The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of The Shootout at the OK Corral and How It Changed the American West

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Jeff Guinn (2011)

There are at least three events that almost all modern Americans of my generation are familiar with in the history of the frontier West, in part thanks to history but in the main thanks to movies and television and to books like this one .

The first is the siege and the defeat of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and about 200 "Texicans" at the hands of overwhelming odds from Santa Anna's Mexican Army at the Alamo in 1836. Roughly forty years later, there came the total defeat of General George Custer's main force of cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn by a combined army of Lakota and Comanche warriors in present day eastern Montana. These were battles by any description--they changed at least for a time the course of history.

The last and most controversial event always seemed inflated beyond measure. But this book explains why what is popularly known as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral became a part of frontier lore.

It directly involved only eight or nine men. It took an estimated thirty seconds to unfold. Thirty bullets were exchanged. Three men died. Three suffered serious wounds. One man was grazed by a bullet but not seriously incapacitated.

And one man--a rough-hewn gambler and former deputy sheriff turned deputized U.S. marshall, Wyatt Earp, walked away unscathed and became, along with "Will Bill" Hickok and "Bat" Masterson, one of a handful of men who were to become the most famous lawmen of the frontier.



The writer, Jeff Guinn, a Texan who has already written a well-received book on Depression Era bank bandits Bonnie and Clyde ("Go Down Together") tries as other historians have since the 1920's, to separate fact and fiction for the reader to try and get a grip on why this one event gained so much publicity at the time and why it became an incident that has fascinated screenwriters, writers of fiction and non-fiction in general and the public ever since.

He does a good job I'd say in laying out the forces, economic and political and personal, that brought these disparate men together on that afternoon.

The idea of this one shoot-out "changing the West" is publishing hype, of course. But it should be noted this was an incident that at the time captured interest all over the territory, the Rocky Mountain states, and the big West Coast newspapers. And the subsequent trials for murder and later the vendetta killings carried out by the Earp Brothers and the Clanton/McLaury families became nationwide stories.

Mr. Guinn does succeed in telling readers why Tombstone (now a tourist den where they reenact the events in an area called "Old Tombstone" ) is a good microcosm to examine the forces of late frontier Westward Expansion.

Tombstone, Arizona, in the southeast corner of the territory was a thriving silver-mining and gambling boom-town in the Arizona Territory that had only come into being three years before the incident at the vacant lot took place. It had already attracted a telegraph station, sewer lines, a regular stagecoach run, two thriving daily newspapers--one serving the Democrats (aimed more to those who had come to Arizona from the former Confederate states) and the other for the Union-minded Republican factions that were the most well-heeled in terms of banking, mining, gambling and prostitution (the latter was legal if the "house of ill-fame" paid taxes to the city.) There was a lot of money to be made in law enforcement there since whomever held the offices of sheriff collected taxes for all of Cochise County--keeping at least ten percent as commission-- and whoever was in charge of Tombstone city police also got a rake-off. In addition there was the office of US Marshall, a post held generally by whoever was appointed by the Territorial governor up in Prescott, a couple hundred miles away. The federal salary was supplemented by the chance to get money from Wells Fargo, a massive corporate-style freight company which had no trouble rewarding good lawmen who brought in stagecoach robbers since the company made a point to make good on any losses from robbery.

It was quite possible to make a large fortune in a very short time in and around Tombstone if you could keep the cattle rustlers in line and collect the taxes on ranches and businesses without much fuss and bother to those who held the big purse-strings. This was a place where lawmen could make the equivalent of 20-30 thousand dollars a year, roughly $400,000 dollars annually in modern terms according to Guinn.


So enter to Tombstone around 1879 the brothers Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp to the new boom-town. They were followed by a dentist-turned-gambler named John Henry "Doc" Holliday, a Georgia-born tubercular patient with a fatalist outlook on life. Wyatt and Doc had been friends and fellow gamblers back when Earp had been in a spot of trouble while gambling in a Texas town and Holliday had come to his defense against strong odds. By all accounts Holliday was usually comfortable around trouble. He would have been a good friends for the Earps to have in Tombstone which was why Wyatt wrote to him to come down there when he and three of his brothers came there.
Earp later worked as a deputy marshall in the Kansas cattle towns of Wichita and Dodge City. Earp's main job was to keep the "drovers" in line--drovers were cattle-wranglers who brought Texas longhorns driven up from that state to the railroad lines that furnished beef for the cities back East.

Wyatt Earp had honed his skills at "buffaloing" rowdies and pistol-whipping drunken hot-heads while serving as a bouncer in a bordello or two in Illinois (his birth state) and also running (and protecting) the card gaming that typically went on in places like Dodge City where there were men with new money in their pockets and the foolish desire to gamble with card sharps like Earp and Holliday.

