Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell
By Tom Clavin

The crime:

A period of swiftly escalating animosity between different factions in and around the town of Tombstone, Arizona culminated in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral that left three dead. That wasn’t the end of things, however, as the fighting and killing continued, with both sides looking to settle scores.

The book:

The story has of course passed into legend. Hollywood has had its way with it for nearly a hundred years, from movies like My Darling Clementine to Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. It even showed up as an episode on the original Star Trek called “Spectre of the Gun” that I remember well. The crew of the Enterprise were cast as the doomed Clantons facing off against the Earps and Doc Holliday, but Spock performs a mind-meld that convinces them that none of this is real so the bullets just pass through them.

In becoming a legend (or being Hollywoodized, which comes to the same thing) the story was simplified, to the point where it became an archetypal tale of good guys vs. bad guys. The real story, which has been covered in a number of recent books of which this is the latest, is more complicated. As Tom Clavin sums it up, “the ‘bad guys’ – Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury – weren’t all bad, and the ‘good guys’ – Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday – weren’t all good.”

I described the two sides as factions, which seems as good a term as any. On one level these factions were familial, with the Earps vs. the Clantons and McLaurys. But they were also political, supporting different candidates for local government (Democratic and Republican), and divided by location, with the Earps being city people living in Tombstone while the Clantons and their associates were ranchers. Finally, and this is a point more relevant to the story, the two factions had different side hustles. The Clantons were cattle rustlers and robbed stagecoaches. The Earps were gamblers and known by their detractors as the “fighting pimps.” Tombstone’s upper classes respected and needed the Earps, in the words of Wyatt’s biographer Casey Tefertiller, but they didn’t want to associate with them socially.

That the Earps were also at various times lawmen doesn’t seem to have meant much. Being a marshal was just another job, and didn’t even keep them out of jail. At the time, the question of what was legal boiled down to what you could get away with. Doc Holliday’s girlfriend even referred to “Wyatt Earp and others of his gang of legalized outlaws.” And if the Clantons stole cattle, well, they did it discreetly. And anyway

There was the view – which extended to the McLaury brothers, too – that because ranching in general was a tough living, if no one got hurt cutting a few corners, so be it. In southeast Arizona, a man did what he had to do to stay in business and feed his family. Allowances were made.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite live-and-let-live. In the resulting anarchy, with “the lower third of the territory . . . a boiling cauldron of competitors for cattle and power and money,” violence often broke out. This was the Wild West, and one contemporary descried Tombstone as “Six thousand population. Five thousand are bad. One thousand of these are known outlaws.” It’s actually surprising more people weren’t shot. But as Clavin points out, shootings were actually a fairly rare occurrence. What I found interesting was the way pistols were so often used in a fight as cudgels, with Wyatt Earp in particular being fond of striking men down with the butts. This is referred to in the book as buffaloing, which is the term they used for it at the time, but it’s more commonly called pistol-whipping today.

Overall this is a fun read that’s quite informative and one that explains a rather complicated situation in a way that makes it easier (if not always easy) to follow. And of course it’s a great story that throws John Ford’s dictum into reverse at nearly every turn, with the legend becoming fact.

Noted in passing:

A good example of the way history and myth can get intertwined to the point where there’s no sorting them out is in the famous line that Doc Holliday reportedly said to the gunman Johnny Ringo when Ringo challenged him to a duel: “I’m your huckleberry. That’s just my game.” Clavin calls this a “perplexing response,” but doesn’t question that Holliday actually said it.

Whether Holliday said it is still an open question. The origin of the quote is a book that came out in 1929, Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest by Walter Noble Burns. Burns doesn’t have the best reputation for reliability as a historian but he had interviewed Earp, who had told him stories about Holliday, so maybe it’s true. But some question if Holliday ever used the phrase.

Even murkier is the question of where the expression came from. Its meaning is pretty well agreed upon: “I’m the man for the job,” or “I’ll do it.” But how did it acquire this meaning? I’ve read different explanations. One has it that knights in medieval lore received huckleberry garlands from rescued ladies, identifying them as their defender or champion. Another source suggests that because huckleberries are small the expression originally meant that you were willing to take on any chore, no matter how menial. And yet another meaning that’s often referenced has it that the original term was “hucklebearer,” which referred to people who carried caskets at a funeral because the handles on caskets were called “huckles.” This makes “I’m your huckleberry” into a threat: I’m going to carry your casket. Apparently Val Kilmer (who played Doc Holliday in Tombstone) was frequently asked if he had actually said “I’m your hucklebearer” in the movie, which is something he denies in his memoir (of the same name): “I do not say ‘I’m your huckle bearer.’ I say, ‘I’m your huckleberry,’ connotating ‘I’m your man. You’ve met your match.’”

In any event, the expression as I’ve heard it used today leans heavily on the movie version. Which isn’t surprising given that it’s probably the only place many people have encountered it. It’s an invitation to a fight.

Another thing I took note of had to do with tarantulas. Apparently they

had a bad reputation because in the Italian seaport town of Taranto in the sixteenth century, residents suffered repeated bouts of a disease that produced a frenzy. What was named “tarantism” was believed to be from the bite of a particularly ugly spider. The inaccurate perception persisted into twentieth-century Arizona. Worse, it was viewed as a deadly enemy of humans, even though the fact is a tarantula rarely bites, and if it does, the bite is no more fatal than a bee sting.

I think I’d heard that about tarantula bites before, though looking into the matter online I guess there’s a fair bit of variety among different types of tarantula. But for the most part they aren’t killer spiders. I didn’t know about the name coming from Taranto though.

Takeaways:

You always have to ask whose law and order is being served by law-and-order governments, and who gets to label the good guys and bad guys.

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