What do you think?
Rate this book
Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends
Tells the entire story of Earp's amazing life, explaining why he became a legend among his contemporaries and how Hollywood reinvented him first as a hero and then as a scoundrel. 30,000 first printing.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
4 people are currently reading
106 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
December 27, 2015
This is a wildly uneven book. When Barra is on his game, he's very good indeed; when he's off it, like the little girl in the nursery rhyme, he's horrid.
His purpose in the book is to explore the process by which Wyatt Earp became a legend. He's very interested in Wyatt's appearances in popular culture; he talks about the movies and the TV shows and also the children's toys and comic books and other ephemera. He's very good at tracing the paths which misinformation has taken, the ways in which the Earps tend to get conflated with their enemies as well as with other lawmen of the frontier such as Bat Masterton and Bill Tilghman. He's particularly good at breaking down theories and rhetoric and applying a reality check. There were four different points at which he particularly impressed me in this regard:
1. When Frank McLaury, just before the Gunfight near the O.K. Corral, told Behan that he would not surrender his arms unless the Earps did, Barra points out that McLaury is a civilian (for whom it is illegal to be carrying weapons in the streets of Tombstone in the first place) demanding that the city marshal and his deputies be disarmed.
2. The Doc-Holliday-Shot-First theory. Some witnesses in the hearing before Judge Spicer testified that Doc shot first, specifically with the nickel-plated revolver he was well-known to carry. (Well, Behan, that weasel, testified that SOMEONE in the Earp party shot first, with a nickel-plated revolver. He left it as an exercise for the student to connect the dots.) But Doc was carrying the shotgun. All testimony agrees on this, as it agrees that the shotgun was fired during the gunfight, but it was not fired first. So Doc, what? Carried the shotgun down Fremont Street, put it down, drew his revolver and shot first, then put away his revolver, picked up the shotgun, and fired it? Barra is perfectly correct to point out that this makes no sense. The idea of Doc wielding the revolver in one hand and the shotgun in the other doesn't work either. A shotgun is not a one-handed weapon.
3. The Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight. Barra, I learn from the dust-jacket bio, is a sports writer for The Wall Street Journal. His knowledge of sports shows to good advantage in his discussion of the fight, both because he can talk knowledgeably about the difference between London Prize Ring rules and the new (in 1896) Queensbury rules and because he has the background knowledge to point out that Wyatt Earp is far from the only referee in boxing history to be vilified for making an unpopular call. His discussion of the fight, although shorter than Tefertiller's (Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend), is actually rather more useful.
4. "Earp has been branded an opportunist and a self-publicist for allowing Lake to write the book that became Frontier Marshall, an odd criticism when one considers that nearly every important figure of the Old West, including Davy Crockett, William Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, Pat Garrett, Tom Horn, Elfago Baca, former outlaws John Wesley Harding, Emmitt Dalton, Frank James, and Cole Younger, and even Geronimo had either written books or lent their names to ghosted autobiographies" (381-2). It's a odd feature of the quote-unquote Old West, that due to the railroads, dime-novelists back east could write the legends as fast or faster than the gunmen could live them. Tourists would come west to see Wild Bill or go buffalo hunting with General Custer. Buffalo Bill Cody essentially made up his legend himself, starring as himself in plays that chronicled exploits that had never happened.
So those are the things Barra does well, and I'm grateful for them. However, there are also things about this book that infuriate and disappoint me.
