UBC: Inventing Wyatt Earp
Apr. 11th, 2010 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBarra, Allen. Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends. 1998. Castle Books, 2005.
This is a wildly uneven book. When Barra is on his game, he's very good indeed; when he's off it, like the little girl in the nursery rhyme, he's horrid.
His purpose in the book is to explore the process by which Wyatt Earp became a legend. He's very interested in Wyatt's appearances in popular culture; he talks about the movies and the TV shows and also the children's toys and comic books and other ephemera. He's very good at tracing the paths which misinformation has taken, the ways in which the Earps tend to get conflated with their enemies as well as with other lawmen of the frontier such as Bat Masterton and Bill Tilghman. He's particularly good at breaking down theories and rhetoric and applying a reality check. There were four different points at which he particularly impressed me in this regard:
1. When Frank McLaury, just before the Gunfight near the O.K. Corral, told Behan that he would not surrender his arms unless the Earps did, Barra points out that McLaury is a civilian (for whom it is illegal to be carrying weapons in the streets of Tombstone in the first place) demanding that the city marshal and his deputies be disarmed.
2. The Doc-Holliday-Shot-First theory. Some witnesses in the hearing before Judge Spicer testified that Doc shot first, specifically with the nickel-plated revolver he was well-known to carry. (Well, Behan, that weasel, testified that SOMEONE in the Earp party shot first, with a nickel-plated revolver. He left it as an exercise for the student to connect the dots.) But Doc was carrying the shotgun. All testimony agrees on this, as it agrees that the shotgun was fired during the gunfight, but it was not fired first. So Doc, what? Carried the shotgun down Fremont Street, put it down, drew his revolver and shot first, then put away his revolver, picked up the shotgun, and fired it? Barra is perfectly correct to point out that this makes no sense. The idea of Doc wielding the revolver in one hand and the shotgun in the other doesn't work either. A shotgun is not a one-handed weapon.
3. The Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight. Barra, I learn from the dust-jacket bio, is a sports writer for The Wall Street Journal. His knowledge of sports shows to good advantage in his discussion of the fight, both because he can talk knowledgeably about the difference between London Prize Ring rules and the new (in 1896) Queensbury rules and because he has the background knowledge to point out that Wyatt Earp is far from the only referee in boxing history to be vilified for making an unpopular call. His discussion of the fight, although shorter than Tefertiller's, is actually rather more useful.
4. "Earp has been branded an opportunist and a self-publicist for allowing Lake to write the book that became Frontier Marshal, an odd criticism when one considers that nearly every important figure of the Old West, including Davy Crockett, William Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, Pat Garrett, Tom Horn, Elfago Baca, former outlaws John Wesley Harding, Emmitt Dalton, Frank James, and Cole Younger, and even Geronimo had either written books or lent their names to ghosted autobiographies" (381-2). It's a odd feature of the quote-unquote Old West, that due to the railroads, dime-novelists back east could write the legends as fast or faster than the gunmen could live them. Tourists would come west to see Wild Bill or go buffalo hunting with General Custer. Buffalo Bill Cody essentially made up his legend himself, starring as himself in plays that chronicled exploits that had never happened.
So those are the things Barra does well, and I'm grateful for them. However, there are also things about this book that infuriate and disappoint me.
Barra is stylistically a better writer than Tefertiller, but he's also a much more careless writer. This is a dreadfully sloppily copy-edited book, to the extent of misidentifying Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterton in the Dodge City Peace Commission photograph, and having errors like misprinting "McLaury" for "Leonard." (I don't, to be fair, know how much of that comes from errors that crept into the Castle Books reprint.) This is unfortunately of a piece with the careless writing; Barra forgets to tell pieces of the story--for example, Luther King's escape:
This makes NO SENSE if you haven't already read some other book on the Matter of Tombstone and know that King stepped out the back door of the jail while Harry Jones was drawing up a bill of sale for a horse which King had sold to John Dunbar. To make matters worse, Barra's endnote to this passage is itself a further example of careless writing: "In his 1928 book, Helldorado, Billy Breckenridge invents a bogus Nugget story about King's escape that finishes with the line "He [King] was an important witness against Holliday" (Barra 176 n.3) In fact, as Gary Roberts explains, Breckenridge (whom he and Tefertiller both spell "Breakenridge") "tamper[ed] with a Nugget article concerning the escape of Luther King from jail after the Benson stage robbery to include the statement 'He was an important witness against Holliday,' which was not in the original (Roberts 386). Breakenridge didn't invent the whole story; he just tacked a line on at the end.
