Such is the estimate of the actual Wyatt Earp as given by Frank Waters in the Introduction to his The Earp Brothers of Tombstone (1960). Considering the strength of the evidence presented in that book, Waters's assessment is, if anything, rather generous. While attempts to suppress the book were made by both Wyatt Earp's last wife and by Stuart N. Lake, neither they nor anyone else has successfully disputed the facts Waters documented. That being the case, how does it happen that Wyatt Earp has been the faultless hero of over a dozen movies and the subject of one of the most popular Western television series in the "Golden Age" of television?³

Nor is Earp's status as hero merely a curious matter of past cultural history. In 1993 and 1994, two large budget movies, Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994), again portrayed Wyatt as the most fearless and proficient lawman of the Old West. Why has the Earp myth held such power for the American public when every film rendering of it save one⁴ has been based on lies, distortions, and ludicrous inversions of history?

The Waters manuscript was available in the Arizona Historical Society as early as 1934. It was published in 1960. Nevertheless, moviemakers have consistently ignored the damning evidence available as to the character and actions of the real Wyatt Earp in favor of the Lake's preposterous fictions or their own (usually equally preposterous) variations thereof. Why? Why has the myth been so much more beguiling than truth? Are there Teflon marshals as well as Teflon presidents [like former President Reagan]?

Certainly the Wyatt Earp of film and other mass media is mythic in the sense of being historically untrue. But is it not also mythic in another and more significant sense: a story whose real purpose is to unfold part of the world view of a people?

According to Stuart N. Lake's Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal (1931; reprinted 1994), the Earps were goaded into the gunfight with the Clantons and McLowerys. As part of a large band of "organized outlawry" (Lake 235), these men were determined to kill the Earps because the Earps were the only peace officers standing between the outlaws and their goal of total control of Tombstone and the surrounding countryside.

Again according to Lake, Wyatt turned down several offers of help from Mayor Clum and vigilance committees eager to come to the Earps' support (Lake 281). So on October 31, 1881, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, alone except for their friend Doc Holliday, a tubercular, onetime dentist, confronted Ike Clanton, his nineteen-year-old brother Billy, and the McLowery brothers, Frank and Tom. The intent of the Earps, we are told, was merely to disarm the Clanton party for illegally carrying firearms in the city limits. The Clanton group instead opened fire, forcing the Earp party to do the same (Lake 295). When the shooting was over, both the McLowery brothers and Billy Clanton were dead; Virgil and Morgan were seriously wounded and Holliday slightly so. Wyatt was unscathed as was Ike Clanton who had run into the nearby Fly's Photography Gallery the moment the shooting began.

The Lake version has it that in revenge for these shootings and for the Earps' persistence as obstacles to their criminal activities, other members of the enormous band of "organized outlawry" also called "the cowboy element" later ambushed and severely crippled Virgil and then murdered Morgan by shooting him in the back while he was playing pool. (Lake 308-9, 312, 323-4).

Finally Lake tells us that despite great opposition from the County Sheriff, Johnny Behan, who was in collusion with the Clanton gang, Wyatt formed a posse and scoured the countryside for the gang, now lead by a vicious and fearless outlaw called "Curly Bill" Brocius. Wyatt and his small posse succeeded in killing Brocius and so many of his gang that not just Tombstone, but the whole state of Arizona was saved from their reign of terror (Lake 343-4).

The truth is unfortunately a great deal more sordid.⁵ To put it bluntly, Wyatt Earp was a crook and a murderer. His gang coveted badges as shields for their illegal activities, which in Tombstone consisted mainly of a series of stagecoach robberies. They had an inside contact at Wells Fargo who tipped them off about bullion shipments from the local mines. Tombstone was a mining boom camp, not a cattle town. Whatever cowboys there were, were vastly outnumbered by miners and folks like the Earps—the gamblers, bunco artists, pimps, whores, and thieves who always gathered in boom towns to mine the miners.

Not that the Earps had been particularly successful in getting badges. Wyatt had tried and failed to get a political appointment as sheriff of the county. That went to John Behan and was one source of their mutual antagonism. Virgil had run twice for City Marshal, but was defeated both times. At the time of the O.K. Corral shootings, he was a Deputy acting as City Marshal because the previous marshal had left town unexpectedly (Waters 138-9). The other two Earps and Holliday were only temporarily deputized by Virgil on the day of the shootings. The day after the shootings Virgil was suspended by the City Council. Several months later he was dismissed from office. (Waters 179, 181).

The Clantons and McLowerys were also something less than sterling citizens (Waters 121-2). With the influx of people caused by the mining boom, Tombstone was chronically short on fresh meat. So, although the Clantons and McLowerys had ranches of sorts, they made their living rustling cattle, rather than raising them. They would steal Mexican cattle and sell the stolen beef to local business people who were quite willing not to ask were the cattle came from.

At the start the Earps, the Clantons, and McLowerys were part of the same Tombstone underworld element. Their feud sprang not from the natural conflict between the forces of Light and Darkness, but from a falling out among thieves. First, one of the McLowery brothers was suspected of sneaking out at night with one of the Earp's daughters.⁶ Second, Doc Holliday got drunk and badly botched one of the early stage robberies, killing the driver and one of the passengers in the process (Waters 127-31). He worked the robbery with three confederates who were drinking companions of Ike Clanton.

The killings caused an intense uproar and forced the usually indolent Sheriff Behan and other local law officers to make a greater show at catching the culprits than was their usual practice. Holliday's three confederates were soon identified. Fortunately for Holliday and the Earps, the three were killed before they could be brought to trial. Unfortunately for the Clantons and McLowerys, that left only them knowing that Holliday had done the shooting and that Wyatt had planned the robbery (Waters 136-7, 144- 6).