Barra is stylistically a better writer than Tefertiller, but he's also a much more careless writer. This is a dreadfully sloppily copy-edited book, to the extent of misidentifying Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterton in the Dodge City Peace Commission photograph, and having errors like misprinting "McLaury" for "Leonard." (I don't, to be fair, know how much of that comes from errors that crept into the Castle Books reprint.) This is unfortunately of a piece with the careless writing; Barra forgets to tell pieces of the story--for example, Luther King's escape:
When the posse returned to Tombstone they could at least console themselves that they had the link to the stage robberies in Luther King, or so they thought. In his diary George Parsons wrote, "King, the stage robber, escaped tonight early from H. Woods who had been previously notified of an attempt at release to be made. Some of our officials should be hanged, they're a bad lot." Harry Jones agreed. Evidently he felt that the horse-selling transaction was a plot to get him out of the office; from that time he counted himself an Earp partisan. ( 143-4)
This makes NO SENSE if you haven't already read some other book on the Matter of Tombstone and know that King stepped out the back door of the jail while Harry Jones was drawing up a bill of sale for a horse which King had sold to John Dunbar. To make matters worse, Barra's endnote to this passage is itself a further example of careless writing: "In his 1928 book, Helldorado, Billy Breckenridge invents a bogus Nugget story about King's escape that finishes with the line "He [King] was an important witness against Holliday" (Barra 176 n.3) In fact, as Gary Roberts (Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend) explains, Breakenridge "tamper[ed] with a Nugget article concerning the escape of Luther King from jail after the Benson stage robbery to include the statement 'He was an important witness against Holliday,' which was not in the original (Roberts 386). Breakenridge (Helldorado: Bringing the Law to the Mesquite) didn't invent the whole story; he just tacked a line on at the end.
There are other examples--Barra claims that the infamous poker game the night before the gunfight included not only John Behan, Virgil Earp, Ike Clanton, and Tom McLaury (who are the gentlemen Tefertiller puts there, along with an "unknown player" (Tefertiller 115)), but also Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday. He gives no source for this rather extraordinary claim, and when he says at the end of the paragraph, "That Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday could have spent nearly five hours drinking and playing poker without trying to kill each other is practically impossible to believe" (167), I entirely agree with him.
In general--and this is ironic for someone whose purpose is to trace the legends and misinformation about Wyatt Earp--Barra doesn't cite his sources. This does not increase his credibility for me, especially when he says things like "The logistics of travel from Colorado, which is where Wyatt was when Ringo was shot, are tough, but researchers have determined that it could have been possible" (Barra 277). WHICH researchers? and determined HOW? Beyond that, it became apparent to me as I read that Barra has a number of biases. He dislikes liberals and academics, and he has a particular hatred of economic and social historians. I couldn't figure out why until I got to the part where he whips his knife out and sinks it into Paula Mitchell Marks: he condemns And Die in the West: The Story of O.K. Corral Gunfight as "well-intentioned" (Barra 214), which is pretty damn near fightin' words. Barra divides the world of Earpian research into pro-Earp and anti-Earp; his categories are absolute and polar, and "anti-Earp" is anyone who does not agree with Barra's equally absolute and polar division of good guys and bad guys at (near) the O.K. Corral.
I am not saying this because I think the Clantons and the McLaurys were "good guys," or because I think Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday, were "bad guys." I'm saying it because I think Barra's view is reductive and dismissive and ultimately not helpful.
This habit also slops over into his appraisal of sources. Earpian research is a particularly fraught area in this regard due to the habit of writers such as Lake ( Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal), Waters (The Earp Brothers of Tombstone: The Story of Mrs. Virgil Earp), and Boyer (I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp) of just making shit up when the facts weren't interesting enough for them. And Barra is weirdly double-faced. He doesn't like Waters' book because it is "anti-Earp," so he dismisses it. But he likes Boyer's pro-Earp I Married Wyatt Earp, so he says things like "The Morgan Earp-John Behan clash isn't in Josephine's actual memoirs and therefore, like all the Tombstone passages in I Married Wyatt Earp, is suspect. Still, it can't be discounted" (252). Why, exactly, can't it be discounted? Having read the passage in question, I find it deeply implausible, and am tempted to apply to Barra his catty remark about Paula Mitchell Marks and The Earp Brothers of Tombstone: "Ms. Marks, it can be said, wants the book to be true" (283).
Ultimately, I think my trouble with this book is that Barra throws a lot of stones without seeming to realize that his own house is made of glass. He attacks other writers for exactly the flaws of his own book. Also, Barra is not a historian, not in the sense of not having a degree in history, but in the sense of not being a historian. This was made appallingly clear to me when he says: "Perhaps any further packets of Doc's letters still out there are best kept hidden. We'd be less interested in Doc if we knew why he left home forever, just as we would lose interest in Bogart's Rick Blaine in Casablanca, if we knew why he could never return to America" (Barra 303). There's so much wrong with this, from my perspective: the casual conflation of a real person and a fictional character; the self-centered assumption that the value of a real person is in how entertaining "we" find him or her; the idea that the truth is less important than being "interesting" (an idea that Mssrs. Lake, Waters, and Boyer might well agree with).
