I didn't know much about Wyatt Earp or the O.K. Corral before I picked up Jeff Guinn's Last Gunfight at the Minneapolis airport a few weeks ago - I certainly didn't know that the gunfight wasn't actually at the O.K. Corall, nor that "cowboy" was a slur used to denote the lowest of the low in frontier society - cattle rustlers, stage robbers, and and murderers among them. I also can't claim to have any great interest in Earp and Company - I had just finished reading about Billy the Kid, though, and learned so much about the West that, especially for $2, I decided Last Gunfight was worth a shot.
Indeed, Guinn paints an equally beguiling portrait of an untamed, unrepentant West where, he tells us, if gunfights where not common, the possibility of them always loomed; men, and not a few women, were armed as a matter of course, whiskey flowed, tempers flared, and Guinn seems to have found a record of the shooting skills - real or perceived - of nearly every man in Cochise County circa 1880. Arizona Territory was just that, a territory rather than a state, the Apaches raided somewhat at will, and the railroad had not yet reached the small towns that cropped up around every silver strike. In such a place it was easy for someone who had run afoul of the law in one place - public brawling, petty theft, breaking jail, running prostitutes, you know, typical frontier transgressions - to be the law in another place. Such was the case for Wyatt Earp who, once he mended his ways, began a lifelong obsession with wearing a badge. (This despite a deep and abiding friendship with the "tubercular dentist," Doc Holliday.")
In many ways, the gunfight itself is the least interesting part of Last Gunfight. Far more interesting are the passages about frontier law and courts, the role in Wells Fargo in mounting posses and paying bounties, and politicking in the territories. Still, this is a book for those seriously interested in the West or in the more obscure corners of American history.
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