A new book, Brothers of the Gun, aims to separate fact from fiction in the story of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, two of the Old West's most legendary figures. Author Mark Lee Gardner, a leading historian, challenges the famous line from the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: 'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' Gardner dismisses this as a catchy but misleading phrase, insisting that legend never becomes fact.
The book focuses on the unlikely friendship between Earp, a complicated but principled lawman, and Holliday, a reckless gambler suffering from tuberculosis. Their most famous moment came on 26 October 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona, during the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Earp, his brothers, and Holliday confronted the Cowboys, a gang of outlaws. In under a minute, three Cowboys were dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp along with Holliday were wounded.
Despite the shootout's fame, Gardner notes that accounts of the event are notoriously unreliable. He cites Addie Borland, a dressmaker who witnessed the fight, who simply said: 'All was confusion.' Even participants gave differing stories, and the Spicer hearing testimony is contradictory. Gardner laughs at the many books with detailed diagrams of the gunfight, saying: 'People are so fixated. They want to see exactly what happened. Well, I'm sorry. I can't give you a frame-by-frame.'
Earp lived into the Hollywood era, dying in 1929 aged 80, after years of fighting over how his story was told. He has been portrayed by actors including Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Kurt Russell, and Kevin Costner. Gardner's book aims to cut through the myth-making to reveal the real men, drawing on his extensive research into the Old West, including previous works on Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Sitting Bull.
