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So I'm reading Casey Tefertiller's Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (John Wiley & Sons, 1997), about which I will have things to say in due course, and have reached the chapter on the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight, in which Tefertiller quotes George Whitwell Parsons, the indefatigable diarist of Tombstone. And there is something incontrovertibly wrong with this quote.
What Tefertiller says Parsons says is:
Given the reading I've been doing recently, I've seen a fair number of Parsons' diary entries quoted, and they are, even when elliptical, perfectly clear, straightforward, and comprehensible. So, either Parsons had a stroke on December 17 or Tefertiller's copy-editor did not copy-edit. There's an instance earlier in the book where Tefertiller describes Earp "languishing" over a meal (242), and that's the same sort of mistake, the sort I associate with spell-checkers run amok, that I think has happened here.
This isn't important, in any sense of the word--the context of the rest of the chapter tells me what "exhibitions or physical culture symposium" means--but, darn it, I want to know what Parsons wrote. So my question to the internet is: has anyone either (a.) come across this typo and done the research themselves; (b.) got easy access to Parsons' diary (which is not, insofar as I can tell, online anywhere) and can look up the entry for December 17, 1896, WITHOUT GOING OUT OF THEIR WAY MORE THAN THIS IS WORTH (i.e., not very much); or (c.) [as my parallel structure falls apart] know someone who would know?
Even if not, I feel better now that I've bitched about it.
What Tefertiller says Parsons says is:
Wyatt Earp disliked because of awarding Fitzsimmons Sharkey exhibitions or physical culture symposium to latter on a claimed foul.
(Tefertiller 303, quoting Parsons' diary entry of December 17, 1896)
Given the reading I've been doing recently, I've seen a fair number of Parsons' diary entries quoted, and they are, even when elliptical, perfectly clear, straightforward, and comprehensible. So, either Parsons had a stroke on December 17 or Tefertiller's copy-editor did not copy-edit. There's an instance earlier in the book where Tefertiller describes Earp "languishing" over a meal (242), and that's the same sort of mistake, the sort I associate with spell-checkers run amok, that I think has happened here.
This isn't important, in any sense of the word--the context of the rest of the chapter tells me what "exhibitions or physical culture symposium" means--but, darn it, I want to know what Parsons wrote. So my question to the internet is: has anyone either (a.) come across this typo and done the research themselves; (b.) got easy access to Parsons' diary (which is not, insofar as I can tell, online anywhere) and can look up the entry for December 17, 1896, WITHOUT GOING OUT OF THEIR WAY MORE THAN THIS IS WORTH (i.e., not very much); or (c.) [as my parallel structure falls apart] know someone who would know?
Even if not, I feel better now that I've bitched about it.