There are other examples--Barra claims that the infamous poker game the night before the gunfight included not only John Behan, Virgil Earp, Ike Clanton, and Tom McLaury (who are the gentlemen Tefertiller puts there, along with an "unknown player" (Tefertiller 115)), but also Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday. He gives no source for this rather extraordinary claim, and when he says at the end of the paragraph, "That Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday could have spent nearly five hours drinking and playing poker without trying to kill each other is practically impossible to believe" (167), I entirely agree with him.
In general--and this is ironic for someone whose purpose is to trace the legends and misinformation about Wyatt Earp--Barra doesn't cite his sources. This does not increase his credibility for me, especially when he says things like "The logistics of travel from Colorado, which is where Wyatt was when Ringo was shot, are tough, but researchers have determined that it could have been possible" (Barra 277). WHICH researchers? and determined HOW? Beyond that, it became apparent to me as I read that Barra has a number of biases. He dislikes liberals and academics, and he has a particular hatred of economic and social historians. I couldn't figure out why until I got to the part where he whips his knife out and sinks it into Paula Mitchell Marks: he condemns And Die in the West as "well-intentioned" (Barra 214), which is pretty damn near fightin' words. Barra divides the world of Earpian research into pro-Earp and anti-Earp; his categories are absolute and polar, and "anti-Earp" is anyone who does not agree with Barra's equally absolute and polar division of good guys and bad guys at (near) the O.K. Corral.
I am not saying this because I think the Clantons and the McLaurys were "good guys," or because I think Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday, were "bad guys." I'm saying it because I think Barra's view is reductive and dismissive and ultimately not helpful.
This habit also slops over into his appraisal of sources. Earpian research is a particularly fraught area in this regard due to the habit of writers such as Lake (Frontier Marshal), Waters (The Earp Brothers of Tombstone), and Boyer (I Married Wyatt Earp) of just making shit up when the facts weren't interesting enough for them. And Barra is weirdly double-faced. He doesn't like Waters' book (The Earp Brothers of Tombstone) because it is "anti-Earp," so he dismisses it. But he likes Boyer's pro-Earp I Married Wyatt Earp, so he says things like "The Morgan Earp-John Behan clash isn't in Josephine's actual memoirs and therefore, like all the Tombstone passages in I Married Wyatt Earp, is suspect. Still, it can't be discounted" (252). Why, exactly, can't it be discounted? Having read the passage in question, I find it deeply implausible, and am tempted to apply to Barra his catty remark about Paula Mitchell Marks and The Earp Brothers of Tombstone: "Ms. Marks, it can be said, wants the book to be true" (283).
Ultimately, I think a lot of my trouble with this book is that Barra throws a lot of stones without seeming to realize that his own house is made of glass. He attacks other writers for exactly the flaws of his own book. Also, Barra is not a historian, not in the sense of not having a degree in history, but in the sense of not being a historian. This was made appallingly clear to me when he says:
There's so much wrong with this, from my perspective: the casual conflation of a real person and a fictional character; the self-centered assumption that the value of a real person is in how entertaining "we" find him or her; the idea that the truth is less important than being "interesting" (an idea that Mssrs. Lake, Waters, and Boyer might well agree with).
Barra isn't a historian; he's a professional journalist with a thing about Wyatt Earp. And many of the things I like about this book spring from Barra being exactly what he is. But he does spend a lot of time getting in his own way.
To end, I want to relay my favorite quote in the book, from an interview Barra had with Val Kilmer about playing Doc Holliday: "Trying to flesh out his character is like trying to put clothes on a ghost" (Barra 286).
This is a wildly uneven book. When Barra is on his game, he's very good indeed; when he's off it, like the little girl in the nursery rhyme, he's horrid.
His purpose in the book is to explore the process by which Wyatt Earp became a legend. He's very interested in Wyatt's appearances in popular culture; he talks about the movies and the TV shows and also the children's toys and comic books and other ephemera. He's very good at tracing the paths which misinformation has taken, the ways in which the Earps tend to get conflated with their enemies as well as with other lawmen of the frontier such as Bat Masterton and Bill Tilghman. He's particularly good at breaking down theories and rhetoric and applying a reality check. There were four different points at which he particularly impressed me in this regard:
1. When Frank McLaury, just before the Gunfight near the O.K. Corral, told Behan that he would not surrender his arms unless the Earps did, Barra points out that McLaury is a civilian (for whom it is illegal to be carrying weapons in the streets of Tombstone in the first place) demanding that the city marshal and his deputies be disarmed.
