Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life / by Andrew C. Isenberg

[Kim Allen Scott]

BREAKING NEWS!!!!! :  Wyatt Earp was not the hero that Hollywood has made him out to be! 

Gosh, you mean you heard that already?  So has everyone else on the planet except for author Andrew C. Isenberg and the publisher of this book.  Once again we have a revisionist historian to tell us the familiar story that Wyatt was a professional gambler, wife deserter, and vengeance killer, only this time with a few twists thrown in for titillating sensationalism.  Isenberg implies that Wyatt was bisexual, for example, without providing any more proof than a lengthy interpretation of “coded” messages within other biographies.  The author also pretends to know Wyatt’s innermost thoughts by stating them without equivocation.  This is a common practice in biography where one must speculate on motivations, but that speculation ought to identified as such.  Perhaps the most damning of this book’s errors are endnotes that go nowhere.  In more than one instance Isenberg makes a controversial statement in the text that is cited to sources that partially document the context but have little to do with the statement itself.  This type of historical bait and switch is exactly the sort of thing graduate students are warned against.

Yes, Wyatt Earp was no hero, and he may have been an accomplished con artist.  I am not sure these revelations are entirely new, and I think I have seen them before, presented in more engaging prose.  And if Earp was a bisexual one has to ask who, in this enlightened age, should find that a negative aspect of his character?