Therefore, the famous shootout at the O.K. Corral, rather than a confrontation between the Light and Dark sides of the Force, was considerably more like one of those scenes from the "Godfather" movies during which the Corleones take care of family business by eliminating all their enemies. As the Earps and Holliday moved down the street toward the Clanton group, several witnesses heard Morgan say to Holliday, "Let's get them." And Holliday's reply, "Alright." Other witnesses confirmed that it was Morgan and Holliday who simultaneously fired the first shots.

Witnesses also confirmed that when the shooting started all of the Clanton group had their hands up except Tom McLowery who was using both hands to hold his coat open in order to show he wasn't armed (Waters 168-70). Ike Clanton wasn't armed either. He was missed at least three times at close range by Holliday as he ran into Fly's Photography Gallery for protection (Waters 158, 164). Both McLowerys were mortally wounded early in the shooting; Frank being shot at close range by Holliday with a shotgun. The nineteen-year-old Billy Clanton was wounded with one of the first shots, but still managed to wound three of the four in the Earp party before they could kill him. So much for the greatest stand-up gunfight in the history of the West.

The witnesses mentioned above never got a chance to testify in court. The Earps were never brought to trial. A Justice of the Peace named Spicer, who happened to be a friend of the Earp faction, was supposed to hold a hearing to determine if there was enough evidence to require a trial. By not calling any of the half dozen or so people who had seen all or some of the actual shooting, and by calling two witnesses who had seen nothing, Judge Spicer was able to declare there was not enough evidence to warrant a trial. However, this seems to have been less a vindication of the Earps than a desire on the part of some of the solid citizenry of Tombstone to get the Earps quietly out of town before they revealed just how many people in Tombstone were profiting from the recent rash of stagecoach holdups. Hence, Virgil's being fired as City Deputy the day after the shooting.

The assassination of Morgan and the attempted assassination of Virgil were apparently the result of further fallings-out among the Tombstone underworld that both the Earp and Clanton groups belonged to. The small Earp posse's heroic blood cleansing (Lake's version) of all the bad element in Arizona was farce of the highest order. Two individuals (also members of the same criminal underworld the Earps were a part of) who may have been involved in the shootings of Virgil and Morgan were ambushed and pretty much shot to pieces. However, to the extent that "organized outlawry" existed, the Earps and Holliday were a part of it; so they were in effect chasing their own tails. To actually catch "organized outlawry" in Tombstone, they would have had to preempt Walt Kelly's Pogo by announcing, "We have found the enemy and he is us." Another posse headed by Sheriff Behan, the political appointee, was supposedly in turn pursuing the Earps. But both groups went to great and successful pains to avoid contact with the other. Eventually, Wyatt declared victory and quietly slipped out of the state.

By the way, another reason for the animosity between Behan and Wyatt (besides the Sheriff's appointment itself) was that Wyatt pursued and wooed away Behan's girlfriend, Josie Marcus, even though Wyatt was married and had a wife (Mattie) in Tombstone at the time. He abandoned Mattie after leaving Tombstone, pursued Josephine to San Francisco and married her without bothering to divorce Mattie, who lived until 1888.⁷ Josie was his third wife. Lake mentions no wives in Tombstone or earlier, leaving the impression Wyatt was a bachelor until he married Josephine after his Tombstone days.

At least five films featuring Wyatt Earp were made before John Ford's 1946 version, My Darling Clementine.⁸ However, none of the earlier movies is as well regarded by critics and audiences alike as the Ford movie. Ford is reported as saying that Earp himself told Ford how the gunfight at the O.K. Corral happened, and that was the way Ford made it.⁹ If Ford did hear the story from Earp, either Earp misspoke (hardly for the first time) or Ford mis-listened or both. What resulted was an above average John Ford Western, coated lightly (very lightly) with a patina of the Lake version of events, and staying a long, dusty day's horseback ride from historical fact.

The relationship of this film to the historical Earp and the events in Tombstone can be gauged by the opening that has Wyatt and his brothers herding cattle. The idea of Wyatt, such a fanatic about his appearance that he would go into a funk if a spot was discovered on his starched shirt (Waters 111), herding cattle sounds like the start of a Mel Brooks western rather than one by John Ford.

Among other minor mix-ups are: Holliday is a former surgeon from Boston rather than a dentist from the South. Holliday and Earp met for the first time in Tombstone rather than years before in Kansas. James, the oldest brother, is here the youngest. Wyatt's younger brother Morgan is played by a Ward Bond who looks ten years older than Henry Fonda's Wyatt. And Wyatt's older brother Virgil is played by a Tim Holt who looks younger than Wyatt. None of the Earp wives is mentioned (everyone but Warren, the fifth and youngest of the five Earps in Tombstone, was married and had his wife with him in Tombstone). The McLowery brothers are not mentioned. The gunfight is placed in 1882 rather than 1881. Old Man Clanton (played by Walter Brennan) is the instigator and main combatant at the gunfight; quite a feat for a man who had actually died several months earlier. Virgil is killed before the gunfight even happens, and Doc Holliday is killed during the gunfight itself. Ford seems to think that Tombstone is a cowtown, rather than a mining camp. He does get the name of the town right.

