It’s doubtful that any American has had more of his legend turned into “fact” than Wyatt Earp, who had a brief career as a frontier peace officer and scarcely wore a badge over the last 48 years of his life. Before and after “lawing,” as it was called in the 19th century, Earp was a teamster, boxing referee, prospector, buffalo hunter, racehorse owner, croupier, stagecoach guard, bouncer, saloon keeper, bodyguard, Hollywood movie advisor, and, for a while before he became a noted lawman in Kansas, a pimp.
He’s been portrayed by more actors than any American president — Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Hugh O’Brian, James Stewart, James Garner, Kurt Russell, and Kevin Costner, to name just a few. But the only years Hollywood has taken notice of are those spent in the cow towns of Wichita and Dodge City, Kansas, and the silver mining camp, Tombstone, Arizona. What happened over that brief span has engendered enough books to fill a small library.
The theme song for the 1950s Wyatt Earp TV series declared: “Long may his story be told.” And so it is again in two new books, Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell by Tom Clavin, a journalist and popular historian; and Ride the Devil’s Herd: Wyatt Earp’s Epic Battle Against the West’s Biggest Outlaw Gang by John Boessenecker, a San Francisco trial lawyer and author of several widely respected volumes on the criminal West, most recently a biography of Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who killed Bonnie and Clyde.
Both books are about the clash between the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday and the semi-organized gang of cattle rustlers, thieves, and killers collectively known as “Cowboys.” That vaunted term was relatively new in 1881 and was then roughly the equivalent of a disparaging term like brigand or pirate. Clavin and Boessenecker emphasize not the gunfight at the O.K. Corral that tends to hog the attention, but rather the subsequent “vendetta ride” in which Wyatt went from lawman to vigilante, combing the hills and valleys around Tombstone hunting down the Cowboys — the contemporary newspapers capitalized the term — who crippled one brother and murdered another.
As history, Clavin’s Tombstone is lightweight. Unattributed dialogue makes it read like a novel, and not in a good way. It lacks an authoritative voice; on most key incidents Clavin offers no opinion but defers to other historians such as Earp biographer Casey Tefertiller and Holliday biographer Gary Roberts. Dubious claims are left unsourced, making it impossible to sift fact from fiction.