2. The Doc-Holliday-Shot-First theory. Some witnesses in the hearing before Judge Spicer testified that Doc shot first, specifically with the nickel-plated revolver he was well-known to carry. (Well, Behan, that weasel, testified that SOMEONE in the Earp party shot first, with a nickel-plated revolver. He left it as an exercise for the student to connect the dots.) But Doc was carrying the shotgun. All testimony agrees on this, as it agrees that the shotgun was fired during the gunfight, but it was not fired first. So Doc, what? Carried the shotgun down Fremont Street, put it down, drew his revolver and shot first, then put away his revolver, picked up the shotgun, and fired it? Barra is perfectly correct to point out that this makes no sense. The idea of Doc wielding the revolver in one hand and the shotgun in the other doesn't work either. A shotgun is not a one-handed weapon.
3. The Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight. Barra, I learn from the dust-jacket bio, is a sports writer for The Wall Street Journal. His knowledge of sports shows to good advantage in his discussion of the fight, both because he can talk knowledgeably about the difference between London Prize Ring rules and the new (in 1896) Queensbury rules and because he has the background knowledge to point out that Wyatt Earp is far from the only referee in boxing history to be vilified for making an unpopular call. His discussion of the fight, although shorter than Tefertiller's, is actually rather more useful.
4. "Earp has been branded an opportunist and a self-publicist for allowing Lake to write the book that became Frontier Marshal, an odd criticism when one considers that nearly every important figure of the Old West, including Davy Crockett, William Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, Pat Garrett, Tom Horn, Elfago Baca, former outlaws John Wesley Harding, Emmitt Dalton, Frank James, and Cole Younger, and even Geronimo had either written books or lent their names to ghosted autobiographies" (381-2). It's a odd feature of the quote-unquote Old West, that due to the railroads, dime-novelists back east could write the legends as fast or faster than the gunmen could live them. Tourists would come west to see Wild Bill or go buffalo hunting with General Custer. Buffalo Bill Cody essentially made up his legend himself, starring as himself in plays that chronicled exploits that had never happened.
So those are the things Barra does well, and I'm grateful for them. However, there are also things about this book that infuriate and disappoint me.
Barra is stylistically a better writer than Tefertiller, but he's also a much more careless writer. This is a dreadfully sloppily copy-edited book, to the extent of misidentifying Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterton in the Dodge City Peace Commission photograph, and having errors like misprinting "McLaury" for "Leonard." (I don't, to be fair, know how much of that comes from errors that crept into the Castle Books reprint.) This is unfortunately of a piece with the careless writing; Barra forgets to tell pieces of the story--for example, Luther King's escape:
When the posse returned to Tombstone they could at least console themselves that they had the link to the stage robberies in Luther King, or so they thought. In his diary George Parsons wrote, "King, the stage robber, escaped tonight early from H. Woods who had been previously notified of an attempt at release to be made. Some of our officials should be hanged, they're a bad lot." Harry Jones agreed. Evidently he felt that the horse-selling transaction was a plot to get him out of the office; from that time he counted himself an Earp partisan.
(Barra 143-4)
This makes NO SENSE if you haven't already read some other book on the Matter of Tombstone and know that King stepped out the back door of the jail while Harry Jones was drawing up a bill of sale for a horse which King had sold to John Dunbar. To make matters worse, Barra's endnote to this passage is itself a further example of careless writing: "In his 1928 book, Helldorado, Billy Breckenridge invents a bogus Nugget story about King's escape that finishes with the line "He [King] was an important witness against Holliday" (Barra 176 n.3) In fact, as Gary Roberts explains, Breckenridge (whom he and Tefertiller both spell "Breakenridge") "tamper[ed] with a Nugget article concerning the escape of Luther King from jail after the Benson stage robbery to include the statement 'He was an important witness against Holliday,' which was not in the original (Roberts 386). Breakenridge didn't invent the whole story; he just tacked a line on at the end.
There are other examples--Barra claims that the infamous poker game the night before the gunfight included not only John Behan, Virgil Earp, Ike Clanton, and Tom McLaury (who are the gentlemen Tefertiller puts there, along with an "unknown player" (Tefertiller 115)), but also Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday. He gives no source for this rather extraordinary claim, and when he says at the end of the paragraph, "That Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday could have spent nearly five hours drinking and playing poker without trying to kill each other is practically impossible to believe" (167), I entirely agree with him.