Barra isn't a historian; he's a professional journalist with a thing about Wyatt Earp. And many of the things I like about this book spring from Barra being exactly what he is. But he does spend a lot of time getting in his own way.
To end, I want to relay my favorite quote in the book, from an interview Barra had with Val Kilmer about playing Doc Holliday: "Trying to flesh out his character is like trying to put clothes on a ghost" (Barra 286).
His purpose in the book is to explore the process by which Wyatt Earp became a legend. He's very interested in Wyatt's appearances in popular culture; he talks about the movies and the TV shows and also the children's toys and comic books and other ephemera. He's very good at tracing the paths which misinformation has taken, the ways in which the Earps tend to get conflated with their enemies as well as with other lawmen of the frontier such as Bat Masterton and Bill Tilghman. He's particularly good at breaking down theories and rhetoric and applying a reality check. There were four different points at which he particularly impressed me in this regard:
1. When Frank McLaury, just before the Gunfight near the O.K. Corral, told Behan that he would not surrender his arms unless the Earps did, Barra points out that McLaury is a civilian (for whom it is illegal to be carrying weapons in the streets of Tombstone in the first place) demanding that the city marshal and his deputies be disarmed.
2. The Doc-Holliday-Shot-First theory. Some witnesses in the hearing before Judge Spicer testified that Doc shot first, specifically with the nickel-plated revolver he was well-known to carry. (Well, Behan, that weasel, testified that SOMEONE in the Earp party shot first, with a nickel-plated revolver. He left it as an exercise for the student to connect the dots.) But Doc was carrying the shotgun. All testimony agrees on this, as it agrees that the shotgun was fired during the gunfight, but it was not fired first. So Doc, what? Carried the shotgun down Fremont Street, put it down, drew his revolver and shot first, then put away his revolver, picked up the shotgun, and fired it? Barra is perfectly correct to point out that this makes no sense. The idea of Doc wielding the revolver in one hand and the shotgun in the other doesn't work either. A shotgun is not a one-handed weapon.
3. The Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight. Barra, I learn from the dust-jacket bio, is a sports writer for The Wall Street Journal. His knowledge of sports shows to good advantage in his discussion of the fight, both because he can talk knowledgeably about the difference between London Prize Ring rules and the new (in 1896) Queensbury rules and because he has the background knowledge to point out that Wyatt Earp is far from the only referee in boxing history to be vilified for making an unpopular call. His discussion of the fight, although shorter than Tefertiller's (Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend), is actually rather more useful.
4. "Earp has been branded an opportunist and a self-publicist for allowing Lake to write the book that became Frontier Marshall, an odd criticism when one considers that nearly every important figure of the Old West, including Davy Crockett, William Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, Pat Garrett, Tom Horn, Elfago Baca, former outlaws John Wesley Harding, Emmitt Dalton, Frank James, and Cole Younger, and even Geronimo had either written books or lent their names to ghosted autobiographies" (381-2). It's a odd feature of the quote-unquote Old West, that due to the railroads, dime-novelists back east could write the legends as fast or faster than the gunmen could live them. Tourists would come west to see Wild Bill or go buffalo hunting with General Custer. Buffalo Bill Cody essentially made up his legend himself, starring as himself in plays that chronicled exploits that had never happened.
So those are the things Barra does well, and I'm grateful for them. However, there are also things about this book that infuriate and disappoint me.
