his steel-blue eyes squinting under the sun as he strides down that dusty Tombstone street, a good and great man for all time.

Additional Reading: To learn more about the famed lawman, we recommend The Illustrated Life and Times of Wyatt Earp by Bob Boze Bell. The oversize softcover book is jampacked with photographs, illustrations, and re-creations, a readable text, and lively quotes about the man immortalized in the brief shoot-out near the O.K. Corral. The book costs $25, plus shipping and handling. To order, telephone Arizona Highways toll-free at 1 (800) 543-5432. In the Phoenix area, call 258-1000.