The Clementine of the title is a nurse-sweetheart of Holliday's who has followed him all the way from Boston. Doc rejects her, being far more deeply in love with his melancholy over being tubercular. This allows Wyatt a chance to do some discrete courting (again discrete courting was not exactly the historical Wyatt's strong suit). And when Doc is conveniently, if unhistorically, killed at the O.K. Corral, it is clear that after Wyatt's obligatory ride off into the sunset, he will turn right around again and ride back for Clementine. For her part, despite being a nurse from Boston who came West only to find her true love, the suddenly deceased Doc Holliday, Clementine has now decided to stay on in the sparkling urban setting of Tombstone, to be the new schoolmarm!

As the critics rightly point out, the film is beautifully photographed, capturing both the enormous contrast of burningly bright days and overwhelmingly dark nights. And the performances by Fonda as Wyatt and Victor Mature as Doc are first rate. It also contains the classic interchange between Wyatt and a saloonkeeper:

And despite its devil-may-care attitude toward either the historical facts or Lake's fabrications, the film does use Fonda's charisma as an actor to create a Wyatt of mythic stature. It also presents Wyatt as a man so deeply dedicated to the law that even the death of two brothers cannot tempt him to seek revenge rather than justice. The establishment of Wyatt's mythical stature will play a key role in other retellings of the Earp myth. However, in later movies, there will be a growing tension between Marshal Wyatt's dedication to justice¹⁰ and brother Wyatt's human desire for revenge.

Setting aside for the moment the trifling point that the myth is based on lies, two portrayals of Wyatt Earp after Fonda's added much to the character's mythic stature. One is Hugh O'Brian's first-rate performance as Wyatt in the television series. The other one, which we will turn to next, is Burt Lancaster's portrayal in John Sturges's Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It is also in this film that the mythic potential of the relationship between Wyatt and Doc Holliday begins to be realized. Mature plays a strong Holliday in the Ford film, but there are no effective scenes showing the bonding between the two that plays a central role in most of the later movies. Fonda's Wyatt backs Doc down with the help of his brothers and later shows something of an affection for Doc, but if Doc returns it, such scenes were left on the cutting room floor.¹¹ His reason for joining in the gunfight is not friendship for Wyatt, but revenge for the death of his dance hall girlfriend, Chihuahua (played by Linda Darnell), at the hands of the Clantons.

Doc Holliday, portrayed by Kirk Douglas in Gunfight, gets out of his sickbed to join the Earps at the O. K. Corral, saying, "If I'm going to die, at least let me die with the only friend I've ever had." Correspondingly, Burt Lancaster's Wyatt develops a strong liking for Doc that leads him to trust Doc to the extent of risking his reputation and even the disapproval of his brothers. Like the protagonist of Joseph Conrad's short story "The Secret Sharer," Lancaster is drawn to someone who seems to be the darker side of himself.

Although the feud between the Clantons and Earps is foreshadowed early in the movie, the bulk of the film is spent establishing Wyatt's stature and the strange friendship between him and the gambler-gunman, Holliday. Wyatt is developed not only as the West's most formidable lawman, but one who (to coin a phrase) is so clean, he squeaks. He is the walking embodiment of the logic of the law. After a somewhat testy first meeting, Wyatt and Doc take turns saving each others life through the middle of the film.

In the last third of the movie, Wyatt is called from Dodge to Tombstone to help his brothers who are already lawmen there. They are in danger of being overwhelmed by Ike Clanton, assorted Clanton brothers, the McLowerys, and Johnny Ringo, the same desperadoes Wyatt was perusing in the opening of the movie. Wyatt and Doc have become so close that when Doc finds Wyatt headed out of town he joins him, claiming lamely that "the deck has gone cold" in Dodge. So the upright Wyatt and the notorious Doc Holliday arrive in Tombstone together, to the consternation of Wyatt's lawmen brothers.

Wyatt leads a campaign to put the squeeze on Ike's cattle rustling. Ike in turn arranges a dark-of-night assassination attempt of Wyatt. However, at the last minute one of Wyatt's brothers replaces him in doing the rounds of the town and is killed in Wyatt's stead. Wyatt, the logical lawman, wants personal revenge. Doc, of all people, tries to taught him out of making it a family matter, pressing Wyatt to be logical. Wyatt replies, "To hell with logic. That's my brother lying there."

When Wyatt is informed that the Clanton bunch will be in town the next day to face the Earps, Wyatt begins to worry about losing other brothers and goes to Doc's room to ask him to help. Doc, however, has passed out from a bad coughing fit caused by his tuberculosis and Kate Elder,¹² Doc's woman, tells Wyatt to leave Doc alone because he is dying. Wyatt spends a long night and morning in the manner of Gary Cooper awaiting the showdown in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952). As the three brothers start for the O. K. Corral, they are joined at the last minute by Holliday. Wyatt's brothers and Doc are wounded in the ensuing gun battle, but all of their opponents are killed.

One review praises scriptwriter Leon Uris for how well he researched the historical events and how faithful his script is to the facts.¹³ Nonsense. As an historical account, this film is only slightly less off the wall than My Darling Clementine. Not only does it avoid any of the unpleasantness about the stage robberies and the shooting of unarmed men with their hands up, it doesn't even follow the Lake version. In fact, like My Darling Clementine, this film has James, the oldest brother, as the youngest, and again kills him off to build conflict. The right number of Earps show up for the gunfight, but apparently Morgan is supposed to be one of Wyatt's older brothers.

In a breakthrough for verisimilitude, one of the brothers is actually married this time and has a wife in Tombstone. But Wyatt is again a bachelor who has had to abandon his lady love almost at the alter in Dodge when he feels compelled to answer the call of Virgil and Morgan to come rescue them in Tombstone. When the showdown comes, Ike is ahistorically killed, and so is John Ringo (who neither history nor Lake mentions as even being in town, let alone in the gunfight). At the end of the shootout, viewers are left with the impression that this is the end of the Earps' troubles in Tombstone. After telling Doc he couldn't have made it without him, Wyatt leaves to seek his ladylove. Doc goes back to his card game. The other brothers and the town apparently live happily ever after.