Barra is stylistically a better writer than Tefertiller, but he's also a much more careless writer. This is a dreadfully sloppily copy-edited book, to the extent of misidentifying Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterton in the Dodge City Peace Commission photograph, and having errors like misprinting "McLaury" for "Leonard." (I don't, to be fair, know how much of that comes from errors that crept into the Castle Books reprint.) This is unfortunately of a piece with the careless writing; Barra forgets to tell pieces of the story--for example, Luther King's escape:
When the posse returned to Tombstone they could at least console themselves that they had the link to the stage robberies in Luther King, or so they thought. In his diary George Parsons wrote, "King, the stage robber, escaped tonight early from H. Woods who had been previously notified of an attempt at release to be made. Some of our officials should be hanged, they're a bad lot." Harry Jones agreed. Evidently he felt that the horse-selling transaction was a plot to get him out of the office; from that time he counted himself an Earp partisan. ( 143-4)
This makes NO SENSE if you haven't already read some other book on the Matter of Tombstone and know that King stepped out the back door of the jail while Harry Jones was drawing up a bill of sale for a horse which King had sold to John Dunbar. To make matters worse, Barra's endnote to this passage is itself a further example of careless writing: "In his 1928 book, Helldorado, Billy Breckenridge invents a bogus Nugget story about King's escape that finishes with the line "He [King] was an important witness against Holliday" (Barra 176 n.3) In fact, as Gary Roberts (Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend) explains, Breakenridge "tamper[ed] with a Nugget article concerning the escape of Luther King from jail after the Benson stage robbery to include the statement 'He was an important witness against Holliday,' which was not in the original (Roberts 386). Breakenridge (Helldorado: Bringing the Law to the Mesquite) didn't invent the whole story; he just tacked a line on at the end.
There are other examples--Barra claims that the infamous poker game the night before the gunfight included not only John Behan, Virgil Earp, Ike Clanton, and Tom McLaury (who are the gentlemen Tefertiller puts there, along with an "unknown player" (Tefertiller 115)), but also Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday. He gives no source for this rather extraordinary claim, and when he says at the end of the paragraph, "That Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday could have spent nearly five hours drinking and playing poker without trying to kill each other is practically impossible to believe" (167), I entirely agree with him.
In general--and this is ironic for someone whose purpose is to trace the legends and misinformation about Wyatt Earp--Barra doesn't cite his sources. This does not increase his credibility for me, especially when he says things like "The logistics of travel from Colorado, which is where Wyatt was when Ringo was shot, are tough, but researchers have determined that it could have been possible" (Barra 277). WHICH researchers? and determined HOW? Beyond that, it became apparent to me as I read that Barra has a number of biases. He dislikes liberals and academics, and he has a particular hatred of economic and social historians. I couldn't figure out why until I got to the part where he whips his knife out and sinks it into Paula Mitchell Marks: he condemns And Die in the West: The Story of O.K. Corral Gunfight as "well-intentioned" (Barra 214), which is pretty damn near fightin' words. Barra divides the world of Earpian research into pro-Earp and anti-Earp; his categories are absolute and polar, and "anti-Earp" is anyone who does not agree with Barra's equally absolute and polar division of good guys and bad guys at (near) the O.K. Corral.
I am not saying this because I think the Clantons and the McLaurys were "good guys," or because I think Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday, were "bad guys." I'm saying it because I think Barra's view is reductive and dismissive and ultimately not helpful.
This habit also slops over into his appraisal of sources. Earpian research is a particularly fraught area in this regard due to the habit of writers such as Lake ( Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal), Waters (The Earp Brothers of Tombstone: The Story of Mrs. Virgil Earp), and Boyer (I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp) of just making shit up when the facts weren't interesting enough for them. And Barra is weirdly double-faced. He doesn't like Waters' book because it is "anti-Earp," so he dismisses it. But he likes Boyer's pro-Earp I Married Wyatt Earp, so he says things like "The Morgan Earp-John Behan clash isn't in Josephine's actual memoirs and therefore, like all the Tombstone passages in I Married Wyatt Earp, is suspect. Still, it can't be discounted" (252). Why, exactly, can't it be discounted? Having read the passage in question, I find it deeply implausible, and am tempted to apply to Barra his catty remark about Paula Mitchell Marks and The Earp Brothers of Tombstone: "Ms. Marks, it can be said, wants the book to be true" (283).
Ultimately, I think my trouble with this book is that Barra throws a lot of stones without seeming to realize that his own house is made of glass. He attacks other writers for exactly the flaws of his own book. Also, Barra is not a historian, not in the sense of not having a degree in history, but in the sense of not being a historian. This was made appallingly clear to me when he says: "Perhaps any further packets of Doc's letters still out there are best kept hidden. We'd be less interested in Doc if we knew why he left home forever, just as we would lose interest in Bogart's Rick Blaine in Casablanca, if we knew why he could never return to America" (Barra 303). There's so much wrong with this, from my perspective: the casual conflation of a real person and a fictional character; the self-centered assumption that the value of a real person is in how entertaining "we" find him or her; the idea that the truth is less important than being "interesting" (an idea that Mssrs. Lake, Waters, and Boyer might well agree with).
