Brothers of the Gun: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and a Reckoning in Tombstone - Hardcover

Gardner, Mark Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059347189X ISBN 13: 9780593471890

Verlag: Dutton, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A True West Magazine Best Book and Best Author of the Year

A colorful and groundbreaking account of the most storied friendship of the American West: the bond between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday

Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday: Legendary gunfighters and friends who gained immortality because of a thirty-second shootout near a livery stable called the O.K. Corral. Their friendship actually began three years before that iconic 1881 gunfight, in the rollicking cattle town of Dodge City. Wyatt, an assistant city marshal, was surrounded by armed, belligerent cowboys. Doc saw Wyatt’s predicament from a monte table in the Long Branch saloon and burst out the door with two leveled revolvers shouting, “Throw up your hands!” The startled cowboys did, and Wyatt and Doc led them off to jail. Wyatt credited Doc with saving his life, and thus began their lasting—and curious—friendship.

In this illuminating dual biography, the first about Earp and Holliday, the lives of these two men, one a sometime lawman and the other a sometime dentist, are chronicled in a swirling tableau of saloons, brothels, gambling dens, stage holdups, arrests, manhunts, and revenge killings. And while there’s plenty of gunsmoke in this saga, hero-worshipping won’t be found. Wyatt and Doc, just like anyone else then and now, had their flaws and failings, and the unsavory parts of their lives are here, too.

In Brothers of the Gun, Old West authority Mark Lee Gardner reveals fresh information about Wyatt’s and Doc’s early lives, their famous friendship, the O.K. Corral gunfight, and Wyatt’s controversial “vendetta ride” following the assassination of his brother Morgan. Drawing upon new research into diaries, letters, court records, and contemporary newspaper reports, as well as firsthand observation at several historic sites, this is the definitive book on Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and their enduring bond. Brothers of the Gun is edge-of-your-saddle nonfiction storytelling at its best.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Lee Gardner is a recipient of the Frank Waters Award for Literary Excellence. His bestselling books, many of them award winners, include The Earth Is All That Lasts, Rough Riders, Shot All To Hell, and To Hell on a Fast Horse. An authority on the American West, Mark has appeared on numerous television programs and other media, including the hit Netflix docuseries Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War. His YouTube video for WIRED’s Tech Support, where Mark answers questions from the Internet about the Wild West, has received several million views. A native of Missouri, he holds an MA in American studies from the University of Wyoming and lives with his family at the foot of Pikes Peak.

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ONE

THE WAY WEST

And the world began when I was born

And the world is mine to win.

Charles Badger Clark

Vidal, California

March 1927

Feeling his years at the age of seventy-eight, Wyatt Earp was tired, exasperated, and broke. His big mustache had been white for a long time now, and he was practically bald, but his six- foot frame remained slim and straight as a board. Wyatt lived with his common-law wife, Josephine, in a tiny cottage that sat just 216 feet from the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. From their front door, unbroken desert peppered with clumps of greasewood stretched for eight miles to the foot of the Whipple Mountains, where Wyatt would spend most days digging and scratching the earth for gold and copper ore at his Happy Day Mine.

But even in this two- bit town in the Sonoran Desert, Wyatt was having to deal with his distant— and controversial— past. On March 15, the old lawman reached back into his memory as he composed a long letter to bestselling author Walter Noble Burns. Burns had requested information from Wyatt on Doc Holliday for a planned biography. The author was originally keen on writing Earp’s story, but he’d settled on Doc, or so he claimed, after Wyatt told him that a friend had already completed a manuscript of his life, and they were currently looking for a publisher.

Wyatt wrote Burns that he was happy to tell him what he wanted to know, but he asked the author not to mention his name too freely in the book. “I am getting tired of it all,” Wyatt explained, “as there have been so many lies written about me in so many magazines in the last few years that it makes a man feel like fighting.” Referring to a research trip Burns had made to Tombstone, Wyatt commented that, “No doubt you were filled up with lots of things which never happened about me.” Wyatt had indeed had more than enough of the stories from blowhards and journalists who weren’t even there. “I can’t understand why they don’t let me alone,” he wrote, “and I think it time to put a stop to it all.”

That wasn’t necessarily an idle threat. In 1922, he’d been enraged by a “nasty and ugly article” in the Los Angeles Times that described Wyatt, his brothers, and Doc Holliday as part of a gang of stage robbers. They’d made Tombstone their headquarters, the story went, after being driven
out of Dodge City by “Chief of Police” Bat Masterson. Not only that, but the writer, a John M. Scanland, had Wyatt being killed in Colton, California, some years later.