Well, then again maybe the Earps and Tombstone didn't live happily ever after. Eventually, someone must have given John Sturges a copy of Lake's book. Because ten years after the making of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, he did a sequel of sorts. The Hour of the Gun begins with the famous shootout and then follows Lake, somewhat, in tracing the events that came after. Perhaps because it turned out that Ike Clanton didn't die in the shoot out, Leon Uris was not asked back to do more of his careful historical research. This script was written by Edward Anhalt, who three years earlier had written the screenplay for Peter Glenville's Becket (1964).

Hour of the Gun is no Becket, but it does show a darker Wyatt Earp than ever before presented on the screen. The film follows the Lake account of events more closely than Sturges's earlier Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or My Darling Clementine. However, Ike Clanton, played by the dapper Robert Ryan, is promoted from small time rustler of Mexican cattle to a robber baron, looking to own all of Arizona before Eastern robber barons can move in to squeeze him out. As usual, only Wyatt and his stalwart brother stand in the way. When the corral shootout fails to eliminate the Earps, Ike orders the ambush of Virgil and Morgan.

Up until one of his brothers is killed and the other crippled, Wyatt, portrayed this time by a totally humorless (and therefore miscast) James Garner, is the same rigid defender of the law that he had been in the earlier Burt Lancaster version. However, once the courts fail to hold, let alone convict, the men who have shot his brothers, Earp purposely uses the law and his small posse as a means to commit a series of judicial murders. He corners each of the men he suspects of involvement and then goads them into drawing first so that he can kill them with his superior proficiency with a gun. Doc Holliday (Jason Robards) soon suspects this is what his friend is up to and is appalled because Wyatt has represented for him one of the few examples of honesty and honor in an otherwise savage and hypocritical world.

One by one, Earp's posse tracks down the Clanton's minions and each time Earp finds an excuse to kill them. Finally, only Clanton is left. He has fled to Mexico where he has set up the same sort of profitable rustling business he had been conducting in Arizona. After attempting to bring Clanton to justice through the Mexican judicial process and again being thwarted by Clanton's ability to manipulate the system, Wyatt, with Doc refusing to leave his side, simply tracks Clanton to his hacienda and kills him (again after letting Clanton make the token first move for his gun). Wyatt then takes Doc to a sanitarium in Colorado and leaves for California vowing never to be an officer of the law again (even though he has been offered a high post by in Arizona) because he has compromised his sense of honor by putting revenge before legality.

As later filmmakers would also discover, trying to make a coherent and engrossing film out of what Lake called "Wyatt Earp's red trail of vengeance" is no easy task. Reviewers found the last half of Hour of the Gun far less successful than the first half. We learn little of what is going on in Wyatt's mind as he makes the switch from upholding the law to seeking revenge. Wyatt's conscience is instead externalized in Robards's Doc Holliday. There is not enough action or suspense to make up for what has become basically a psychodrama in which we are not allowed inside the thoughts of the main character.

As usual, no use is made of Waters's account of the facts. It is not clear whether this is by design (a conscious decision that the public would not go to a movie about the real Wyatt Earp) or simply out of ignorance of Waters's book. However, it would not have taken much effort beyond a call to any reputable historian of Western Americana or even merely a call to the reference desk of a fair sized library to find out that Waters's The Earp Brothers in Tombstone existed and offered reputable evidence demolishing the Lake account of Wyatt Earp's deed and personality. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence that the final two movies to be discussed both made extensive use of material only available from The Earp Brothers in Tombstone. But the use to which that material is put might be summed up as "curious and curiouser."

George P. Cosmatos's Tombstone is the only Earp film I know of to give full treatment to Wyatt Earp's grand conspiracy theory about the "organized outlawry" that is supposedly threatening Tombstone and the good people of Arizona. The film opens with a massacre of Mexican policemen by Curly Bill Brocius (Powers Boothe), Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) and their murderous band of red-sash wearing cowboy criminals. The Clantons and McLowerys are merely members of this huge band of more than a hundred outlaws that have been run out of Texas only to be even more of a problem for Arizona under the leadership of Brocius.

Meanwhile, Wyatt Earp brings his brothers Morgan and Virgil (the other two brothers are never mentioned) to Tombstone determined that they will all give up the law and make money instead. Doc Holliday, already Wyatt's longtime friend, arrives in town almost at the same time. And, lo and behold, the Earps have wives! All of them, even Wyatt, although it is doubtful whether any of them have actually been formally married since the women were recruited into the Earp clan from the ranks of dance hall whores.

Wyatt's hopes of hanging up his star and peacefully (or at least fairly peacefully) amassing a fortune for himself and his kin are dashed by the pervasive, menacing presence of the Cowboys. When Wyatt refuses Mayor Clum's entreaties to become town marshal and clean up the place, Virgil is unable to turn a blind eye to the chaos and violence caused by the Cowboys. He accepts the badge and Morgan signs on as his deputy. Their duties quickly bring them into conflict with the Clanton-McLowery subgroup of the Cowboys. An angry and pessimistic Wyatt is forced to back his brothers, and Holliday is eager to join the Earps in their confrontation with the Clantons and McLowerys. They win the gunfight O.K. Corral, but subsequently Virgil is crippled by a gunshot wound, Morgan killed, and an attempt is even made on the lives of the wives. All deeds are orchestrated by the ruthless gang leader, Brocius.