Barra isn't a historian; he's a professional journalist with a thing about Wyatt Earp. And many of the things I like about this book spring from Barra being exactly what he is. But he does spend a lot of time getting in his own way.
To end, I want to relay my favorite quote in the book, from an interview Barra had with Val Kilmer about playing Doc Holliday: "Trying to flesh out his character is like trying to put clothes on a ghost" (Barra 286).
December 21, 2015
3.5 stars. This is an interesting read on Wyatt Earp and his legend. The book is written mainly to debunk a lot of other books, both positive and negative, that have come out regarding Wyatt Earp and the gunfight in Tombstone that many take for fact, most of them written in the 1920s and 1930s. The one book he truly takes issue with, since it has been called the definitive Earp book and has cemented his legend in American culture, is Frontier Marshal by Stuart Lake. As pointed out in this book, Lake, like a couple of Earp biographers before, could not get Wyatt to talk about himself or the incidents in Tombstone. Lake apparently relied heavily on stories he got from third parties, most notably Bat Masterson, who would never talk about his own exploits but would over exaggerate those of his friends like Wyatt and Virgil Earp and, even though Bat didn't care for him much, Doc Holliday. Unlike previous books about Earp, this book does mention Wyatt's wives (Urilla, who died before Wyatt left the Midwest for the frontier, and Mattie whom he met in Texas and later left), and his partner for the last 47 years of his life, Josephine Marcus (who some believe was at the center of the troubles between him and Sheriff Johnny Behan, who she was seeing before she began dating Wyatt). Previous books prior to I Married Wyatt Earp, which were based off of Josephine's memoirs, and Allie Earp's (Virgil's wife) book left out a lot of this info due to legal threats by Josephine. Overall a good read, but there are many, many typos, including the repeated reference to John Wesley Hardin as John Wesley Harding.
April 5, 2013
This book is the most poorly written and edited piece of history I have ever read. As far as I can tell, the history itself is sound, and Barra's skepticism is healthy. But the writing is convoluted and confusing. No attempt is made to create a narrative, but rather a series of incidents presented vaguely. I was not surprised to read that the author was not a historian, but a sports writer.
That said, it is hard for me to rate this book this low. The facts and story itself is fascinating, I just wish it had a more skilled author, though I believe it could have been a much better book with a better editor.
That said, it is hard for me to rate this book this low. The facts and story itself is fascinating, I just wish it had a more skilled author, though I believe it could have been a much better book with a better editor.
November 8, 2012
A great book that gets as close as any at trying to separte the legend from the msn.
February 13, 2022
The American Old West has many historical figures whose stories have been retold and reimagined so many times that plenty of mythology and folklore has been added (or borrowed from others' stories). Wyatt Earp is one such character. His family moved around a lot in his youth and he continued wandering as an adult. He worked as buffalo hunter and a law man in Kansas, he moved to the Arizona Territory to be a prospector and investor (though he wound up being a law man again), he continued on to California, and he had a brief stint in Alaska for the gold rush before returning to California. His fame was based on his time in Arizona. He lived in Tombstone with his brothers where they invested in the mines, dealt cards at one of the hotels, and eventually were pulled in to law enforcement. The Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday had a famous street fight with the Clantons and McLaurys who were part of the Cowboys, a group of cattle rustlers and stagecoach robbers. After the battle, the Cowboys were gunning for the Earps. Virgil Earp was crippled and Morgan Earp was killed in reprisal shootings. Wyatt and Doc went on their Vendetta Ride, killing many of the men responsible for or affiliated with those who attacked Virgil and Morgan. Wyatt tried to put all of that behind him, but press (both favorable and unfavorable) kept bringing back up the Tombstone street fight and the rest of his history.
Allen Barra has painstakingly investigated the life of Wyatt Earp, trying to find what truly happened and who Wyatt truly was. In the late 1800s, the press was not always accurate or unbiased in its reporting (a fact sadly true even today). Records were kept but often lost due to fires or carelessness. A lot of people who wrote memoirs of their lives in Tombstone had an axe to grind or wanted to make a dollar, so exaggerating or confabulating the truth (or just misremembering) happened. Barra looks at all sorts of resources from primary texts and records to pop culture novels and histories. Stuart Lake's Frontier Marshal from the 1930s built a lot of the legend around Earp, lionizing him as a knight errant of the Old West. By the 1960s, plenty of revisionist, anti-Earp attitudes became popular.
