[175 years ago this weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to this weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]
On Wild
West myths, realities, and how to split the difference.
While the
mythos of a figure like Billy the Kid very much began during his (brief)
lifetime, it seems that the myth of Wyatt
Earp only truly began to be created after his January
1929 death at the age of 80. Earp had been living in Los Angeles for the
last couple decades of his life, trying among other things to get a film of his
life made; to that end he had been working with Western author Walter
Noble Burns, whose book Tombstone,
an Iliad of the Southwest (1927) had really begun the mythologizing of
Earp. The process accelerated significantly with Stuart Lake’s authorized
biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), a bestseller which was based on
many conversations between Lake and Earp but which nonetheless (or perhaps as a
result) established many of the iconic details of the Earp myth that have
endured to this day. It is those details, centered on the shootout at Tombstone’s
O.K. Corral but also and especially framed by stories of a lifetime of
legal and extralegal justice delivered with his trusty pistols (and alongside his
brothers and his best friend
Doc Holliday), that became the basis for pop culture representations, from
TV shows like The Life and Legend of Wyatt
Earp (1955-61) to films like Tombstone (1993) and
Wyatt Earp (1994)
among many others.
Earp did
work off and on as a lawman throughout his life, but it was his brother Virgil
who was working as a
Deputy U.S. Marshal in Tombstone (Wyatt was working as a stagecoach shotgun
rider at the time). And in any case, the through-line of Earp’s life, at least from
his first police work
in Wichita, Kansas when he was in his mid-20s through his move to LA in his
60s, was not any one profession but rather constant sojourns across a series of
Western boomtowns in an effort to strike it rich. The settings also included
Dodge City, Kansas; Deadwood,
South Dakota; Tombstone, Arizona; Eagle City, Idaho; Nome, Alaska; and San
Francisco. The get-rich-quick schemes included participating in numerous silver
and gold rushes, owning and operating saloons, dealing faro (a popular
card game at the time), racing horses, and refereeing boxing matches. If
the latter doesn’t sound like a way to get rich quick, it’s worth noting that Earp
was suspected of having fixed
the December 1896 heavyweight championship bout in San Francisco between Bob
Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey, an accusation
that haunted Earp until the end of his life. Earp’s brothers and Holliday
frequently joined him in these endeavors, as did his multiple wives,
reinforcing these pursuits as the most consistent part of his identity.
So beyond
simply noting oversimplifications and inaccuracies in the pop culture stories
(a somewhat useful but too often pedantic exercise), how do we put these
different stories in conversation with one another? I’d say one important way
to do so would be to recognize that work as a lawman was simply one of many
professional paths for Earp (and his brothers and friends), and indeed one
through which he and they were likewise hoping to prosper. That doesn’t mean
they were necessarily corrupt, but rather that the system and society of these
towns, of the late 19th century West more broadly, and of Gilded Age
America overall was one in which law and justice were very much caught up in
power and prosperity, gold and greed, the American Dream and its darker
undertones. Those interconnections are somewhat specific to the world of the “Wild
West,” not in its mythic meanings but in its all too fraught realities. But, as
Monday’s focal voice Richard Slotkin would no doubt remind us, those
interconnections are also definingly American, one more reason why the Wild
West has retained its powerful hold on our collective imaginations.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?
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