Legends of the Old West - TOMBSTONE Ep. 6 | Jeff Guinn Interview

Episode Date: September 16, 2018

Author Jeff Guinn wrote the New York Times bestseller, "The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral — And How It Changed the American West." He joined the show to dissect the most famous gunfight in the Old West. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This one features New York Times best-selling author Jeff Gwynn. He wrote one of the primary sources I used for research while producing this series on Tombstone and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. His book is called The Last Gunfight, the real story of the shootout at the O.K. Corral and how it changed the American West. I met him at the Western Writers of America convention right before he accepted the prestigious Spur Award for Best Traditional Novel. We covered lots of topics, including how the shootout at the O.K. Corral changed the American West, some of the common misconceptions about the gunfight, and some of the things he discovered while writing the book. I hope you enjoy it. Here's Jeff Gwynne.

First things first. Thank you, Jeff, for being on the show. I very much appreciate it. And congratulations on the Spur Award that you're going to receive at this year's convention. We are sitting here at the Western Writers of America convention in Billings, Montana. So congratulations. Very well done. Thank you, and congratulations to you for bringing real history of the Old West to a wide audience. It's a wonderful thing you're doing. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I grew up watching Westerns with my dad and, you know, I've developed that love of history, number one, and then it's always kind of gravitated toward the Western American history, the American West, the Old West. So when I started researching

podcasts that I really wanted to produce, this was the natural first step. And so it's been a great ride so far and it's only getting bigger and better as we go along. Oh, good for you. Thank you. So I think today what we want to discuss is the town of Tombstone and the shootout at the OK Corral. One of these seminal moments in Old West history, perhaps the most written about

and most filmed moment in the Old West. So we're gonna dive into that a little bit. So I love the title of your book and so I want to start right there. How did the shootout at the O.K. Corral change the American West? What's important about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which wasn't at the O.K. Corral, and in a sense wasn't even a gunfight, it was an arrest or a disarmament gone wrong, is the way it's evolved in Western mythology in all the years since. I think if a lot of your listeners in any football season watch a few games and somebody

wins a close one, the coach will say it was like the shootout at the OK Corral or when any of us are feeling the heat of some kind and want to be rid of it, we say, got to get out of Dodge. Yes. In fact, the gunfight, which again, you can make some argument it wasn't, was seminal to the West, particularly in the way it affected the history of the West, the way people chose to remember it. And they've broken it down into the guys in the white hats, particularly Wyatt Earp, and the guys in the black hats, the bad guys. And they're going to shoot it out, and the good guys win,

and that is a microcosm of the American West and what America is supposed to stand for. In fact the confrontation is a culmination of a lot of things that are happening in that place and time. The good guys weren't entirely good, the bad guys weren't entirely bad, but they found themselves in a situation where they couldn't coexist. What happened after the fight is very important that there was actually a hearing to see whether the Earps and Doc Holliday will be tried for murder. There is the aftermath, there are more deaths, and we find Wyatt Earp having to leave fast because the authorities are looking for him.

And if anything, I think it's important because it should be remembered as the moment when it's made clear. In the West, in the frontier, you can't settle your arguments with guns anymore. You're going to court, you're't settle your arguments with guns anymore. You're going to court. You're going to have to answer for it. So the more we learn about what happened in Tombstone that day, the better we understand what the West was really like and the way it evolved. So yeah, it's seminal. I agree with you 100% on that. It's just seminal for a different reason if we look at it closely enough.

It's not necessarily seminal because of the action-packed adventure that we have seen in the movies. It's for the ramifications. Right. I mean, people, if they think of it today, of course they think it happened at the O.K. Corral, which it didn't. But in a sense, it even represents that hoary old notion that every day at high noon in the main street of town, the good guys and the bad guys are going to shoot it out. And it's not just in America. I've lived overseas for quite some time. Anybody who's traveled there, that's what everybody's heard about that's the first thing they think about with the old west is the is the quintessential shootout it's this is what it was

like all the time yeah and everywhere yeah a no and b it wasn't even like that in tombstone right so speaking of of someone you just mentioned, obviously one of the big things that people have already heard is that the shootout didn't actually take place at the OK Corral. So let's kind of build off that a little bit. So what are the most hotly debated elements of this? And maybe the list is too long to be comprehensive right now, but just throw out a few of, you've done so much research with this, what are some of the top ones? Okay. Well, the beginning of it is, in fact, was it a classic shootout with both sides drawing on each other that it was going to be death for someone. Right.