Barra sifts through all the evidence and attitudes to find a more accurate portrayal of Wyatt Earp. He's in the pro-Earp camp and ably argues his position. As with any real person, Earp's life is more complicated than a passing glance reveals. Earp was a quiet person and often avoided violence (or at least killing), making him less colorful than a gambler and adventurer like Doc Holliday. Even so, Earp did seek out adventure and new things like mining and real estate, though he was never great at endeavors outside of law enforcement. He was a just man who did what was right even under hard circumstances. He's an admirable figure once looking past all the larger-than-life stories that have grown up around him.
The book is an interesting history of the Old West and an analysis of how iconic figures are represented and used in popular culture through the years. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (a name it only got decades after it happened) has achieved a mythic standing in American culture. But it is just one of many events in Wyatt Earp's fascinating life.
Highly recommended.
Sample quote, nicely summarizing the attitude of the Earps: "For all their gambling and mining interests, the Earps were active, aggressive lawmen who enforced laws without regard to politics or popularity and who had no compunction about stretching the power of their federal appointments to do so." [p. 154]
Allen Barra has painstakingly investigated the life of Wyatt Earp, trying to find what truly happened and who Wyatt truly was. In the late 1800s, the press was not always accurate or unbiased in its reporting (a fact sadly true even today). Records were kept but often lost due to fires or carelessness. A lot of people who wrote memoirs of their lives in Tombstone had an axe to grind or wanted to make a dollar, so exaggerating or confabulating the truth (or just misremembering) happened. Barra looks at all sorts of resources from primary texts and records to pop culture novels and histories. Stuart Lake's Frontier Marshal from the 1930s built a lot of the legend around Earp, lionizing him as a knight errant of the Old West. By the 1960s, plenty of revisionist, anti-Earp attitudes became popular.
Barra sifts through all the evidence and attitudes to find a more accurate portrayal of Wyatt Earp. He's in the pro-Earp camp and ably argues his position. As with any real person, Earp's life is more complicated than a passing glance reveals. Earp was a quiet person and often avoided violence (or at least killing), making him less colorful than a gambler and adventurer like Doc Holliday. Even so, Earp did seek out adventure and new things like mining and real estate, though he was never great at endeavors outside of law enforcement. He was a just man who did what was right even under hard circumstances. He's an admirable figure once looking past all the larger-than-life stories that have grown up around him.
The book is an interesting history of the Old West and an analysis of how iconic figures are represented and used in popular culture through the years. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (a name it only got decades after it happened) has achieved a mythic standing in American culture. But it is just one of many events in Wyatt Earp's fascinating life.
Highly recommended.
Sample quote, nicely summarizing the attitude of the Earps: "For all their gambling and mining interests, the Earps were active, aggressive lawmen who enforced laws without regard to politics or popularity and who had no compunction about stretching the power of their federal appointments to do so." [p. 154]
April 5, 2020
This is an outstanding read that features outstanding research. Allen Barra has not only produced an excellent biography, he has also shown how that compares to the Wyatt Earp who has come down to us through books, and especially movies. After reading this, I watched the movie Tombstone again for about the 10th time, because of the new "eye" that I could now bring to it. If you enjoy good biography, Western history, or stories about how legends are made, then I highly recommend this book. Indeed, I was sorry to see it end.
So, why only 4 stars? Because the book was very poorly copy edited to the point of distraction. There were many typos, and most egregiously, John Wesley Hardin was consistently referred to as "John Wesley Harding."
So, why only 4 stars? Because the book was very poorly copy edited to the point of distraction. There were many typos, and most egregiously, John Wesley Hardin was consistently referred to as "John Wesley Harding."
October 4, 2021
Pretty definitive account of the life of Wyatt Earp and the rich body of folklore and fiction that has built up around him in the past 140 years. Barra generally does a fantastic job of separating fact from opinion but does ultimately come down as pro-Earp (which I mostly am too, so take that as an FYI not a Buyer Beware), and so dismisses a few takes that I'd consider valuable. A few typos, a bit of repetition and the odd minor contradiction or factual error* don't stop this from being a great volume for your Western History shelf.