All these towns , including Tombstone, had serious gun-control laws by the way. If you went to an area of saloons and gambling clubs, et al, the authorities took your gun and you got it back when you left town. Similar laws were enforced in Tombstone in 1881. The fact that some men were allowed to have guns in town with permits and other, like the "cow-boys", couldn't get those permits usually made for more bad blood between the factions.

"Few frontier lawmen had clean records," Guinn records. "The idea was that men who had broken laws themselves would understand best how to prevent others from doing the same."

A short entry from Wikipedia sums up Wyatt Earp's past: "Earp left Dodge City in 1879, and with his brothers James and Virgil, moved to Tombstone, Arizona. The Earps bought an interest in the Vizina mine and some water rights. There, the Earps clashed with a loose federation of outlaw Cowboys. Wyatt, Virgil, and their younger brother Morgan held various law enforcement positions that put them in conflict with Tom and Frank McLaury, and Ike and Billy Clanton, who threatened to kill the Earps. The conflict escalated over the next year, culminating on October 26, 1881 in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, during which the Earps and Holliday killed three of the Cowboys. In the next five months, Virgil was ambushed and maimed and Morgan was assassinated. Wyatt, his brother Warren, Holliday, and others pursued the Cowboys they thought responsible in a vendetta.

"After leaving Tombstone, Earp continually invested in various mining interests and saloons. He and his third wife, in their later years, moved between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, where the town of Earp, California was named after him. Although his brother Virgil had far more experience as a sheriff, constable, and marshal,[1] because Wyatt outlived Virgil, and due to a largely fictionalized biography by Stuart Lake that made Wyatt famous, he has been the subject of and model for a large number of films, TV shows, biographies and works of fiction.":

Indeed in my opinion the best lawman among the Earps was Virgil Earp. He had the best "people skills" and likely had a cooler head when dealing with potential opponents. He had had been crippled in a sneak attack shortly after the famous gunfight and lost part of his arm. His life was more sedate after that, while Wyatt still pursued fame. Late in life, Wyatt became (as the last living man at the famous shoot-out) a minor celebrity. He moved to Los Angeles more or less permanently in the 1920s with his wife and made friends with Hollywood western actors like Tom Mix and William S. Hart. He also was a friend of a young director of Westerns named John Ford, who introduced him to a young prop-man in the Ford company named Marion Morrison, soon to be known as John Wayne.

In his last years, Earp, who died in January of 1929, age 80, tried to capitalize on a renewed interest in the Old West. He hoped that William S. Hart would play him in a film, but it never happened. Earp did find his main biographer, Stuart Lake, and hoped to tell his side of the story about life in Tombstone almost a half-century later. As it was, Wyatt died before the success of the Lake book and the beginnings of the legend of him through "the silver screen" career came about. At least a dozen famous actors--including Henry Fonda to James Garner to Kurt Russell to Burt Lancaster and Kevin Costner have played Wyatt Earp or, in the case of Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott, played men inspired by his exploits, however close to the truth they really were.

"The Last Gunfight" is a very interesting book for those interested in Western lore, history and how it all reflects American culture today.

Small Town Marked By Inexplicable Murder

Although murder and crime are not unknown in less-urban parts of the United States, I must admit I hadn't thought of anything quite so disturbing coming to my current home town of Ashland Oregon, a place Ive called home for almost twenty years. 

There have exactly six murders in the last 30 years here.  Most of them, save one which was ruled only a "possible homicide",  were settled fairly quickly I gather Then came the brutal killing on November 19th of David Michael Grubbs, a 23-year old grocery clerk, musician  and student at the local Southern Oregon University.  His nearly-decapitated body was found along a paved bike/walking path called the Bear Creek Greenway, a path I am familiar with.  He died around 5: 30 that evening, just after sundown. 

The assailant apparently used some kind of a large sharp instrument to do this heinous deed.  There was no robbery here.  It was more like an execution.    

   

Grubbs was apparently a nice, upbeat  young man.  No one appears to have had it in for him.     A crowd of about 500 people came out to   the local high school on the evening of November 28th to hear the local police talk about the case.  The authorities seem  baffled and appear to be grasping at straws. 

Grubbs wasn't a drug dealer, just  a hard-working student with roots in the town who got along with others.  Some people think it might have something to do with a video game he played online, but so far that's a lot of hype.   

There are no real leads, despite having 16 detectives from all over the area working on this case.  The FBI has been called in.  A forensics expert is coming next week from all the way back in Pennsylvania to try and sort out what type of weapon was used in the victim's death. 