It's a vacant lot. The vacant lot is not that big. We've got some idea that you've got these eagle-eyed, you know, great shots probably 20, 30 feet away drawing out of holsters. Well, first of all, they didn't have holsters, a couple of them. Wyatt Earp had his gun in his raincoat pocket, for God's sakes. They were maybe four or five feet away from each other. Wow, that's incredible. And because they're such lousy shots, I mean, the bullets are going all over the place. If you look carefully at a hand-drawn sketch Wyatt Earp drew of the end of the gunfight, which we dug up and were able to include in my book, you read about how his brothers are terribly wounded. One of the brothers shot at the calf falling to the ground. Well,

if you look at Wyatt's diagram, he probably is the one that shot his brother, aiming at somebody else. So it's all confusion. There's nothing calculated. There's no skill involved. So that's the biggest myth of all, that it's some classic epic confrontation where everything's almost organized. There's the rules of the gunfight. Let's follow it. It was a hot mess. So that's certainly the chief amongst everything else. What are some of the maybe smaller, under-the-radar things the general public wouldn't pick up on? Oh, well, one of the big debates is, was one of the McClory brothers armed or not? Right.

Did somebody plan a gun on him after he's laying there dead? That's one of the big ones. The one that surprised me, I didn't expect. One of the big Wyatt Earp myths is the Buntline special. Okay. That he carried this gun given to him by Ned Buntline, you know, extra barrel length. Right.

Well, he obviously wasn't, even if he had one, and we don't know he did, he's not going to bring that into a situation where he might have to pull his gun out of his pocket. The extra three inches of barrel is going to mean the other guy's got the gun out first and you're a dead man. the extra three inches of barrel is going to mean the other guy's got the gun out first, and you're a dead man. So when I wrote in my book, you know, of course, you didn't have the Buntline special, and that the Buntline special isn't even a very important thing. Wyatt Earp had a gun, and he used it that day. That's what's to come. And I've been hearing from Buntline fans that this is so important to them. It's like, how can you say Santa Claus probably doesn't have elves? Just like Santa and the elves, Wyatt has the Bunt Line special.

So I would say the McClory brother, armed or not, and Wyatt not having the Bunt Line special, which he clearly didn't. Those are two things people like to argue about probably after about 27 beers late at night. Right, and that's always when the best, most coherent arguments take place. Well, the most colorful ones. Certainly, certainly. So what are the other topics that I was having discussion with another gentleman here at the Western Writers Convention, and that was the debate over who actually shot first. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, it's a great debate because nobody knows. And when you don't know for certain, that lets you sort of plug in the way you wanted to have it happen. We know that when the Earps and Doc came, they were not looking for a fight.

They were looking to disarm these guys. We know that the McClurys and Billy Clinton, I, of course, is a drunken idiot and is capable of anything, but we know the three of them were maybe talking big about, oh boy, they better not stop us or anything, but they were getting their horses. they were going to go out of town so nobody's going in expecting necessarily to shoot and we know that when the first shots ring out it's because people are mistaking maybe what everybody else is doing you have right you have everybody else is doing. You have town marshal Earp, you know, saying, hold there. And if you're making hand gestures and everybody's tense, it's easy to think, oh my God,

they're going for their gun. I better do it first. Who shot first? The only people who knew have been dead a long time. So that's less important than what brought them to that state of antagonism where they were ready to shoot because they believed the other guy was probably going to try to do it first. There is no answer. Why argue about it? So another one of the mysteries I was discussing with the gentleman here at the convention, his name is Jim, he's also from Texas, he's a great guy, is how the confrontation developed on that day. Because we were discussing that the night before, Wyatt seems to make a clear point of saying, I don't want to fight. And then the next day, he seems to go out of his way to start instigating things in a couple of these instances that build up to the confrontation at the

OK Corral. So the question, obvious question is, maybe what changed overnight? Do we have any clue as to how he seemingly went from one type of person to a different one the next day? Let's remember the night before. You've got Ike Clanton, who's drunk and belligerent, the two things Ike was best at. The third thing Ike was best at was running if it was a dangerous situation. Now, he's barging in, and he's making some very outlandish claims.

Wyatt Earp so badly wants to become the county sheriff. Okay. And to become county sheriff is to become, in those days, rich. What you do is you collect the taxes. There were a lot of taxes to be collected in Tombstone. You got to keep 10%. Wyatt Earp was never that interested in being a lawman. He wants to make money.

He wants to be important. Ike Clanton coming up and started to spout off about some ways that he and Wyatt had been talking about solving a bank robbery and nailing some of the people who were involved. Wyatt wanted that to make himself look good. He's endangering Wyatt's chance to have a really good livelihood. So Wyatt's not necessarily going to like that. But the fact that Ike is drunk and being an idiot, there's nothing new about that. And Virgil Earp, who is the town chief of police, tells Ike, you know, go home, sleep it off. But first he actually is in a card game with Ike, with a McClory, with Kern County Sheriff Johnny Behan. They're playing cards all night. I mean, it's just going to be something that passes over.