*As an Australian I am quite aware of the date of the Glenrowan Siege and the Kelly Gang's adoption of steel armour, but it wouldn't have jumped out at me if I wasn't deep into my own country's history.
*As an Australian I am quite aware of the date of the Glenrowan Siege and the Kelly Gang's adoption of steel armour, but it wouldn't have jumped out at me if I wasn't deep into my own country's history.
May 3, 2020
Allen Barra analyzes the many legends and outright lies told about Wyatt Earp (looking at both the man and all of the portrayals of him for television and movies) and comes up with a very revealing biography.
My favorite tidbit: Hugh O'Brian's Wyatt Earp tv series ("brave, courageous and bold") ran longer (six years) than Wyatt was actually a lawman in Kansas and Arizona.
He was the basis of both that series and Gunsmoke and there really was a Long Branch saloon.
It amazes me that Earp lived into the 1920s in LA. What a great interview he would have been -- if you could only get him to talk.
My favorite tidbit: Hugh O'Brian's Wyatt Earp tv series ("brave, courageous and bold") ran longer (six years) than Wyatt was actually a lawman in Kansas and Arizona.
He was the basis of both that series and Gunsmoke and there really was a Long Branch saloon.
It amazes me that Earp lived into the 1920s in LA. What a great interview he would have been -- if you could only get him to talk.
October 6, 2019
this is making a good companion to my reading of "Doc" and "Epitaph" by Maria Doria Russell. There is a LOT of detailed information here that is a bit more than I need, so I don't know that I could sit and read it cover to cover, but I've gleaned many good tidbits. The sections of the portrayal of Wyatt in books, movies and TV, which of course is what has created his fame, is quite interesting.
July 1, 2025
I wanted to like this book but wasn't really for me.
July 3, 2018
For some who may not know: Wyatt Earp was a real person, not just a fictional character in the movie TOMBSTONE or played by Kevin Costner in another. Secondly: Don't let the title of this book mislead you - there's no Earp-bashing going on in these pages! After reading several other bio's of Wyatt (to the extent I almost feel like I knew him), I can honestly say that INVENTING... is probably the best account of his life and times available today. Of course the Tombstone period is well covered, but the time between that and Earp's death in 1929 is more detailed here than in any other work I have read. For serious researchers, Barra does a good job critiquing other Earp authors and their works, both good and bad. For western buffs (and lovers of biographies who just want to explore a new trail), this book is must reading. As page 11 of the introduction says, "Wyatt Earp was more interesting and his life more exciting than anyone else except Wyatt's most intimate friends knew". Read it and find out why.
January 26, 2012
I really wanted to love this book. After having read Doc by Mary Doria Russell (one of the best historical fictions ever), They Call Me Doc by DJ Herda and Doc Holiday's Woman by Jane Claudia Coleman, I was intriqued to find out what Doc Holliday's best friend, Wyatt Earp, was like.
I had a lingering doubt though hoping this wasn't going to be "yet another account of the fight at the OK Corral," and thankfully it wasn't.
But I just couldn't get into this. Its goal isn't biography, which I had hoped. It more or less seemed to be written in order to debunk legends as the title suggests. At one point, I flipped to the back and re-read the author's bio., suspecting this was written by a history professor, but it's not. He appears to be a journalist. I found myself skimming several pages at a time thinking, "What's this have to do with Wyatt?"
Sooooooo, if you're looking for a book about general western history over Arizona in the 1880's, and some highlights here and there about Wyatt and about the politics of Tombstone, then you might like it.
Personally, I wanted to know more about Wyatt as a man, a human being. I wanted to know how exactly he met Sadie, and whatever happened to Mattie. I wanted to know all about the friendship he had with Doc. How he was around his brothers, little tales like that. No dice.
I even skipped ahead and read the chapter about Doc. I give him props for not labeling Kate Haroney as a prostitute. I don't ever believe she was. She was just doing what she probably had to now and then to get ahead.
But even still, the chapter goes back to debunking other historians, Lake, even Bat Masterson's recounts.
If you're a historian who loves debunking, this book is for you.
I had a lingering doubt though hoping this wasn't going to be "yet another account of the fight at the OK Corral," and thankfully it wasn't.
