TOMBSTONE An Illiad of the Southwest

I bought this book on a whim. I got an urge to do some research on the OK corral shootout, and this book has a snazzy cover and was well reviewed. I wanted a scholarly type thing, that went into details about the personailties and dynamics of that event. I was delightfully surprized that style of this book is more like the pulp fiction stories popular when it was first publish. The period is covers in detail is sometime shortly after the civil war to the begining of the 1900's. It made me pause and reflect on the conditions of that time, and how a generation that survived our countrys bloodiest and most deadly war adjusted to civilian life. While PTSD has only recently been recongized, I suspect its effects where influencial in the lawlessness and genocide this period is known for. Its not all about Wyatt Earp and Ike Clanton, although they are there, and does endorse this work, but the history of the entire region. It tell hows Tombstone was founded, the men who ran it, and lastly its decline into tourism. Its a story of shoot outs and desperados, boom towns and dance halls, lost treasure and broken dreams. Sorry, I got caught up in it there...its really entertaining. The only real issue I have is that the information is not referanced, so its hard to tell fact from fiction. The sources are readily, from newspaper accounts, court records and first person interviews, but its just not always clearly stated where the facts end and the speculation begins. So yes, its a fun and informative. It kept my interest and I learned a little. Perfect for your commute on the bus or a day at the beach.

One of the editorial reviews above says that this book is "a mixture of fact and fiction." It seems to me that it is no more so than modern works on the topic and perhaps may be more accurate. Written less than 50 years after the primary events that made the town famous, and while some of the people who participated in them were still alive, Burns crafts a portrait not just of those seminal events but a general history of the town from its inception to what had become of it in the 1920's. Many other works about the Earps and their opponents tend either to lionize or demonize Wyatt Earp. Burns takes a more balanced view of both sides in the conflict, exploring their shortcomings and their qualities. Modern writers on the subject could take a lesson from him.

I read somewhere that more movies have been made about Wyatt Earp than all the U.S. presidents combined! There's something about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral that touches the mainspring of American imagination. Tombstone is the book that made Wyatt Earp famous and shaped forever our perception of him. I read Tombstone first when I was in high school back in the 1950s and I've since dipped into it countless times. Some might object to the author's purple prose and made-up dialogue and newer scholarly studies of the Earps and Tombstone may be more accurate and balanced. But Burns drew his material from interviews with old-timers and Tombstone newspapers and I'm confident that he comes about as close to fact as you can get. This is a magical tale and nobody could tell it any better than Burns. Smallchief