But Wyatt Earp gets up the next morning, as do the Earp brothers. And what they hear right away is Ike Clanton is not only still drunk, he's walking the streets saying he is going to kill you guys. And they subdue him. They find him. They pistol whip him. They take him into court. And they subdue him.

They find him. They pistol whip him. They take him into court. And lo and behold, Ike just has to pay a fairly petty fine, and he walks right out again. Now, if you were the Earps, if you're especially Wyatt Earp, this is not going to leave you in a good mood. This guy has threatened all kinds of things. He got a slap on the wrist. He's telling Wyatt before the hearing starts, you know, if I ever had the chance to get you alone, you're going to... I mean, that's a big

macho thing. We're talking alpha male here. So Wyatt's mood has changed. And you get the poor McClory kid coming into town not knowing what the heck is going on, and Wyatt pistol whips him and leaves him in the streets. So yeah, Wyatt is in a really crappy mood. And it just keeps getting worse. Well, the reason it escalates is you've got the Clantons and McClurys hanging around the O.K. Corral and part of town talking about, well, they'll bother us again, this is what we're going to do.

The Earps and Doc Holliday are in a saloon about a block and a half away, and people keep coming up to them saying, now, if you need help getting them out of here, we're ready to go. We'll bring in vigilantes. Bring in vigilantes. Right. Now, the last thing that the chief of police wants is armed civilians who've never dealt with this kind of thing hustling in to try to get involved. Right, to help. Right.

Virgil Earp's whole idea is we've got to take care of this without guns. Right. What he's doing, and it was probably the smart thing to do at that point, is, oh, they'll shoot their mouths off, not their guns. They'll get on their horses. They'll leave. Right. But he is more or less forced into it.

You know, he wants to stay on as chief of police. The important people in town who control whether he has his job or not, you know, not subtly hinting, you know, we need to do something here. Do you need help? We need to do something here. Do you need help? So finally, the three Earp brothers are going to go, and they're basically going to say, look, if you're staying in town, we've got to have the guns. That's the law. Now there's another mistake the Earps make,

because Doc Holliday likes to mix it up. He wants to help, and he's genuinely a loyal friend of Wyatt Earp. Now, of all the terrible shots in Tombstone, Doc Holliday may have been the worst. Really? Yes. There's even a time a few months before that when he got into a drunken argument with a saloon keeper named Joyce and got a gun and fired at him six times at point-blank range, and he actually nicked him on the finger once. One nick out of six bullets. People say, well, why did the chief of police give his shotgun to Doc and just have a handgun instead.

Well, here's the reason. They tell Doc, first of all, when they get to the vacant lot, don't come in with us, just stand over there in case some of the other friends of the McClory's and Clanton's try to get into it. And they're giving him the shotgun because that's the only way Doc is likely to hit anybody if it comes to actual gun play.

So again, this is a colossal coming together of parties, none of whom had the intention of anything like this happening. And it builds and it escalates and it escalates. And so by this point everybody's in a bad mood, everybody's uncomfortable, and everybody has guns and people have been drinking and gee, what does that combination almost ensure is likely to happen? Right. The conclusion at the end is pretty logical.

The result is you can see it coming. Yeah. But so again, it's not this big dramatic, they walked into the OK Corral, you know. And they're waiting for them. You know, we're the McClory's and the Clanton's, you know, go for your gun, you son of a bitch, you know, none of that. But it makes a good, it makes a fun story for the movies for sure. Well it does, but again, what's the willing suspension of disbelief? We've all heard that phrase.

And maybe with the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, you want the perfect example. We like our Western history to be simple. Yes. Black and white, clear cut. It wasn't, and it never was. It wasn't and it never was and that's a frustrating thing when people who just deeply want to believe the story are actually offended when you say, well you know there's a little bit, it was a little bit different. Yeah. And it's just, I have been called now, I remember being introduced at a Western

History Convention as a revisionist writer, somebody who's trying to take the best part of American history and mock it. And that was a guy introducing me. Yeah, that's an interesting introduction. Yeah, I thought it was probably going to get me off to a good start. Yeah, speaking of putting someone in a bad mood. Again, I think real history, including what happened to Tombstone that day, the truth is always more fascinating than the made-up stuff. Right, and let's somewhat stay in that theme, and how, let's just answer this basic question, how did we come to know this event as the shootout or the gunfight at the O.K. Corral? Can you tell me the story behind that?