These acts drive Wyatt to an equal ruthlessness. He accepts the Deputy U.S. Marshal's badge that he had rejected on first arriving in Tombstone and organizes his posse of Doc and three others. This small group begins to kill its way through a large swath of the Cowboys. In response, Curly Bill sets up an ambush, but an enraged Wyatt steps into the open, seemingly invincible to the dozens of bullets flying at him, marches up to Curly Bill and kills him and all those near him. This amazing feat heartens Earp's followers and completely demoralizes the Cowboys who run off.

However, the Earp posse has gone from the frying pan into the fire because the remaining cowboys, who still number over thirty, are now led by Johnny Ringo, a killer so bloodthirsty and capable with a gun that even Curly Bill seems restrained by comparison. Ringo challenges Wyatt to a personal duel. Wyatt's honor won't let him refuse even though a bedridden Holliday confirms Wyatt's suspicion that, unlike Doc himself, Wyatt is not nearly fast enough on the draw to beat Ringo. Wyatt leaves Doc in bed at a friendly rancher's homestead and goes out to face Ringo. However, Doc, who was not as ill as he pretended, gets to Ringo ahead of Wyatt and kills Ringo in a duel. Doc, Wyatt, and the remaining members of Wyatt's posse then smash the now leaderless Cowboys, ending their menace forever.

Although not without significant flaws, this is in some ways the most satisfying movie version of the myth that grew out of and far beyond the fictions of Stuart Lake. Certainly, Val Kilmer gives the most engaging and mythically appropriate portrayal of Doc Holliday in any of the movies. In Doc's interaction with Wyatt, and Wyatt's with Josie (played by Dana Delany) we see the inhibitions in Wyatt that have kept him from knowing himself. As he says to Doc before going off to what he thinks will be his death in the duel with Johnny Ringo, "For the first time in my life I know what I want and even who I want to do it with. That's the damnable thing of it." After the smashing of the Cowboys, Wyatt takes Doc to a sanitarium and visits him daily. The dying Holliday forces Wyatt to say goodbye and to get on with his life, telling him to go find Josie and then live every moment to the fullest, to live those moments for Holliday. Wyatt leaves to follow Doc's advise, freed by his demon other from his inability to live a fully authentic life.

While giving full flight to Lake's accounts of the bogus "Cowboy conspiracy," the film also introduces significant facts only available from Frank Waters's account of the real Earps. The brothers are given their actual wives. Although whitewashed to make Mattie rather than Wyatt seem more at fault, Wyatt's adultery with Josie and abandonment of Mattie is at least finally presented. An actual passage from the Waters book is incorporated into the script. When Virgil, after being told that he has lost the use of his left arm, strives to comfort Allie by saying, "Never mind, I've got one good arm to hug you with" (Waters 185).

Nevertheless, the Wyatt of Tombstone is still the fabricated hero of Lake, not the self-promoting, criminal, and confidence-man failure of historical fact. It is ironic, to say the least, that Wyatt Earp, portrayed in the movies as the greatest lawman of them all was never in fact a full-fledged marshal anywhere in the West at any time in his career. He was a Deputy or City Policeman at various times and in various places in Kansas (Waters 38-40). In his pursuit of "organized outlawry" after the death of Morgan, he had a Deputy U.S. Marshal's appointment. However, only because the Tucson-based U.S. Marshal Crawley P. Dake, a time-server of the Behan sort, came to Tombstone and literally gave out the badges by the handful to anyone who would take one in order to demonstrate to his superiors that he was doing something to control the "rough element" of Tombstone. Of course, guess who lined up to get the badges? (Waters, 188).

The last film we will look at, Wyatt Earp directed by Lawrence Kasdan, is by far the most ambitious retelling of the Wyatt Earp myth, not just in its length (over three hours), but in its attempt to convey the whole of Wyatt Earp's life. Action starts with the Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil starting their walk to the O.K. Corral on the day of the famous gunfight. Then it flashes back to Wyatt's formative years in Missouri, first as a teenager too young to join his older brothers James and Virgil [yes, amazingly James is actually the eldest in a movie treatment] fighting in the Civil War. He imbibes his father's (Gene Hackman) preachment that "nothing is so important as family. Everyone else is a stranger." The law is a good second source for loyalty, but only if it does not conflict with family.

After a short period adventuring in the Western Plains, Wyatt returns to marry his local sweetheart. He is attracted to the untouched and uncrowded plains, but he is far more deeply in love with his sweetheart. For a year they are idyllically happy, but then his pregnant wife dies of typhoid. He is so overwhelmed by grief that he sets out to drink himself to death. Nine months later finds him in jail in Arkansas for stealing a horse to fund his drinking. Only the arrival of his father who posts bond saves him from the hangman's noose. His father tells him that grief is no excuse for not going on with life, gives him a horse and a gun and orders him to ride until he is out of Arkansas and to never come back.

Wyatt returns to the open plains, this time as a buffalo hunter. He is successful, but wants to make a living doing something other than "shooting dumb animals." For a while, he deals faro. However, his bravery in subduing a drunk shooting up a saloon gets him a job in Wichita as a deputy. This later leads to his being recruited to be chief Deputy Marshal in the booming cow town of Dodge City. Throughout this period, he functions but remains emotionally cold and contained, trusting no one but his brothers and a few friends like Bat Masterson, most of whom have also gone into law enforcement in Dodge. He gains a reputation as an honest, fearless but also ruthless enforcer of the law, one who will pistol-whip a drunk at the least provocation.