For the last two weeks this town has been on edge.    As much as you say, "Of course something like this COULD happen here", you're not prepared when it actually does.   

"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Faye Dunaway, Warren Beatty

"Bonnie Clyde" was not supposed to be a hit movie and it nearly wound up as a  feature to be re-discovered as a "cult film" years after its release.  It took several years to bring it to the screen, at a time when American movies were evolving away from the  standard Hollywood back-lot, classic-narrative style and toward the more informal and abrupt techniques pioneered by the French New Wave.

 

 

 Both Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard  were offered the direction of the film by co-producer Warren Beatty. But Truffaut wanted nothing to do with a  film actor telling him what to do behind the camera and Godard apparently thought the movie should be made as a low-budget effort as close to New York City as possible, rather than the states of Texas and Oklahoma where the actual crime spree of the Barrow Gang took place.  

 

The American director of "The Miracle Worker", Arthur Penn, was chosen. He had worked with Beatty on an earlier homage to the New Wave, "Mickey One", which had died a quick death at the box office and left audiences confused. 

The studio that made it "Warner Brothers" thought the idea of a bank robbery film set in the 1930's making any money in 1960's America was very unlikely.  Jack L. Warner, who had been boss of production for over three decades, saw it as an old-fashioned story of bank robbers and cops in the style of the Cagney and Bogart urban dramas that had gone out of favor after World War II.  He gave Beatty a large percentage of the potential profits on the picture, thinking it would likely play quickly in cities, die a sub-par death and then get put into drive-ins.  

 

 

It turned out that the realistic violence and honest depictions of sexuality did go over well with a lot of  audiences, although many critics like Bosley Crowder of the New York Times thought it a "film for morons". Younger critics like Roger Ebert found it to be outstanding. The studio, however,  initially refused to give it a wide release.  Beatty managed to talk the new owners of Warner Brothers into ignoring the mixed reviews and letting a wider audience see it.        

On the second release the film took off, eventually making $40 million dollars. The stark violence and bloodiness of the movie matched what people were seeing on their television screens as the Vietnam War was being reported on the evening news in  America night after night.

Gangsters like Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger were legendary anti-heroes in their own times--the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on houses and farms. In the same way, disaffected and mostly younger 1960's film-goers saw the couple and their gang of bank-robbers as figuratively setting out to tweak the failed establishment.  In other words, the movie clicked in ways that couldn't be anticipated by executives in suits looking for the next "Sound of Music".

 

The ultra-violent ambush ending of the film is probably one of the most memorable  in film.  I saw as a kid in 1972 in theater just before the film went to television. I remember being stunned by how realistic and appalling the shoot-ups were.  If this was what shotguns and revolvers actually did to people's bodies, it was news to me. 

 

I had only seen movies before where people who were shot simply fell over dead, clutching their chests in a bloodless swoon before landing nicely on the floor.  The first time I saw a character in "Bonnie and Clyde" get shot square in the face, and actual red blood came out of his forehead, it was a realisation that this was more a mere entertainment but a film with a purpose: to show gun violence without the old conventions, the old lies. 

  

The real Bonnie and Clyde were a rather mangy looking pair,  not of the Beatty/ Faye Dunaway types by a long shot.

 

  . Ironically its the supporting cast, Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), who seem better suited to the lead roles from a physical  perspective.  

 

 

 

 

But the depictions of the   hero and heroine as outlaws in hard times (with the  American Dream reborn  from a smoking barrel of a Colt .45  and a fast 1933 DeSoto)  and that brutal death scene overcome  any Romanticism in my view. This is a must-see, and see again  movie.   

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" (1973) Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Director: Peter Yates

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Eddie 'Fingers' Coyle: "I shoulda known better than to trust a cop. My own goddamn mother coulda told me that."

Treasury Cop Dave Foley: "Everybody oughta listen to his mother."





"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" is an ultra-realistic crime drama from 1973 that recently was released on DVD by Criterion Video. It had been quite a while since I had seen Peter Yates' gritty R-rated "film noir" classic. I first saw it sneaking into a restricted movie theatre as a lad, and at the time I was somewhat confused by the way the story didn't allow for the "hero" to bust loose and take down all his enemies the way that 70's movies featuring Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen usually did. These actors also made gritty urban films, but in Robert Mitchum's case he was playing a character closer to reality, closer to the bone of what it was that goes into a real crime figure. I sensed that about the film but i still wasn't pleased on that first viewing. It was only later that I saw how Peter Yates had taken a realistic novel and shot it free of the romance and the daring and gratuitous action scenes that Hollywood movies usually served up then and now. I was pleased to see this little gem holds up well.

