Tom Clavin - Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell

When I was on tour to talk about my two previous books set in the American West, Wild Bill and Dodge City, an inevitable question was, What is your next project? When I said I was working on a book about Tombstone, the reaction was usually enthusiasm, but a few people were puzzled, too. Let me focus on the enthusiasm for a moment.

As I researched the events in Tombstone, Arizona, from 1877 to 1882, I realized that the so-called Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and the Earp vendetta ride are our Iliad and Odyssey, two separate but connected events that are big parts of the foundation of our mythology. The shoot-out in a vacant lot has often been viewed as the classic confrontation between good guys and bad guys, and its participants have become legendary figures in American history and popular culture. The bad guysIke and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaurywerent all bad, and the good guysVirgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Hollidaywerent all good, but that is beside the point. They were two opposing forces representing the past and future of the American West who clashed on that cold late-October afternoon, and law and order and the future won. To our way of thinking, that was how it should be. And it was a heck of a gunfight, toothirty shots in thirty seconds, leaving three dead and three wounded. So, a new version? Bring it on!

But why were some people puzzled? Because of the perception that the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral story has been told. Of course it has, in books by a range of writers as well as on the big screen: My Darling Clementine, though highly fictionalized, is considered one of John Fords best westerns; Tombstone remains a western-fan favorite more than a quarter century after its release; and two of Hollywoods biggest stars who were at their peak, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, teamed up to play Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. What more can be told about the Tombstone story?

Answering that question was my challenge. One reason I wrote Tombstone was to gain a sense of completion. Dodge City had been written first, then Wild Bill, and suddenly there needed to be a third volume of an unanticipated but apparently welcome Frontier Lawmen trilogy. With these three books there is an arc from the postCivil War years, when the prototype of a frontier lawman was established by Wild Bill Hickok as the lone gunman with two six-shooters, to the mid- to late 1870s, when Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson cleaned up Dodge City as peace officers trying to avoid gunplay, to Tombstone, when the famous gunfight in 1881 can be seen as the last gasp of violent lawlessness in a closing frontier as civilization took hold in the West.

But a more powerful reason is that the Tombstone story is so rich with colorful characters and delicious details and exaggerations and outright fictions. Some have been included in previous versions, some have not. Each writer, whether it be of a nonfiction book or a screenplay, makes choices based on the research, material gathered, and sometimes personal biases. I wanted to tell my version of the Tombstone story, to have it refracted through my lens, and along the way provide new and previously overlooked characters and details.

That does not mean that in the pages to follow I simply winged it. A lot of sifting of material had to be done to present a version that is as accurate as possible. I was blessed with a wealth of material, topped by the works of several inspiring authors. Their books are cited in the text, but I want to give them extra credit here. One is Casey Tefertillers indispensable biography of Wyatt Earp, another is Gary L. Robertss engaging biography of Doc Holliday, and a third is Jeff Guinns The Last Gunfight, the most comprehensive treatment of the Tombstone shoot-out that forever branded the Wild West.

I hope to have many opportunities to give Tombstone talks and meet readers and this time, fingers crossed, the only reaction will be enthusiasm.