Wyatt is temporarily replaced as Chief Deputy in Dodge because of his dour, violent methods. During this time he meets and befriends Doc Holliday in Griffin, Texas. The two lonely, distrustful, violent men see in each others eyes a man they can understand and whose word is his bond. Wyatt is called back to Dodge when his more "affable" replacement is murdered in the streets and the town reverts to lawlessness. He soon cows the cowboys with his willingness to met their rowdiness with unblinking courage and deadly force.

Eventually, he tires of the law and Dodge and talks his brothers and Holliday into going with him to Tombstone, a booming silver camp where they will give up law enforcement and make their fortunes in operating the saloons, gambling, and stagecoach lines needed by the growing town. The Earp wives try to confront Wyatt and force him to leave their husbands be in Dodge. He is simply angered by their attempt to have a say in their own lives. So everyone moves. However, a year later, they have made no fortunes and Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt have drifted back into law enforcement, working as city deputies under Sheriff White. Again the other Earp wives press for the chance for their men to go their own way free of Wyatt's insistence that "family is everything." Again, Wyatt ruthlessly tells them their opinions count for nothing because "wives come and go; they run off; they die."

The feud with the Clanton, McLowery, Curly Bill Brocius bunch begins. The bunch controls Sheriff Johnny Behan and the county law, but the Earps as Tombstone lawmen become an increasingly aggravating hindrance to their criminal activities. Attempts to bribe Wyatt simply anger him and cause him and his brothers to push the gang harder. The gang responds first with an ambush that results in the murder of City Marshal White, and then with an open threat that they will kill the Earps on sight.

Meanwhile, Wyatt has taken up with Josie, which drives the already neglected Mattie deeper into an addiction to laudanum. Wyatt is troubled by his betrayal of Mattie, but not enough to stop seeing Josie who has gotten more deeply into his emotions than any woman since the death of his wife (he has never married Mattie though he lets her use his name). On the eve of the shootout, Josie begs Wyatt to leave with her, but he cannot conceive of a live not centered on the Earp brothers as a unit. Even for her he will not go.

We come back to the opening scene of the movie, as the Earps, soon joined by Holliday, march to the O.K. Corral to disarm or destroy the part of the gang that has assembled there. The gunfight ensues. Billy Clanton and the McLowerys are killed. Virgil and Morgan are seriously wounded. However, nothing is actually resolved. The Earps continue in Tombstone in their rut, giving Brocius the opportunity to organize the maiming of Virgil and the murder of Morgan.

Wyatt tells Josie he knows now they stayed too long in Tombstone. Nevertheless, his overwhelming priority now is to kill all those involved with the shooting of his brothers. A man fully possessed by the need for revenge, he kills with a viciousness that shocks his youngest brother Warren and even makes Doc Holliday uncomfortable. In a final shootout, Wyatt is caught in the open in a crossfire set up by Brocius and the other main figures in the gang. Bullets tear through his duster but cannot seem to touch him. He kills Brocius. The rest of his posse arrives and help kill Johnny Ringo and the core of the gang.

We next see Wyatt and Josie seventeen years later on their way to the Alaska gold rush of 1898. A scene is contrived to recall for us yet one more example of Wyatt's courage and steadfastness in the face of great odds. Wyatt says, in effect, that people may not remember him that way. Josie takes his hand and tells him, "Never mind, Wyatt, it happened that way." We are told in a closing caption that they lived faithfully together for forty-seven years and that their ashes were buried together.

Wyatt Earp was not as successful at the box office as Tombstone. Many credit that to its inordinate length. However, Costner's enormously successful Dances with Wolves (1990) was also three hours long. It may be that the problem with the film is that the Kasdan/Costner team had the courage to deal with more of the real Wyatt's dark side, but not courage enough to go all the way. So their admirable attempt gets caught betwixt and between. Wyatt is just too mean and cold to make an endearing hero, no matter how many feats of bravery he performed.

These last two films have played with the idea that the historical Josie completes the mythical Wyatt, but actually it is the mythical Doc who does. Together, they make a whole—Wyatt is physically healthy but lacks the ability to live a full emotional life. Doomed to die, Doc can see how his friend can live the life Doc himself cannot. Both the 1993 and the 1994 Doc Holidays, but particularly Kilmer's portrayal are, in Jungian terms, the "Shadow" that Wyatt must reabsorb in order to have a fully developed and integrated Self. Only then can he go off to a life with Josie.

So now it is time to draw some conclusions about the mythic life of Wyatt Earp. What better source to turn to than Frank Waters, who has delved deepest into the facts of the historical Earp. It is not accidental, as Charles Adams (the dean of Waters' scholars) has pointed out, that Waters entitled his introduction to The Earp Brothers of Tombstone as "The Anatomy of a Western Legend" (Adams 32). Waters notes that the Earp legend, preposterous as it is, is nevertheless a coherent subpart of the larger Myth of the American West: "the resplendent myth of westward expansion that culminated in the Winning of the West within less than a single century" (Waters 3).

The mass culture legend of Wyatt Earp begins to progressively darken in the last three movies we examined. Is it because more and more Americans are realizing that the myth of the Winning of the West is not quit so resplendent after all? Are we, as Waters predicted more than a generation ago:

[B]eginning to discern today the subjective and tragical history of a people who failed to comprehend the forces that drove them. Pioneers fleeing the comforts and lusts of civilization, fleeing home, companionship; a people still Puritans fleeing from themselves. That was the nemesis that pursued them. To get away, anywhere, under any condition . . . only to confront suddenly the shattering forces of that great entity, psychical as well as physical, that was the heartland of a new continent.