The film is truly a look at the seamy underbelly of urban American life. The films features Mitchum as a two-time loser Eddie Foyle, a small-time gun-runner who looking at a long stretch in prison in New Hampshire for smuggling untaxed whiskey across the border from Canada. He's too old to take prison lightly and is not happy with the idea of his wife and two teen-aged kids having to go on welfare. This leads him to try and bargain with the cocky young Federal cop Foley (Richard Jordan) to put in a good word with him with the District Attorney or the judge to get him off from going down for the whisky job.

The problem is that Eddie is small-time, essentially a middle-class criminal who lacks enough clout with the underworld to get information that would satisfy the Feds. Nor do his "friends" in the underworld cares one way or another about him personally--they want his untraceable guns, and he's reliable. But they also know he's about to be shipped off to a Federal cooler and he's in no position to bargain the way he once did.

Eddie's "friends" are not very friendly, and this prevailing sense of hope ebbing away for this "odd man out" is at the heart of the two threads of storyline that run through the film. The other thread are the three bank robberies depicted in the film---all done with a minimum of dialouge and shown in straight-forward detail. Yates work in the British film "Robbery" (1967) with Stanley Baker and Joanna Pettet and the classic "Bullitt" the next year with Steve McQueen all served to give him to assureance he shows in these scenes.


"Film Noir" movies have been a rich part of American popular cinema, and the Boston area--where all of this film was shot-- has sported some very good crime dramas of late. Ben Afflack's "The Town" and Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" being the most recent examples. Each of these films I would say owe something to Yates' spare and minimalistic style of film-making. And to the excellent supporting performances by Jordan and Peter Boyle as a rat-fink hit-man who hints that guys like Coyle are "gentlemen" from the past whose time has run out.

The film is also a testament to how underrated Robert Mitchum was to American film critics and those of his peers who voted out awards to their favorites. Despite the fact that Mitchum is off the screen more than half the time in this movie he dominates the proceedings thanks to scenes like this one below. Director Yates (in the DVD commentary) describes show Mitchum inhabits the role of this middle-aged Boston hood, right down to the stillness and the economy of emotion he puts into this scene where he meets for the first time with fellow gun-runner Jackie Brown (Stephen Keats). Warning: this clip has strong language:

Guilty Pleasures at the Movies: Michael Caine in "The Italian Job" (1969)

One of the most clever and enjoyable movies from the familiar genre of the suave- robber-who-can't-go-straight school of movie action, this film links up Michael Caine, Noel Coward (in his last film role), Raf Vallone, Benny Hill and Maggie Blye.  

The caper involves creating a giant traffic jam in the middle of Turin and making off with a large amount of gold that actually should be ripped off fair and square by the Italian Mafia.  A passel of Mini Coopers then just make a quick mountain swing into Switzerland to celebrate the joys of a job well done!    

Although things do not quite as well as that plan intended. 

"The Italian Job" features some great toss-away lines by Caine and a amusing performance by Coward as "Mr. Bridger" a powerful if jailed crime boss (who enjoys looking at formal portraits of Her Majesty in his private cell.)   It also has a lot of beautiful women, great Renaissance architecture, and  some great car racing stunts  and an ending in the Alps that will literally leave you hanging!     

Crime and Punishment

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Good God!" he cried, "can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open... that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, blood... with the axe... Good God, can it be?"
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Ch. 5





Dostoevsky second major novel (after "Notes from Underground") "Crime and Punishment" (1865) follows a poor St. Petersburg student , Rodin Romanovich Raskolnikov, and how he is at times elated and other times tormented in the aftermath of killing a woman pawnbroker and her sister in their apartment. Raskolnikov believes at times that the murders were justified, that the money he steals can be of benefit to many, he even gives some away to a struggling family of a drunken ex-civil servant.

At times he sees himself as a great man--another Napoleon, a proto embodiment of Frederic Nietzsche's "Ubermensch" -- believing his actions somehow are just because he is beyond good and evil and transcends morality by a twisted self-affirmation.

But at other times he is brought to despair and the impulse to confess his terrible crime. It is this duality in human nature that Dostoyevsky exploits so well---the currents of reason and irrational (or rational) fear that over takes us and makes either cowards or killers or fools or heroes if they are placed in a situation where they are driven beyond the borders of mundane life.

"But what can I tell you? I have known Rodion for a year and a half; he is moody, melancholy, proud, and haughty; recently (and perhaps for much longer than I know) he has been morbidly depressed and over-anxious aboud his health. He is kind and generous. He doesn't like to display his feelings, and would rather seem heartless than talk about them. Sometimes, however, he is not hypochondriacal at all, but simply inhumanly cold and unfeeling. Really, it is as if he had two separate personalities, each dominating him alternately."--Dimitri Prokofych Razumihin, on his friend Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment Part 3, Chapter 2.