In general--and this is ironic for someone whose purpose is to trace the legends and misinformation about Wyatt Earp--Barra doesn't cite his sources. This does not increase his credibility for me, especially when he says things like "The logistics of travel from Colorado, which is where Wyatt was when Ringo was shot, are tough, but researchers have determined that it could have been possible" (Barra 277). WHICH researchers? and determined HOW? Beyond that, it became apparent to me as I read that Barra has a number of biases. He dislikes liberals and academics, and he has a particular hatred of economic and social historians. I couldn't figure out why until I got to the part where he whips his knife out and sinks it into Paula Mitchell Marks: he condemns And Die in the West as "well-intentioned" (Barra 214), which is pretty damn near fightin' words. Barra divides the world of Earpian research into pro-Earp and anti-Earp; his categories are absolute and polar, and "anti-Earp" is anyone who does not agree with Barra's equally absolute and polar division of good guys and bad guys at (near) the O.K. Corral.
I am not saying this because I think the Clantons and the McLaurys were "good guys," or because I think Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday, were "bad guys." I'm saying it because I think Barra's view is reductive and dismissive and ultimately not helpful.
This habit also slops over into his appraisal of sources. Earpian research is a particularly fraught area in this regard due to the habit of writers such as Lake (Frontier Marshal), Waters (The Earp Brothers of Tombstone), and Boyer (I Married Wyatt Earp) of just making shit up when the facts weren't interesting enough for them. And Barra is weirdly double-faced. He doesn't like Waters' book (The Earp Brothers of Tombstone) because it is "anti-Earp," so he dismisses it. But he likes Boyer's pro-Earp I Married Wyatt Earp, so he says things like "The Morgan Earp-John Behan clash isn't in Josephine's actual memoirs and therefore, like all the Tombstone passages in I Married Wyatt Earp, is suspect. Still, it can't be discounted" (252). Why, exactly, can't it be discounted? Having read the passage in question, I find it deeply implausible, and am tempted to apply to Barra his catty remark about Paula Mitchell Marks and The Earp Brothers of Tombstone: "Ms. Marks, it can be said, wants the book to be true" (283).
Ultimately, I think a lot of my trouble with this book is that Barra throws a lot of stones without seeming to realize that his own house is made of glass. He attacks other writers for exactly the flaws of his own book. Also, Barra is not a historian, not in the sense of not having a degree in history, but in the sense of not being a historian. This was made appallingly clear to me when he says:
Perhaps any further packets of Doc's letters still out there are best kept hidden. We'd be less interested in Doc if we knew why he left home forever, just as we would lose interest in Bogart's Rick Blaine in Casablanca, if we knew why he could never return to America.
(Barra 303)
There's so much wrong with this, from my perspective: the casual conflation of a real person and a fictional character; the self-centered assumption that the value of a real person is in how entertaining "we" find him or her; the idea that the truth is less important than being "interesting" (an idea that Mssrs. Lake, Waters, and Boyer might well agree with).
Barra isn't a historian; he's a professional journalist with a thing about Wyatt Earp. And many of the things I like about this book spring from Barra being exactly what he is. But he does spend a lot of time getting in his own way.
To end, I want to relay my favorite quote in the book, from an interview Barra had with Val Kilmer about playing Doc Holliday: "Trying to flesh out his character is like trying to put clothes on a ghost" (Barra 286).
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:24 am (UTC)That's a lovely quote from Kilmer.
From the little I know about boxing history, it's easy to see how things could get complicated, especially when you're at the point where two rule systems are in competition. As for the hapless referees, let us remember that "We was robbed!" is a boxing quote.
If you're big on history as the record of great and wonderful things done by Great Men, economic and social history isn't likely to make you happy. It tends to drag those pink-and-golden clouds of glory down to earth fast.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 03:45 am (UTC)Then there are those nasty Marxist roots so much social and economic history has--if girl cooties are icky, Marxist cooties are much worse. You can pat the girls and tell them they're cute, after all. The Marxists just sneer and apply dialectic to you--what's a fella to do?
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 08:18 am (UTC)Not in the real world, anyway. But Anime!Doc or ActionHero!Doc could dual-wield TWO shotguns. With his FEET. :-)
Apropos of your column the other day, and our discussion on it -- if you have not already read it, go to a bookstore, find the annotated edition of From Hell, and read the short comic "Dance of the Gull Catchers" at the back. The things it has to say about historical writing, and historical fiction, and the vortex that forms around loci like the Ripper (or Tombstone), are really interesting. (The best touch is when he likens this kind of study to a Koch Snowflake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Snowflake); its edge becomes fractally infinite, as more information gets added, but will never escape the circumscribed limits of the event itself.)
no subject
Date: 2010-07-04 03:16 pm (UTC)