Wyatt Earp at the O. K. Corral: Six Versions

"Westerns have changed and reflected our culture over the different decades." Dennis Quaid (Kasdan 107) When asked by Teddy Roosevelt why he had not written about his colorful Ufe, Bat Masterson is said to have answered, "Mr. President, the real story of the Old West can never be told unless Wyatt Earp will tell what he knows, and Wyatt will not talk." Well, he did. Not many years before he died (1929), Wyatt twice made the effort to tell his story. He did so, believes Earp biographer Alien Barra, because he was furious about articles in the Saturday Evening Post that portrayed him and his brothers as "the instigators of much of the Tombstone trouble of the early 188Os" (Inventing 382). Neither of these efforts of Wyatt came to fruition.1 Eventually, Stuart Nathaniel Lake persuaded Wyatt to talk to him, and the resulting fictionalized biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), launched the Earp legend.2 It became "one of the great myth-making American books of the twentieth century,"3 reviving both Wyatt's fame and the memory of those associated with him. Lake provided westerns with a modern hero. His Earp did not wear buckskins, but a white shirt and black coat that made him look more like a twentieth-century businessman and thus someone with whom the average man might more nearly identify. He portrayed Wyatt as the peace officer who could not be swayed from doing what he thought was right. Lake, however, oversimplified matters, and in doing so made Wyatt's life less complex and exciting than it actually was. As Bat Masterson's comment suggests - and this was the opinion of Wyatt's other frontier friends - Wyatt was larger than life. As a consequence of Frontier Marshal, historians even now judge him "not by his own achievements or by the standards of lawmen in his own time and place but by the absurdly unrealistic ideals of the saintly Hollywood characters derived from [the] book" (Barra, Inventing 11, 384). But, as we shall see in the six films that are the subject of this study, including two that credit Lake's biography as their source, Wyatt generally is far from being a saint. His motive, moreover, for confronting the men at the O. K. Corral is, with maybe one exception, never simply to squelch lawlessness. Throughout the twentieth century, different media told and retold the story of Wyatt Earp and the gunfight that had long been part of Western folklore. Films did not create the legend, though they did add greatly to its allure. The events dramatized in each new telling - the early films playing fast and loose with the facts - and the emphasized qualities of Wyatt's character depended on forces common in film: the need to be original and the nature of the times. In the 1930s, for example, with the police and the FBI battling Prohibition's gangster gunmen, Wyatt became "an inspiration for a return to frontier justice." By contrast, during the 1960s, Wyatt became a prime target for debunkers. Disillusionment over America's intervention in Vietnam incited attacks on his image as the archetypical frontier lawman invited by intimidated citizens to establish peace and order. Acts of violence have decided so many conflicts in our history that the seeming clarity of the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral has become a ready and justifying symbol, notably in the government quashing threats to civil order. As in Tombstone, representatives of law and order, after having shown considerable restraint, are finally provoked into facing armed opponents bent on eliminating both them and the rules they enforce. This is the general view of the gunfight at the O. K. Corral - or "the streetfight in Tombstone" as it was usually referred to before The Gunfight at the O. K. Corral was released in 1957. Barra even goes so far as to claim it is "the single most symbolic act of violence in American history," the event most often evoked by Americans during a public confrontation (Inventing 6, 361). But for those in our society who reject government action that interferes with individual freedom, the symbolism of what happened is different. …