Differing Views of Wyatt Earp

Earp belongs in the pantheon of popular western heroes and villains,

alongside names made famous in history texts, fiction, folk song, theater, musical comedy, film, and television. His contemporaries included Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Matt Dillon. His name is associated with fabled places: Dodge City, Boot Hill,

the O.K. Corral, and Tombstone. He achieved his particular fame, according to one biographer, Stuart Lake, as “the greatest gun-fighting marshall that the Old West knew.”

Lake, who interviewed Earp in his last years, summed him up as follows: “Wyatt Earp was a man of action. He was born, reared, and lived in an environment which held words and theories of small account, in which

sheer survival often, and eminence invariably, might be achieved through deeds alone. Withal, Wyatt Earp was a thinking man, whose mental processes were as quick, as direct, as unflustered by circumstance and as effective as the actions they inspired.”

A less exalted image of Wyatt Earp emerges from the scrutiny of Frank Waters, a veteran observer of American Southwest landscape and history. “Wyatt,” he wrote, “was an itinerant saloonkeeper, cardsharp, gunman, bigamist, church deacon, policeman, bunco artist, and a supreme confidence man. A lifelong exhibitionist ridiculed alike by members of his own family, neighbors, contemporaries, and the public press, he lived his last years in poverty, still mainly trying to find someone to publicize his life, and died two years before his fictitious biography recast him in the role of America’s most famous frontier marshal.”

Differing Views of Wyatt Earp

The truth, as is common enough with historical figures about whom we know more from oral tradition than from documentation, undoubtedly lies between these extremes. The lives of those who became legend in the history of the West are perhaps even more embellished, for good or ill, as a result of sensational exaggeration by journalists and other writers. Confrontations between cowboys and Indians in the American “wild West” have long fascinated foreign audiences.

British writers accompanied William F. (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody on his expeditions, for example, producing “penny dreadfuls,” cheap, paperbound books that sensationalized the wanton killing of Indians and of buffalo. Clint Eastwood’s celebrated “anti-western,” Unforgiven, includes a writer who takes notes throughout on the mayhem. Eastwood’s earlier westerns were produced in Italy; the Japanese, in their films, found parallels between itinerant, free-lance gunslingers and early samurai warriors. The raw, physical energies that supposedly characterized western pioneers fascinate French intellectuals.

Nevertheless, the mere facts about the Earp family offer an unchallenged, epical account of the turbulent,

confused, sometimes noble, sometimes less than savory or honorable development and exploitation of America’s western frontiers in the decades after the Civil War. To establish their hold on the variegated

landscape, settlers had to contend with extravagantly hard seasons and the hostility of natives who were being callously displaced.