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

Abstract

Westerns have changed and reflected our culture over different decades. Dennis Quaid (Kasdan 107) When asked by Teddy Roosevelt why he had written about his colorful Ufe, Bat Masterson is said to have answered, Mr. President, real story of Old West can never be told unless Wyatt Earp will tell what he knows, and Wyatt will talk. Well, he did. Not many years before he died (1929), Wyatt twice made effort to tell his story. He did so, believes Earp biographer Alien Barra, because he was furious about articles in Saturday Evening Post that portrayed him and his brothers as the instigators of much of trouble of 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 resulting fictionalized biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), launched Earp legend.2 It became of great myth-making American books of twentieth century,3 reviving both Wyatt's fame and memory of those associated with him. Lake provided westerns with a modern hero. His Earp did wear buckskins, but a white shirt and black coat that made him look more like a twentieth-century businessman and thus someone with whom average man might more nearly identify. He portrayed Wyatt as peace officer who could 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 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 standards of lawmen in his own time and place but by absurdly unrealistic ideals of saintly Hollywood characters derived from [the] book (Barra, Inventing 11, 384). But, as we shall see in six films that are 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 men at O. K. Corral is, with maybe one exception, never simply to squelch lawlessness. Throughout twentieth century, different media told and retold story of Wyatt Earp and gunfight that had long been part of Western folklore. Films did create legend, though they did add greatly to its allure. The events dramatized in each new telling - early films playing fast and loose with facts - and emphasized qualities of Wyatt's character depended on forces common in film: need to be original and nature of times. In 1930s, for example, with police and FBI battling Prohibition's gangster gunmen, Wyatt became an inspiration for a return to frontier justice. By contrast, during 1960s, Wyatt became a prime target for debunkers. Disillusionment over America's intervention in Vietnam incited attacks on his image as archetypical frontier lawman invited by intimidated citizens to establish peace and order. Acts of violence have decided so many conflicts in our history that seeming clarity of shoot-out at O. K. Corral has become a ready and justifying symbol, notably in 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 rules they enforce. This is general view of gunfight at O. K. Corral - or the streetfight in Tombstone as it was usually referred to before The Gunfight at 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, 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, symbolism of what happened is different. …