Rereading the book after many years I was struck by how the author drives home this dichotomy of his main character. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, he is torn between conscience and cold-bloodedness; between flights of egotistical haughtiness and anti-social behavior to acts of crippling doubt and a desire for simple understanding and forgiveness.

Dostoevsky desire for spiritual redemption is also at the heart of the story, not only for Rosolnikov but also for Sonia, the prostitute who also represents an ultimate victory of sorts over the depravity of the modern urban world through the Image of Christ. It is to modern minds an idealistic drive indeed, an avoidance of the great waves of technology and political theories that were so popular in Western Europe and so wrong for Russia (or so the author thought.)

Still, the story is great not for what it says about Russia's political or spiritual world that the author occupied, but for the keen insights into human behavior through characters that occupy a fully dimensional and all-too recognizable landscape. It is no wonder that Dostoevsky writings continue to be studied and admired.

"The Third Man" (1949) Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in "The Cuckoo Clock" Scene

The classic film that was voted number one of the Top 100 films by the British Film Institute, "The Third Man" was based on a screenplay and novella by Graham Greene. (The latter was published a year after the film was released.) It was directed by Sir Carol Reed and produced by Alexander Korda.

The story is about a down-and-out American writer of pulp Westerns (Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins) who comes to the four-power occupied city of late 1940's Vienna to take his old friend Harry Lime up on a job offer. It turns out that Lime has faked his demise in order to throw the British police off on his doings as a black-marketeer of, among other things, secretly diluted (and lethal) penicillin to children's hospitals.
Lime is both a callous murderer and a genuine "bon vi-ant", and Orson Welles plays both aspects of the character to perfection. (Ironically, despite all his work on film as a director/actor, this relatively minor role was the one he was most famous for during his heyday.)

The final part of the scene with Lime's recounting the Italian City-States and Swiss cuckoo clocks was Welles' inspiration.

When Martins finds out Lime is still alive, he tracks him down to the Russian Sector of the divided city to find out what has happened to his friend. Here the Machievellian philosophy of the fugitive Lime is brought out in crystal clarity above the city on a dizzying and potentially dangerous ferris wheel ride. The clip here is one of the best in a series of great scenes in this movie, a true must-see film.

The Sharon Tate/Leo and Rosemary LaBianca Murders: The Dark End of the 1960's

This was Sharon Tate in May, 1969, photographed near the  Bel-Air home  she shared with her husband Roman Polanski.  On the night of August 6th of that year, she and her unborn child and several  friends were brutally murdered in the house they were relaxing in by intruders. These people were half-a-dozen members of the "Manson Family", including several young women. 

 In a trial that  took nine months, and was then most expensive to date in the history of California, all of the perpetrators and their leader, the demonic  Charles Manson (who was not at the scene of the murders) were found guilty.  All of those sentenced to die had their sentences commuted when the state legislature of California outlawed the death penalty. None of them have ever made parole, nor I gather are they likely to until the end of their lives. 

  

I remember these murders vividly--they were in the news for months.  later I read the book "Helter Skelter" by the chief prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.  The book gave me a full idea of how Manson operated and the insane notions me affixed in the minds of others. But it didn't answer onw question for me. How to believe in a decent world when innocent people can be killed by such human monsters?    What evil force could one man (Manson) possess  to dispatch others to follow diabolical instructions and commit bloody rampages  with knives and blunt instruments?  Not only to kill prominent people, for which some pathological envy could be a motive, but ordinary people as well, like Mr and Mrs Leo & Rosemary LaBianca, who owned a grocery store?   

There have, of course, been many other mass murderers, but Charles Manson was somehow different.  More of a hippie Caligula than  the  classic American Lone-Wolf Serial KIller. He served for decades as a kind of human Shock-Wave so powerful that entertainers like Marilyn Manson have used his name to achieve notoriety.     

  The great tragedy is that he is still alive and someone like Sharon Tate could not live to see where her own destiny would take her, to be a great star or just an ingenue who grew older and became someones grandmother.  I cannot say that I would like to see him die in an electric chair, but rather that no human being should be able to gull others to commit crimes. But I've written too much on this man.  I thought I'd share this video of the person most remembered for this horrible night 40 years ago in Bel-Air, Los Angeles.  She and those she died with deserve to be remembered not as victims but amongst the many  decent people who should be remembered for what they already did and what they might  have done had they been spared such a cruel fate. 

(My thanks to the Ilovemarciabrady site.)