Shady Sadie Saves The Day

 October 12, 2026

   Down to the wire. What else is new? We have a Tombstone Epitaph doubletruck due today and I was going to do a full blown Graphic Cinema treatment on Wyatt Earp's bunco steering incident in LA, but I realized I need to do something about the AI look of it all. On the narrative level it looks great and Rob Mathiasch did an excellent job with the AI but I need to make it mine and I don't want to cloud the water with something half-baked.

Wyatt Earp Busted!

(in progress)

Shady Sadie Saves The Day

   I believe Sadie would be honest about the Truth being complicated. She might even have admitted, Wyatt did all of those things he was arrested for and more—but those are just the ones where he got caught! I also believe she would admit his biggest weakness was he wasn't afraid of anything—and that got him in trouble all the time. Sadie, of course, spent a lot of time trying to write up Wyatt's story to sell to Hollywood and every Sunday she and Wyatt and John Flood would meet to fashion a commercial story but their efforts were simply awful and cartoonish. For example, somehow Sadie got it in her head that Wyatt should save a damsel in distress from a burning building in Tombstone and that ham-fisted episode is in their story. They spent a lot of quality time on it (their final manuscript clocked in at 348 pages!) but no one was interested.

Wyatt Does A Flaming Fabio?

So When Did the Turn Begin?

   Stuart Lake is the one who turned the tide in 1931 with the publication of "Frontier Marshal" (it's a little ironic that Lake wanted "Frontier Gunfighter" as the title, but Sadie would not have it). Prior to this, Wyatt Earp was primarily known in the press as a "Gun Man" not as a lawman. And the O.K. Corral incident was more often than not described as the "Earp-Clanton feud," as in the Hatfield & McCoys embroglio. So Lake's prose and Sadie's restraint created the stalwart lawman that we know today.

A Myth to Beat The Band

"It does beat the band how the truth will be warped and misstated over the years."

—Wyatt Earp in a letter to William S. Hart