1 LEX TALIONIS On the night of March 20, 1882, at a train station in Tucson, Arizona Territory, Wyatt Earp, a deputy United States marshal, shot Frank Stilwell, an accused stage-robber and murderer. Wyatt aimed to kill, firing his shotgun into Stilwell's chest at such close range that powder burns encircled the gaping wound. The shotgun blast alone was a mortal wound, but when a railroad worker discovered Stilwell's body the next morning, he found that Stillwell had been shot multiple times. Members of Earp's posse, which included his youngest brother, Warren, and his closest friend, the professional gambler John Henry "Doc" Holliday, had opened fire with their own weapons to make sure of Stilwell's death. The gunfight was one-sided: Stilwell's pistol had not been fired.1 By most accounts, Stilwell was a villain. As a deputy sheriff in Cochise County, Arizona, which included the silver boomtown of Tombstone, he was one of several corrupt lawmen who shielded cattle rustlers and stage-robbers from justice. He was in Tucson, seventy-five miles northwest of Tombstone, to face prosecution for having participated in a stage robbery himself.
He was at the train station awaiting the arrival of a cowboy who would provide him with an alibi in court-the cowboy was likely prepared to commit perjury. Wyatt had long known Stilwell was a blackguard, but he had another, more important reason to confront him at the train station in Tucson. Two nights earlier, in Tombstone, gunmen had murdered Wyatt's younger brother Morgan. Witnesses had identified Stilwell as one of Morgan's killers, and a coroner's jury in Tombstone had indicted him for the crime. As Stilwell's wounds suggested, Wyatt, despite his commission as a deputy U.S. marshal, made no attempt to arrest the accused murderer and bring him before a judge. Wyatt's experiences with Arizona's legal system over the previous half year had soured him on courtroom justice.
In October 1881, as a deputy police officer in Tombstone serving under his brother Virgil, the town police chief, Wyatt had participated in a gunfight that had left three cowboys dead. (The shoot-out, memorialized as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, actually took place in an empty lot behind the corral.) Following the shoot-out, Virgil, Wyatt, and Wyatt's fellow deputies Morgan and Holliday were accused of murder and endured a monthlong courtroom ordeal. Wyatt spent much of that month in a Tombstone jail cell.2 In late December, confederates of the dead cowboys shotgunned Virgil on a deserted Tombstone street; Virgil survived, but lost the use of his left arm. A cowboy, Ike Clanton, was charged with attempted murder, but in court, seven witnesses swore that Ike had been with them in a mining camp outside Tombstone on the night of the attack.
3 Wyatt feared that if Stilwell was brought to court to face charges for Morgan's murder-which like the shooting of Virgil was in retaliation for the October gunfight-Stilwell's friends would testify falsely to provide him an alibi. Accused of murdering Stilwell and, in the days that followed, two other cowboys he suspected of involvement in Morgan's death, Wyatt fled Arizona. Despite the ignominy of his exit from Tombstone, his role as a vigilante became a crucial part of his eventual status in American popular culture as an icon of law and order, the violent agent of justice on a lawless frontier. On the surface, it seems unlikely, or at least ironic, that a vigilante killer would become a symbol of rectitude. Yet Wyatt's story appealed to Americans who like him saw justice not in fickle courtrooms, but in the character of stalwarts who were willing to break the law-even to commit murder. A host of books, films, and television programs propelled Wyatt into his status as the iconic vigilante lawman.4 In 1931, a biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal , by Stuart N. Lake, cast Wyatt as an Old West version of an FBI agent and his Tombstone enemies as an organized-crime ring.
Like Eliot Ness or Melvin Purvis, Lake implied, Wyatt rightly resorted to extralegal justice because of the brutality of his enemies and the corruption of local police and judges. During the early years of the Cold War, the icon of the resolute lawman became a symbol of resistance to communism. Such resistance was so violent, in Western films such as 1957's Gunfight at the O.K. Corral , which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt, that the lawman inevitably remained outside of the civil society he protected.5 In late 2001, when President George W. Bush vowed to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," he summoned up the Earp icon of the frontier lawman willing to go outside of the law in the pursuit of justice. On September 19, 2001, a columnist for the Hartford Courant referred to the "dead or alive" vow as "Wyatt Earp rhetoric.
"6 In 2010, one year before the Justice Department indicted his office for discriminating against Mexican Americans, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, created an armed "immigration posse" to inderdict suspected illegal aliens. One of the posse's members was a Phoenix man, Wyatt Earp, who was not only the namesake of the 1880s Arizona lawman but claimed to be his nephew. Across three-quarters of a century, in battles against organized crime, Soviet communism, Islamist terrorism, and illegal immigration, Americans have invoked the Earp icon to rationalize the extralegal pursuit of justice. Yet the Wyatt Earp of the nineteenth-century American West was not the film icon familiar to modern Americans. While the Hollywood version is stubbornly, consistently duty-bound, in actuality Wyatt led a life of restlessness, inconstancy, impulsive law-breaking, and shifting identities. Beginning in his late teens, he rarely lived more than a year or two in one place. For much of his life, he was both hunter and hunted: he was a lawman in Missouri, Kansas, and Arizona; he was also a fugitive in Colorado and saw the inside of jail cells in Arkansas, Illinois, Arizona, and California. He was the grandson of a Methodist preacher and struck most of the educated, genteel, religiously minded people who knew him as a paragon of probity; he also spent most of his life working in brothels, saloons, and gambling halls.
When he was not wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, brothel bouncer, professional gambler, and confidence man who specialized in selling gold bricks that were nothing more than rocks painted yellow. His hasty exit from Arizona in 1882 was not the first time that an impulsive criminal act had forced him to become a fugitive. In 1871, he broke out of jail in Arkansas after being arrested for horse theft. In 1872, he left Peoria, Illinois, following a string of arrests for consorting with prostitutes. In 1876, officials in Wichita, Kansas, declared him a vagrant and banished him after he assaulted a candidate for town marshal on the eve of a municipal election. In each case, Wyatt left behind his scandals, moved to a fresh town where he was largely or entirely unknown, and reinvented himself. In the narrowly localized society of the 1870s, a man such as Wyatt who was willing to pull up stakes and remake his reputation in a new town could outrun his past. These reinventions often meant abandoning old partners-men and women-for new ones.
In Wichita, he left behind his police partner, Jimmy Cairns, with whom he had shared a bed. When he fled Arizona, he abandoned Mattie Blaylock, a woman with whom he had lived for years. Indeed, Wyatt changed partners nearly as often as he changed occupations and addresses. He had three wives over the course of his life; a fourth woman, a prostitute at a brothel where Wyatt worked, once claimed to be his wife. He maintained close relationships with two men; in addition to Cairns, his friendship with Holliday was so close that it was described by one contemporary as romantic. Self-invention has a long history in America. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, self-invention was closely related to the powerful American belief in the possibilities of moral betterment and upward social mobility. Benjamin Franklin was the prototype for this kind of self-made man; in his autobiography Franklin depicted himself, not entirely without justification, as a runaway servant who rose to wealth and prominence through hard work and virtuous self-denial.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, an exdivinity student, Horatio Alger, Jr., heralded the American creed of rags-to-respectability mobility through a series of stories aimed at boys and girls. Alger's protagonists were bootblacks and pickpockets who, after experiencing a conversion to the Whiggish creed of upward mobility, righted themselves to become churchgoing entrepreneurs.7 Wyatt's version of self-invention differed from that of Franklin and Alger. Socially, his family was downwardly mobile. He had been born into an extended family of churchgoing, Whiggish strivers who adhered to values of hard work. Yet when Wyatt was still a boy, his father, Nicholas, disappointed by a series of financial and legal setbacks, lost his faith in the promise of upward mobility. By the time Wyatt was in his teens, his father had become an inveterate liar who invented for himself the achievements that had eluded him in life.
Like his father, Wyatt embraced the prerogative of self-invention, and like him, he eschewed the self-denial that Franklin and Alger maintained was essential to upward mobility. As an adult, Wyatt convincingly acted the part of the upright lawman, but was never willing to sacrifice gambling, prostitutes, confidence games, or petty crimes to beco.