Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends / by Allen Barra

[Kim Allen Scott]

There are few symbols of the American frontier experience that are as readily recognized around the globe as Wyatt Earp.  There is something about his legend that resonates with people in Arizona or Australia, and that bold walk of the Earp brothers on their way to the O.K. Corral can be recognized as a metaphor for any kind of resolute march towards a violent confrontation.  Unraveling the complicated story of Wyatt Earp is a task that many writers have attempted over the years with varying degrees of success.  This book purports to be a study of how the legend of Wyatt Earp eventually consumed all actual record of the man himself, but it does so by simply retelling the story over again with aside commentaries on previous versions.  There is value in a discussion of sources; without someone to perform the internal criticism of historical accounts we would never achieve any degree of synthesis and understanding.  The problem with this book is its failure to conclude the discussion with any deeper answer to the question of Earp’s fame than the fact he was chronologically among the last figures of the Old West to be mythologized.  I enjoyed reading the narrative anyway because Barra has a very pleasant, almost conversational style of writing, but the outrageous number of typographical and editorial errors in the text is extremely distracting.  I understand this first edition was rushed into print from Barra’s uncorrected manuscript, and that subsequent printings of the book corrected the worst of these typos.  If you are going to read it at all, try to get one of those corrected editions so you can concentrate on the story, rather than its shoddy presentation.