The towering mountain ranges bulked up inside them. The mysterious rivers ran in their blood. The empty deserts ate into them. And the final loneliness engulfed them, more vacuous than the spaces between the stars above. And as the fear and tension kept mounting within them, they struck out at everything, the land and its people, with a blind compulsion to dominate and destroy. (Waters 3-4)

This "blind compulsion to dominate and destroy" is the essence of "Wyatt Earp's bloody trail of vengeance" as fictionalized by Lake and embroidered upon in such films as Hour of the Gun, Tombstone, and Wyatt Earp. This is also the section of the Earp myth that critics and moviegoers alike often find difficult to comprehend.¹⁴ It is, however, where the truth of Wyatt's character comes through despite greater or lesser attempts to whitewash the murders outside the O.K. Corral.

As I mentioned earlier, although neither 1994 film acknowledges Waters's book, both borrow extensively from it. Both in their own ways also try to come to terms with the "blind compulsion to dominate and destroy," even if they project that need on to characters other than Wyatt. For example, an early scene in Tombstone (the "Shall I hate him" confrontation between Ringo and Doc at Wyatt's faro table) has made clear to the audience that Doc sees in Ringo a refection of all he hates in himself. Then near the end of Tombstone, Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earp asks Val Kilmer's Doc what makes the murderous Johnny Ringo do the things he does. Speaking of the darker part of himself (and of Wyatt) as well as of the totally dark Ringo, Doc says: "A man like Ringo [has] got a great empty hole right through the middle of him. He can't ever kill enough or steal enough or inflict enough pain to fill it."

Kevin Costner's Wyatt reveals his darkness even more directly when he goes berserk in the killing of his first revenge target at the train station in Tucson. After firing both barrels of a shotgun into the man at point blank range, he empties his pistol into the body, fails to recognize and almost shoots his posse member Sherm McMasters, and responds only slowly to reality as Doc shakes him and tries to get him to come to his senses. In case we might miss the point, the camera focuses on the shocked face of his younger brother Warren who has witnessed Wyatt's uncontrolled murderousness.

Costner's Wyatt is a man almost completely incapable of gentleness, warmth, or empathy. He justifies this in his own mind by the death of his beloved first wife. But even his own father does not buy that excuse. After rescuing him from the jail in Arkansas, the elder Earp tells him that everyone suffers grief in life, but they go on.

Although played as heroically courageous in confronting physical dangers, emotionally Costner's Earp fits very closely the description Waters offers of the dark secret at the core of the Western gunman:

Everything about him betrayed his fear and inferiority. Without real strength, he had no gentleness. Lacking all but the physical courage of desperation, he gave no odds and shot on sight. Even his face grew into an unemotional mask to match his taciturnity. Appearance and action, both added up to the fear of his fellow man. The fear of the immeasurable, inimical landscape dwarfing him to an infinitesimal speck, and its haunting timelessness, which overemphasized the brief and dangerous span of his own life. And the fear of his own fears. A man forever self-conscious, tense and inhibited, he epitomizes more than any other the compulsions of his time and place. (Waters 5-6)

Although Waters presents this as a description of the type in general, it is also an exact description of the historical Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp. So why do we make a hero of him? Waters says of the type that Earp exemplifies: Of all the characters in the American Myth [of the Winning of the West] he is the most to be pitied because he suffered the most. We understand his suffering. It is what makes him our favorite hero. (Waters 6)

But a hero for whom we feel a strong ambivalence. Waters found that even in Earp's lifetime, his self-promotion and claims of unbelievable heroism "aroused an almost equally fanatic resentment against him. For eighty years his neighbors, contemporaries, and the public press, writers, researchers, and historians have increasingly succumbed to the compulsion to search out the truth about him" (Waters 10).

Such ambivalence is a healthy sign. So is the appearance in the last two movies of the long suffering Earp wives, particularly in Costner's Wyatt Earp where they are actually given a chance to vent their frustration at being ignored and abused by our favorite American hero. And a final healthy sign is the courage of mass-market moviemakers to pull up the curtain, even if only a bit, on the darkness lurking behind the Earp legend.

  ¹ [This article originally appeared in a slightly different version in Charles L. Adams (ed.). Studies in Frank Waters - XVII: Viewpoints and Visions. Las Vegas: Frank Waters Society, 1995. pp. 63-89. Daryl Grider has taught college in Montana, Nevada, Tennessee, and West Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN. He is currently an Assistant Professor at West Virginia University in Charleston, WV where he teaches Technical Writing and directs the Writing Lab. Although he now specializes in Technical Writing, Dr. Grider's dissertation was on the novels of Frank Waters. Many years ago he did me the very great honor of introducing me to the novels of Frank Waters. We spent many pleasant summer afternoons discussing Frank Waters and Jungian psychology and sipping gin (Bombay when we could afford it) and tonic. This article, which I have reformatted and very lightly edited, is posted here by kind permission of Dr. Grider. It is copyrighted (really), so you might want to contact Dr. Grider for permission to use it (other than using routine quotations, for which you are granted permission). His e-mail address is griderda@mail.wvsc.edu. [Back]

For those who are interested in the subject of the history behind the films, I recommend Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, edited by Mark C. Carnes. (New York: Henry Holt, 1995). I also recommend the following for fans of Western cinema: (1) Cineaction Collective. The Western Then and Now. (A special issue of Cineaction, No. 46); and (2) Robert Warshow's "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner," in The Immediate Experience. New York: Atheneum, 1970. (The essay is also available in many anthologies of film studies).—TLV All other footnotes are Dr. Grider's.] [Back]

