Blog 5: Murder in Tombstone & Roaring Camp

I love transitions between texts. This morning over coffee, I started our next text, Elliott West’s Way to the West. I happily discovered we would study the central plains in addition to the “traditional” West. My husband was born in Wyoming and raised in a small town in southwestern Nebraska. . Last year, his father died and we spent some time there closing up his dad’s house. The experience of being there is always a love/hate dichotomy: the strange and compelling beauty of the surrounding rolling plains vs. the utter boredom and feeling of desolation being “in the middle of nowhere.” In Elliott’s introduction, he writes that the West “will conjure up at least a few famous events and characters associated with this country: George Custer, Wyatt Earp, and Buffalo Bill Cody, cattle drovers and railroad workers,…Marshal Dillon and Festus…” (p. 4-5). By golly, Wyatt Earp got second place in Elliott’s list of mythic characters of the west--the ones who, in a sort of Pavlovian response, step forth when the average American pictures The Old West.

Lubet’s title is interesting. Notice he does not choose “Trial in Tombstone.” For those of you who have not finished the book, you may want to read the rest of this paragraph later. The book’s last chapter was as much a shocker and change of tone, a 90 degree turn, as the last chapter in One Vast Winter Count. Earp turns into as much a murderer as the Cowboys he hated. The level-headedness he had previously and consistently seemed to exhibit, his reputation for using guns as a last resort, in fact the entire personal character that helped save him from a murder charge, evaporate after his brother Morgan is slain. The Wyatt Earp we put on the western pedestal as kids (and maybe as adults) turns into the type of man we don’t revere, an opportunist who runs from the law rather than upholds it. Not to be outdone, the noble and wise Judge Spicer becomes a prospector and what we today would call a “loser,” eventually “wandering” into the desert and dying of thirst or starvation. The book’s title is given a whole new justification. Was justice meted out in the trial of Doc and the three Earp brothers? Lubet lays the historic evidence on the table, but doesn’t shove an answer down our throats. He allows us to weigh and consider, a likable feature of good history books.

The book does several important things. Most obviously, it tells a good story. The trial follows one of the most famous events in Western history. While everyone can picture the four lawmen standing down the bad Cowboys, few know the subject of the book’s subtitle: “The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp.” History, then, is expanded upon and the context and aftermath of the famous incident are elucidated, which is always a good thing for the history student. I found the elucidation of the techniques of attorneys and how their minds (allegedly) work almost more fascinating. (Dave, we’re counting on you to give us your take on all this!) If we look through the lenses of both the defense and prosecuting attorneys, we get an approximate way to examine history: from all angles and possibilities. Not since After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection in History 602 has a text served so extensively as a trainer on how to go about mining the “truth.” As I suspect we will find in the Roy Baker packet, the Truth in Tombstone will never be quite graspable. And here’s another good reason for this book: I think it’s going to mirror the pattern we will use in writing our Roy Baker paper.

As a finishing aside, I wonder if any of you have ever checked into the contemporary exploitation, commercialization, and contorting of History as documented in Ebay listings. I typed in “Wyatt Earp” and came up with some rather interesting findings. A copy of a purported semi-nude photo of Johnny Behan’s Josie/later wife of Wyatt was up for sale. This seemed a bit suspicious, and I did some research and found an interesting article from a well-respected Maine antiques magazine debunking this notorious photo’s legitimacy (Lubet alike mentions on p. 154 Josie’s purported autobiography/memoirs, generally disclaimed now by historians). Yet another reminder to examine all claims to “Truth”! In addition, a poster up for bids announces what Wyatt Earp allegedly intended to do with annoying children.
Last but not least, a purported copy of Wyatt Earp’s autograph(sadly, NOT from his Tombstone epoch, the seller allows) is for sale, with the unfortunate misspelled title “Very Scare [sic] Wyatt Earp Siganture [sic].” (P.S. to PhD candidates: there is an uptapped wealth of dissertation material here: “ U.S. Social History as Characterized on Ebay,” and/or “The Pronounced Proclivity of Ebay Sellers to Employ Creative Spelling” [with apologies to Meriwether Lewis]). But I digress….

COMMENTS ON ROARING CAMP

Since my previous blog was a bit long, I’ll make up for it by a shorter one on Roaring Camp. I just read the other blogs sent in so far, and probably more so than the blogs on any of our other books, they seem to be similar in content, so I’ll try not to be too redundant since I agree with most of them. Apparently so far there is not a lot of controversy or vastly differing opinions on this book. I expect gender issues will stir up the most varied opinions--that always seems to be the case in class discussion when gender is involved. I thought it was kind of interesting and often amusing how men compensated for the lack of women—and even more amusing how some weren’t quite so sure they wanted the influx of non-prostituting white women to create order in their largely male society and to reintroduce traditional social conventions into the world the men had come to know and, for the large part, adapt to.

If the Southern Mines (with their greater diversity) have been so neglected in history (Jim can confirm this), then this book was a good thing to fill that void. After our past readings, we can also appreciate how important it is for white Americans (and especially historians) to realize that a full history of American involves many ethnic groups. I was particularly surprised that people from France and Chile also came looking for gold---I had no idea! Johnson’s narratives on the Chinese were also very enlightening. The many parts about the Miwok Indians took on a new perspective after having just read One Vast Winter Count last week.

I want to emphasize a particular topic Johnson addresses which I also have become interested in: the creation of narrative and memories and what they mean in the study of history. Such a breaking of myth and the counternarratives that naturally follow have also been seen previously seen in Limerick’s book. Like most of our previous authors, Johnson wants to shed new light on old narratives, to create “alternative plot lines” (p. 27). There are “tensions between memory and history” (p. 50) and between “what has been remembered and what forgotten” (p. 52). The “dominant cultural memory has refracted history” (p. 340). “We must turn in particular to those who are producing countermemories…doing battle with dominant narratives that reinscribe social inequities” (p. 343). She shines a light into previously de-emphasized places and gives the social world of the Gold Rush a new, more accurate, image.