The silent-?film star William S. Hart, an unabashed Earp admirer, came to the old lawman’s defense in a subsequent issue of the newspaper, but Wyatt wasn’t satisfied. He was determined to find the offending writer and set the man straight himself. It took two years, but Scanland, then age seventy-?nine, was finally located, boarding with a couple in Los Angeles and about as broke as Wyatt. Wyatt showed up at the front door along with John Flood Jr., the man who was writing Earp’s autobiography, and Wyatt was in no mood for introductory pleasantries.
Just how startled Scanland was to see the famed Wyatt Earp towering over him can only be imagined, but Earp later wrote Hart that the journalist expressed real regret and readily apologized for his two-?year-?old story. Scanland even typed up a retraction and signed it—
anything to get Earp on his way.

“It does beat the band how the truth will be warped and misstated over a period of years,” Earp wrote Hart, which was a big reason why Wyatt was dictating his life story to John Flood. Another reason was that authors were making money off those faulty newspaper and magazine articles, and Wyatt felt that if anyone should be making money off his exploits, real or imagined, it should be him.

The old lawman had high hopes for the manuscript John Flood was preparing, which they would tout as the “first and only authentic story” of Wyatt Earp. He was eager that that story be told right not only for himself, but for the sake of those no longer living and unable to defend their reputations: brothers Virgil, Morgan, and Warren— and Doc Holliday. They’d all backed Wyatt when he needed backing. It was a debt that could never be fully repaid, but Wyatt would try. His story, then, Wyatt instructed Flood, was to be about truth, correctness, and vindication.

Especially vindication.

The truth of Wyatt Earp begins in Illinois in the spring of 1848. He came into the world on March 19 of that year in the rural village of Monmouth, the third son of Nicholas and Virginia Ann Earp. Six months earlier, thirty-?four-?year-?old Nicholas had ridden off to Mexico with one hundred recruits from the town and surrounding area, eager to win laurels fighting the soldiers of Antonio López de Santa Anna. They called themselves the Monmouth Dragoons, and their commander was a well-?liked attorney and merchant named Wyatt Berry Stapp. However, a
mule kick to the groin abruptly ended Nicholas’s soldiering south of the Rio Grande. He was discharged in Vera Cruz in December 1847 and arrived home four weeks before the birth of his son, whom he named for his former captain: Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp.

Young Wyatt joined three brothers, Newton (a half brother), James (Jim), and Virgil, and a sister, Martha, in the Earp family’s small two-?story home. But it wouldn’t be their home for long. Just one year after Wyatt’s birth, Nicholas sold the house for $300 and moved his family one
hundred and twenty-?three miles northwest to the new settlement of Pella, in Marion County, Iowa. Like Monmouth, Pella was surrounded by lush prairie land with rich, black soil just beneath the surface. The settlement had been founded by emigrants from Holland seeking religious freedom in the United States. Their colony numbered some nine hundred individuals with more on the way.

Nicholas wasn’t Dutch, nor was he fleeing religious persecution, but he was a cooper (barrel maker) by trade, and there was surely money to be made serving these newcomers. In fact, one newspaper article about the Hollanders observed that they had “considerable pecuniary means.” Nothing is known of Nicholas’s initial dealings with the Hollanders, but it’s apparent that the bearded five-?foot-?eleven Mexican War vet quickly took to his new surroundings and neighbors. When the federal census taker visited Marion County’s Lake Prairie Township in September 1850, he recorded Nicholas as engaging in both coopering and farming, with land holdings valued at $500. The following year, Nicholas added flatboat captain to his résumé of skills, floating a load of corn down the Des Moines and Mississippi rivers to St. Louis.

Wyatt remembered his father as having a “love for the soil and for making things grow,” but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t give up that passion if something more lucrative came along. Intoxicating stories of easy riches coming from the California gold fields spread like a contagion
among Iowa’s farmers and tradesmen. “Even the most thoughtful and sober-?minded,” stated an early Marion County history, “found it difficult to resist the infection.” Nicholas was one of the many who succumbed. He’d earned 160 acres of bounty land for his wartime service and sold it in June 1852, possibly to raise funds for his overland journey. The exact date of his trip is uncertain, but the fabled bonanzas were as elusive to Nicholas as they were to thousands of other Argonauts. He returned to his family after a few months, with nothing to show for his weary adventure but the experience...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059347189X
• ISBN 13: 9780593471890
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Dutton; https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/; ; Im Mittelfeld 25; K?ln; Deutschland; 51105; Deutschland