But I just couldn't get into this. Its goal isn't biography, which I had hoped. It more or less seemed to be written in order to debunk legends as the title suggests. At one point, I flipped to the back and re-read the author's bio., suspecting this was written by a history professor, but it's not. He appears to be a journalist. I found myself skimming several pages at a time thinking, "What's this have to do with Wyatt?"
Sooooooo, if you're looking for a book about general western history over Arizona in the 1880's, and some highlights here and there about Wyatt and about the politics of Tombstone, then you might like it.
Personally, I wanted to know more about Wyatt as a man, a human being. I wanted to know how exactly he met Sadie, and whatever happened to Mattie. I wanted to know all about the friendship he had with Doc. How he was around his brothers, little tales like that. No dice.
I even skipped ahead and read the chapter about Doc. I give him props for not labeling Kate Haroney as a prostitute. I don't ever believe she was. She was just doing what she probably had to now and then to get ahead.
But even still, the chapter goes back to debunking other historians, Lake, even Bat Masterson's recounts.
If you're a historian who loves debunking, this book is for you.
June 2, 2016
If, like me, you grew up in the era of The Western, you should love this book. The author dissects how the legend of Wyatt Earp was created and how it changed over time. He tries to piece together the facts of the man's life but admits' at times, that the truth is elusive and tells you what he prefers to believe.
The main shortcoming of the edition of this book I read is occasional sloppy editing. For example he refers to someone's "ancestors" as still living in the town of his birth when in context clearly could only mean "descendants". In another passage events are described as taking place in "the 1880's and early 1990's". The sentence only makes sense if the author meant for the second date to be the early 1900's.
Editing aside, if you enjoy stories about the west when it was wild, or have fond memories of gathering with your family in front of the TV for the latest adventure of Matt Dillon or the Cartwright family, you will enjoy this book.
The main shortcoming of the edition of this book I read is occasional sloppy editing. For example he refers to someone's "ancestors" as still living in the town of his birth when in context clearly could only mean "descendants". In another passage events are described as taking place in "the 1880's and early 1990's". The sentence only makes sense if the author meant for the second date to be the early 1900's.
Editing aside, if you enjoy stories about the west when it was wild, or have fond memories of gathering with your family in front of the TV for the latest adventure of Matt Dillon or the Cartwright family, you will enjoy this book.
July 7, 2010
Having watched the movie "Wyatt Earp" based on this book, decided to read the book. Only got 1/2 way through though. The story of Wyatt's life in facts...is pretty matter of fact. He and his brothers and all of their wives lived in pretty rough circumstances in the West. They were interested in making enough money to live comfortably. Everyone did not always get along. Wyatt was pretty handy with a gun, didn't like shooting at people. Didn't always make the people in his community happy. The invented part of Wyatt is the hero we see in the movies and TV. They are partly true, we just don't see the sad realism of the people's lives. Nice hats, pretty dresses weren't that common.
April 22, 2008
This and Casey Tefertiller's biography of Earp are the most definitive and accurate life stories. Earp and his image fascinate me. My only criticism of this book is the editing--it borders on abysmal--way too many typos. Also, the author refers to John Wesley Hardin as Harding throughout. Sloppy.
January 23, 2015
Excellent; comprehensive in that it not only examines the biography, it also then puts other accounts of Wyatt Earp's life into context, how it was depicted in subsequent books, movies, and television, and also fills in details of the western settlement, cattle drives, land management, law enforcement.
May 28, 2011
Full of interesting information about one of the most famous lawmen of the Old West, but it felt very disorganized, and that made it very hard to read. Plodding through it became something of a chore.
March 3, 2008
I haven't finished this book yet, but I find Wyatt Earp the man very interesting. The movie "TOMBSTONE" is the only movie that closely dipicts what happened there.
June 17, 2009
Superb research by the author but the book is in a class by itself when it comes to the incredible typos.
March 10, 2010
Extremely interesting and well-researched, but inexplicably full of typographical errors.
July 12, 2013
Would have given it a 5 star because of the wonderful historical details, but it was a bit long-winded.
August 22, 2014
I think that this book was more of a 3 1/2 stars.It was an interesting point of view but it seemed that the author had a slight obsesion with Wyatt Earp. all in all it was ok
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews