Heroes

The other night I watched a video of My Darling Clementine, starring a marvelous Henry Fonda, an unusually good Victor Mature, and a ludicrous Linda Darnell, playing her Mexican senorita (or was she supposed to be Indian?) with a flat Texas accent. The story of Wyatt Earp and his brothers up against the dastardly Clanton family in Tombstone, it is felt by many to be John Ford's finest film. It is a good movie, with many striking shots, excellent performances, and some pleasantly real, human moments. But it takes huge liberties with history...which is not, of course, unusual in a movie.

Just for starters, it would seem that Wyatt Earp, far from being a man of heroic stature, was a not-very-nice man, at least in his youth, and more than anything was a self-aggrandizer, who quite possibly took credit for achievements of others.

In March 1871, in Missouri, two lawsuits were brought against him. One, brought by Barton County, charged him with having kept the moneys he had collected, in his position as constable, instead of turning them over to be used by the school fund. In a separate allegation he was charged with having misrepresented how much a local citizen needed to pay in fines, again keeping the difference. Neither of the actions was ever acted on, apparently because Earp and his father (who was also not one of your more upstanding citizens) had left the state.

The next month he was charged with horse theft in Indian Territory, where he had apparently fled to avoid the suits against him back in MO. He was arrested for this crime, but escaped.

In 1872 he was living in, and off the proceeds, of a brothel in Peoria, IL; he was arrested several times in connection with this, and had to pay fines. Later he was involved with a floating brothel on the Mississippi. He often made his living gambling.

In Tombstone, where he achieved his greatest fame, he wasn't even the marshal, as all the movies would have it -- his brother Virgil was the deputy federal marshal, as well as the city marshal -- Wyatt was just, at times, a deputy. In Clementine Virgil had the job of riding shotgun on the stagecoach; this was actually a job that Wyatt took, in between gambling, and mining. Those were his primary interests in Tombstone.

And the famous gunfight was nothing like the way it's always portrayed in movies. For one thing, the opposing party wasn't "Pa" Clanton and his four sons; it was only Billy and Ike Clanton, along with two other brothers, Tom and Frank McLaury, and a fifth cowboy, Billy Claiborne. Ike and Billy Claiborne ran away, and so lived; the three others were killed. Doc Holliday was not killed -- as portrayed in Clementine -- though he and the other Earp brothers were all wounded. Wyatt was the only one who came out unscathed, which is what contributed mightily to his reputation as a top gunslinger.

The gunfight didn't even take place at the corral, but about a block away, in an empty lot between two buildings, with the two parties facing each other at close range, not scooting in and out of out-buildings and behind fences, as generally portrayed.

While I find all of this factual history very interesting, I can't help wondering how this man who seemed to spend as much of his time on the shady side of the law as supporting it, ended up becoming this western icon. Well, actually, I know how -- he told his highly roman-ticised story to someone who swallowed it whole, wrote it up, and spit it out for the rest of the world to read, be fascinated by, and believe. We want heroes so badly, we'll take them even when they aren't real.