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eglazier
, June 28, 2008
(view all comments by eglazier)
Forget all you knew about the Earps and their status as western heros.
This is the story about the fight at the O.K. Corral and its aftermath, part fiction, part real. There is an afterword of the eventual fate of the people who took part, one of whom, Wyatt's common-law wife Sadie Marcus died in 1944 and Alvira, Virgil Earp's common-law wife, in 1947. Wyatt lived until 1929.
First of course is that the fight did not take place at the O.K. corral, but about 30 yards west at an empty lot next to Fry's boarding house. Though the Earps and Doc Holliday were on one side, they were really not the law nor dogooders, but a rival gang to the Clantons and they went to one skirmish in a gang war.
Far from being the stalwart western heros the Earps were just gamblers, business men who owned saloons and one of whom, James the oldest brother, ran whorehouses. They were investors in mines and other income producing properties, all of which they wanted to keep. For this reason they went into the law business so they could work things their own way.
It is true the Earps were big men in a day when men over six feet were not common. But they were not big men when it came to ethics. When one reads the story, one recognizes they were ordinary people just like the ones we work with, know, and read about every day, except they lived in a time and a place when death was common by gunfire. Most men were armed, the law was frequently nonexistent, and because life at best was hard, tempers were often short. This was along with that trait that the good people did not often come to these little western towns though the rascals and the psychotic did. Money from the silver mines was being shipped around frequently, stage robbing was common, and in the Tombstone area, Mexico and its cattle were close and easy to rustle. Feuds were common and shooting from ambush or really for no good reason at all did happen. The law when presnt was frequently bought and paid for, as were the Earps.
Reading this account is worthwhile for it is not only well done and an interesting story but will remind us, lovers of the written and filmed western, that the fictions are far from reality and that the people who made the west were no different from many of us.
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