Wyatt Earp Revised, Remixed And Reconsidered

May 17, 2025
    It's been awhile since we published the best selling issue of True West ever.

Feb-March,  2001, a pristine copy of this

issue goes for $300 if you can find one.

But, as you no doubt know, when it comes to Earpland, the hits keep on coming. Here is the opening of a rather delicious review in an upcoming issue:

  "Earp’s story has been twisted, whitewashed, blackwashed, and otherwise distorted from the git-go. We can credit Bat Masterson for first mythologizing his old friend in 1907 in the pages of the magazine Human Life. After Masterson, the facts were cooked by professional mythmakers such as Walter Noble Burns (Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest, 1927) and Stuart Lake (Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, 1931), who were supplied with Hollywood’s decades worth of facts morphed into legend.

   "Later, the facts mutated into darker legends in books by Ed Bartholomew’s Wyatt Earp: The Untold Story (1960) and Frank Waters’ The Earp Brothers of Tombstone (1960). And a nod must be given to the late Glenn Boyer, whose I Married Wyatt Earp (1976), supposedly based on the unpublished memoirs of Wyatt’s widow, Josephine Marcus, was hugely popular.

   "The books of Bartholomew, Waters and Boyer may have lacked historical veritas—I Married Wyatt Earp was later proven bogus and withdrawn by its publisher, the University of Arizona Press— but they succeeded in putting the spotlight on a major player in the Earp story: Josephine “Sadie” Marcus, his companion for the last forty-odd years of his life. Once historians recognized her place in Wyatt’s story, Sadie began to take up more and more of the story until she has practically come to be the story."

—Allen Barra, in the opening of his review of the recent docudrama Wyatt Earp And The Cowboy War

   Of course, Allen Barra is in the infamous P Commission photo taken in front of Hatch's Saloon location on Allen Street in Tombstone the night after a confrontation with a notorious bounty hunter who got me kicked out of Arizona Highways.

The P Commission, 1993

That's Allen Barra squatting at left, Paul Northrop, Casey Tefertiller and me. Back row: Bob McCubbin, Jim Dunham, Robert Palmquist and Jeff Morey. 

Photo by Wyatt Earp

(No, really!)

   Meanwhile, in the even Stranger Than Fiction Zone. . .

 In the so-called Flood manuscript, Wyatt remembered using a telephone to call in a stage robbery. While it's unlikely he did this, there were in fact telephone lines between several mines and the Tombstone Stock Exchange in 1881.

Hello, operator, give me Sheriff Paul please. . .

And, as goofy as this looks, yes, early telephone models had two receivers, one for each ear. Makes sense, actually.

Hugh O'Brian as Wyatt Earp

"Yes, kids some of this is actually kind of true."

I'll be damned if I know what sells.

—BBB putting words in the old man's mouth

"You won't like him. He's not who you think he is."

—The late John Gilchriese