The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral – And How It Changed the American West

By Jeff Guinn
Four out of Five Stars

Apparently in the late 19^th Century to refer to someone as a ‘cowboy’ was the equivalent of insulting them. Cowboys were the rustlers and villains who played around on the edges of civilized society – or at least what passed for civilized society during the formation of the Wild West. That is one of the facts we learn when reading Jeff Guinn’s The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral – And How It Changed the American West. While I found that interesting, seeing how ‘cowboy’ has managed to turn from a negative to a positive, it is only one of many facts Guinn’s New York Times best-selling book relates about the infamous gun battle that has survived into legend.

Born in the 1960’s, I grew up in a time when maintaining legends still seemed important; rumours have it that back in the day, many journalists knew of President John F. Kennedy’s sexual dalliances in the White House, but turned a blind eye to them, seeing it as unseemly to report. Today, it would be front page news. Back in my day, before the Internet, and the fact news and information wasn’t so readily available, it was possible to believe in legends, but that no longer seems to be the case. And while I long for the simplicity of legend, I must say that exploring the truth, or at least what we can derive of the truth when writing history, is fascinating in its own way. Tearing down the legend of lawman Wyatt Earp, and the infamous gun battle that has cemented his place in history, is exactly what Jeff Guinn manages with The Last Gunfight; this is not a bad thing, however, because he replaces that legend with a look at a complex man with human motivations and flaws; he has taken Wyatt and made him real.

For many of us, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a story of good and bad; the law-like Wyatt Earp and his brothers, along with a slightly questionable Doc Holliday, shooting it out with the Clanton’s and McLaury’s, cattle rustlers and bad guys. What we learn is that Wyatt was not as squeaky clean as we thought – definitely not a pillar of virtue, but instead a man who was constantly in search of position in life; determined to rise above his station. We also learn that the reasons for the shootout were not as pure as we’ve been led to believe over the decades, but were political in nature, stemming from Wyatt’s determination to become an important person in Tombstone and Ike Clanton’s greed. The fight itself, according to Guinn’s research stemmed from a clandestine deal between Wyatt and Ike that didn’t pan out, and that one of them feared would come to light.

Jeff Guinn paints a fascinating tale of the formation of the town of Tombstone, and the social structure of the day. Over the years, in movies and on TV we’ve watched many Sheriff’s taking on the bad guys, but it was never explained to us that they may not be in that position under a sense of duty, but because in many cases the position paid extremely well, as the Sheriff was also responsible for assessing property values and collecting various taxes of which he was entitled to keep a small percentage of as part of his annual salary. We discover that the face-to-face main street shootout we’ve seen countless times in entertainment was rare, and one aspect of the fight at the O.K. Corral that alarmed people on that fateful day, and indicated something bad was going down, was the fact that the Earps and Holliday approached the cowboys by walking side-by-side – something rarely seen.

Legends still loom large, and the movies can have them. When it comes to truly appreciating history, however, reality, or what a historian can surmise, based on the facts put in front of him or her can be so much more fascinating. Jeff Guinn has done his homework, and he has presented that homework in a highly engaging way, painting a picture of the Wild West, not as we believe we know it, but as it was, and in the process taken a gunfight – a brief moment in time that has lived on to today – and given us an understanding how it came to be, how it happened, and the aftermath.

Along with The Last Gunfight, Guinn has written, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Based on his handling of the O.K. Corral, I’d say Go Down Together is worth seeking out and delving into.