  ² Although Lake at time presented his book on Earp as one of the "as told to" variety and hence really an autobiography, during his attempts to frighten off potential publishers for the Waters book, he admitted in writing that Earp had never dictated a word to Lake and had not seen the manuscript before he died. (See Waters 9.)  [Back]

  ³ The television show starring Hugh O'Brian and called Wyatt Earp was on in the late 1950's and early 1960's. The show begins with Lake's version of Earp's glorious career as a lawman in Kansas. Therefore, it excludes Lake's extensive account of Earp as the greatest of all buffalo hunters. Still, the show made far more extensive use of the Lake biography than any of the movies, with the exception of Costner's Wyatt Earp. O'Brian does a magnificent job of carrying off the role, giving Earp a hard inner core, but making him far more likeable than Lake manages in the book, where Earp, either despite or maybe because of Lake's exercise in total idolatry, comes across as a cold, calculating egotist. So Lake is inadvertently true to the man, except that the actual article was far less competent and far more the complete sociopath than the Lake fictionalization.  [Back]

  ⁴ Doc (1971) directed by Frank Perry with a script by Pete Hamill. It starred Stacy Keach as Doc Holliday, Faye Dunaway as Kate Elder and Harris Yulin as Wyatt Earp. It romanticizes Holliday, but gives Earp most of the negative qualities he actually possessed. While critics gave it credit as being well made (see Leonard Maltin's brief review in the Microsoft CD, Cinemania 97), it was not a popular success and is one of the very few Earp movies made since 1940 that is very difficult to find on video tape.  [Back]

  ⁵ See Parts III and IV of The Earp Brothers of Tombstone for the fully documented account of the Earps' activities in Tombstone during 1881-82. The initial source and inspiration for Frank Waters's account of the Earps in Tombstone was Allie Earp, Virgil Earp's wife and Wyatt's sister-in-law, who was with the Earp clan both in Dodge City and Tombstone. Waters met "Aunt Allie," as she was known in the neighborhood, in Los Angeles in the 1930s. He later made a trip to Arizona to extensively corroborate her version of events with others who had lived in Tombstone during the time. He also made thorough use of newspaper files, diaries, and other historical records assembled by the Arizona Historical Society.  [Back]

  ⁶ Waters, 123. The girl was Hattie, daughter of Jim Earp, the oldest of the five Earp brothers in Tombstone at the time of the shootings. Virgil was next in age, then Wyatt, Morgan, and the youngest, Warren, who was twenty-two in 1881.  [Back]

  ⁷ See Part VI of The Earp Brothers of Tombstone for Waters's documentation of the sad end of Mattie Earp.  [Back]

 ⁸ According to the CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Reviews coverage of My Darling Clementine (in Cinemania 97), the earlier Earp pictures include: Law and Order (1932) with Walter Huston, Frontier Marshal (1934) with George O'Brien, Frontier Marshal (1939) with Randolph Scott, and Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die (1942).  [Back]

 ⁹ See CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Reviews coverage of My Darling Clementine in Cinemania 97.  [Back]

  ¹⁰ Actually, Wyatt Earp was never a full-fledged marshal at any time in his career. He was a Deputy or City Policeman at various times and in various places in Kansas. In his pursuit of "organized outlawry" after the death of Morgan, he had a Deputy U.S. Marshal's appointment. However, only because the local U.S. Marshal, a time-server of the Behan sort, came to Tombstone and literally gave out the badges by the handful to anyone who would take one in order to demonstrate to his superiors that he was doing something to control the "rough element" of Tombstone. Of course, guess who lined up to get the badges? (Waters, 188).  [Back]

 ¹¹ It is said that Darryl F. Zanuck cut 30 minutes from My Darling Clementine. See CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Reviews coverage of My Darling Clementine in Cinemania 97.  [Back]

  ¹² Kate Elder was at least Doc's common law wife. However, as Wyatt refused to publicly acknowledge Mattie as his wife in Tombstone, so Doc treated Kate.  [Back]

 ¹³ See CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Reviews coverage of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Cinemania 97.  [Back]

 ¹⁴ For instance, Leonard Maltin says of Hour of the Gun, which begins with the shootout and then gives an account of Wyatt's "vengeance trail": "[B]egins well, becomes increasingly tedious." See Leonard Maltin's "Review of The Hour of the Gun" in Cinemania 97.  [Back]

Adams, Charles L. Introduction to "Selection from The Earp Brothers of Tombstone." Frank Waters: A Retrospective Anthology. Athens, Ohio: Swallow/Ohio University Press, 1985.

CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Reviews of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and My Darling Clementine. Cinemania 97. CD-ROM. Microsoft, 1996.

Doc. Dir. Frank Perry. Perf. Stacy Keach, Faye Dunaway, and Harris Yulin. MGM/UA Home Video, 1971.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Dir. John Sturges. Perf. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. Paramount Pictures [Video], 1956.

Lake, Stuart N. Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. 1931. Reprinted New York: Pocket Books, 1994.

Maltin, Leonard. Review of Hour of the Gun. Cinemania 97. CD-ROM. Microsoft, 1996.

My Darling Clementine. Dir. John Ford. Perf. Henry Fonda and Victor Mature. Fox Video, 1946.

Tombstone. Dir. George P. Cosmatos. Perf. Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer. Hollywood Pictures Home Video, 1993.

Waters, Frank. The Earp Brothers of Tombstone. Clark N. Potter, 1960. Reprinted Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Wyatt Earp. Dir. Kevin Costner. Perf. Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid. Warner Home Video, 1994.