Book Review: Inventing Wyatt Earp by Allen Barra

Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends by Allen Barra

The American Old West has many historical figures whose stories have been retold and reimagined so many times that plenty of mythology and folklore has been added (or borrowed from others' stories). Wyatt Earp is one such character. His family moved around a lot in his youth and he continued wandering as an adult. He worked as buffalo hunter and a law man in Kansas, he moved to the Arizona Territory to be a prospector and investor (though he wound up being a law man again), he continued on to California, and he had a brief stint in Alaska for the gold rush before returning to California. His fame was based on his time in Arizona. He lived in Tombstone with his brothers where they invested in the mines, dealt cards at one of the hotels, and eventually were pulled in to law enforcement. The Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday had a famous street fight with the Clantons and McLaurys who were part of the Cowboys, a group of cattle rustlers and stagecoach robbers. After the battle, the Cowboys were gunning for the Earps. Virgil Earp was crippled and Morgan Earp was killed in reprisal shootings. Wyatt and Doc went on their Vendetta Ride, killing many of the men responsible for or affiliated with those who attacked Virgil and Morgan. Wyatt tried to put all of that behind him, but press (both favorable and unfavorable) kept bringing back up the Tombstone street fight and the rest of his history.

Allen Barra has painstakingly investigated the life of Wyatt Earp, trying to find what truly happened and who Wyatt truly was. In the late 1800s, the press was not always accurate or unbiased in its reporting (a fact sadly true even today). Records were kept but often lost due to fires or carelessness. A lot of people who wrote memoirs of their lives in Tombstone had an axe to grind or wanted to make a dollar, so exaggerating or confabulating the truth (or just misremembering) happened. Barra looks at all sorts of resources from primary texts and records to pop culture novels and histories. Stuart Lake's Frontier Marshal from the 1930s built a lot of the legend around Earp, lionizing him as a knight errant of the Old West. By the 1960s, plenty of revisionist, anti-Earp attitudes became popular. 

Barra sifts through all the evidence and attitudes to find a more accurate portrayal of Wyatt Earp. He's in the pro-Earp camp and ably argues his position. As with any real person, Earp's life is more complicated than a passing glance reveals. Earp was a quiet person and often avoided violence (or at least killing), making him less colorful than a gambler and adventurer like Doc Holliday. Even so, Earp did seek out adventure and new things like mining and real estate, though he was never great at endeavors outside of law enforcement. He was a just man who did what was right even under hard circumstances. He's an admirable figure once looking past all the larger-than-life stories that have grown up around him.

The book is an interesting history of the Old West and an analysis of how iconic figures are represented and used in popular culture through the years. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (a name it only got decades after it happened) has achieved a mythic standing in American culture. But it is just one of many events in Wyatt Earp's fascinating life.

Highly recommended.

Sample quote, nicely summarizing the attitude of the Earps: "For all their gambling and mining interests, the Earps were active, aggressive lawmen who enforced laws without regard to politics or popularity and who had no compunction about stretching the power of their federal appointments to do so." [p. 154]