“Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride From Hell”, by Tom Clavin

 

Griffin, 416 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1250214607

With Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride From Hell, author Tom Clavin attempts to sift through the many, many Tall Tales that litter the historiography of the Old West in order to get to the Truth of what happened at the O.K. Corral and why. To do so, he first takes us to the 1877 founding of Tombstone as a mining town in Cochise County, Arizona. From there we get a complete history of this original lawless Western town up to and after the infamous goings on at the O.K. Corral. This extensive background gave the centerpiece of the tale an added element, as we see how and why it came to pass from a more-complete perspective of many intersecting events.

Thus, we find the Brothers Earp – that would be James, Virgil, Morgan and Warren – coming to town and falling in with the so-called “Law & Order” faction due to their past experiences as lawmen…and their need for regular incomes (originally, they were just there to try their luck at mining and gambling). They soon clashed with the Cowboys – that would be, primarily, Johnny Behan, Frank Stilwell, Pete Spence, Ike Clanton, Florentino Cruz, Frederick Bode, Pony Diehl, Johnny Barnes, Frank Patterson, Milt Hicks, Bill Hicks, Bill Johnson, Ed Lyle, Johnny Lyle, “Curly” Bill Brocius and Johnny Ringo (whew!) – a term that was originally a pejorative used to describe anyone who were as likely to rustle cattle as to raise them legitimately (that is, when they weren’t robbing the odd stagecoach). It may be overstating things to say that a clash between the two factions was inevitable, but it’s damn close.

And so we come to the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, in which three cowboys were killed and Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday were wounded. The fight seemed to turn a lot of Tombstone citizens against the Earps, with many viewing them as cold-blooded killers simply because they had kept their heads and performed well in the fight. The Cowboys swore vengeance for the deaths of Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Clanton, which subsequently led to the shooting of Virgil and the murder of Morgan, and thence to Wyatt Earp’s “vendetta ride”.

One would think that a century-plus after the events tempers would have cooled but, if you are a history nerd, you know that this would be a foolish thought. In the great O.K. Divide – between partisans of the Earps or Clantons – Clavin would appear to fall in the former camp, although he does his damndest to be as nonpartisan as he can. Seeing as Tombstone is more than just a history of the infamous fight, but a study of the settling and taming of the West, it succeeds at being so much more than a potboiler. What Clavin has not done is write a radically new take on the story, which is…O.K. Tombstone is a well-researched history of this moment in American time, and he makes a convincing case that, after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, gunfighters didn’t have many places to turn. The old west was becoming at long last civilized.