Oh, yeah. What you had some 20 years after the fact, the gunplay takes place 1881. You have Bat Masterson reinventing himself as a journalist. Right. You have Bat Masterson reinventing himself as a journalist. And Bat Masterson starts writing for the Eastern magazines about the great heroes of the West that I saw. And one of the ones he's writing about is Wyatt Earp. And Bat Masterson knew how to make a good story better. It's not completely factual what he wrote but the guy was there

and that helped. And then you have the Western pulp fiction as separate from what was coming out even 20 years earlier because now you have more widespread stories. I mean when you write a book, when you have the magazines, it gets more universal display than it once did. Wyatt himself is trying to make a buck in his old age by writing about himself. And Wyatt clearly in any of his memoirs, including the one that was officially published with Flood, you know, he ain't telling the truth much of the time either. And when Flood in particular, you know, writing about what happened there, the shootout at the OK Corral, from a marketing sense, is so much more effective than the accidental shooting in an empty lot near the OK Corral.

Of course. You know, what's the Liberty Valance thing, you know, when you've got the truth and the legend, you write the legend. Yeah. And that's what happened. The West, the frontier of America, beginning in the 1910s, 1920s, almost through the 1950s, that was the history, that was the tradition of America. And it's no different than in England talking about King Arthur and the Holy

Grail. And if you want to believe it's right, you can. Every culture develops its own mythology based on its history. America had the West, and Tombstone and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is the exact equivalent of King Arthur and the Holy Grail and Camelot in England. This is what happens in cultures. We want to build up our histories and our heroes. Great. What a great point. I hadn't thought about that equivalent. That's really interesting. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And so let's kind of somewhat finish on this note that we've touched on a little bit, but if it's not too redundant, what are some of the most common misconceptions about the event? We've gone through a couple.

Right, we've gone through all of those. But I think the other misconception that everybody needs to think about, if we're going to get it in context, in perspective, is that it was simply one instant. Nothing that happened before it, nothing that happened after it, has any further relevance. That it was a defining moment in and of itself. The gunfight took place in the OK Corral. It epitomizes what frontier America was and that's it. That's believing that is far more misleading than believing it happened in the OK Corral or that it was an all-out gunfight or that Wyatt Earp used the Bundline Special. If we really look

at it and see the context how it happened and what happened afterwards what that represented. That's when we'll start understanding our Western heritage better. What do you think are the chief ramifications that have come from this that have been passed down through time? Like what have been the effects over time with the legacy of this? Americans want to think of themselves as the guys in the white hats who won at the O.K. Corral that day.

And just as the situation in the O.K. Corral was far more complex than we want to realize, it gives a lot of people in our modern era the excuse of saying, well, it's very simple. We can solve anything very quickly with a gun if we have to. solve anything very quickly with a gun if we have to. And that stems back because they've been hearing about this and believing in it and loving the story of it for generations now. We are not a six-gun society where if all else fails, shoot, and the guy who's still standing is the winner. Right. And probably the right one. Right. Like he deserved to be the one.

That was not true then, it's not true now, but because of the myth, people still today use that as an excuse to have the same frame of mind. So we'll end on this note. As you were doing all your research, what was the most interesting thing you encountered about this whole thing? As we've all heard the basics, what did you find deep down in there that fascinated you more than anything else? That the issues that were driving the antagonisms and the gunfight are absolutely the issues we face today. Immigration, gun control, and taxes.

Government intrusion. There's nothing new under the sun. Every generation seems to think, oh, here it is on us. And we just haven't solved these problems all these years. If you want a clear-cut example that we can all learn from, look at what happened in Tombstone at that time. History is cyclical. And I had no idea that those were the same issues that was driving it. And for most of my research, I was going, oh, my God, I can't believe it. And yet it's true.

If we want to solve today's problems, let's look at what really happened back then instead of what we'd like to believe happened. Then we'll stop talking about, you know, fine, let's meet at high noon at the OK Corral, and maybe for a change we'll deal with problems that have been plaguing us that we haven't solved for over a century. Right. Great. You make a great point. All right. Last thing. What is your favorite Old West story and why? I would not have said this before I wrote the book. Now my favorite Old West story is the shootout that wasn't a shootout that didn't happen at the OK Corral because in studying that I think I understand American history and particularly Western history better. So I had the lucky experience of what I was

writing the book about. As I learned more, I started enjoying it more. And to me, yeah, that's the story that I came away loving and in a different way than I had enjoyed it previously. Great. Perfect note to end on. Thank you very much for being a part of the show. I'm sure we'll have you back again to talk about many more subjects, but thank you very much for the interview. Thank you. Thanks for listening.

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