Stuart Lake (1889–1964)

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please," Mark Twain quipped to Rudyard Kipling in 1899. Western fans have had their choice of facts about Wyatt Earp long before the film roundups of Kurt Russell, Kevin Costner and Hugh O'Brian. In 1996 I visited Tombstone, Ariz., 30 miles from the Mexican border and scene of Earp's 1881 OK Corral gunfight, to tell Twain's frontier journalism tales and dedicate the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper office as a Historic Site in Journalism. (The Epitaph still covers local news as a University of Arizona journalism project.) There I sampled the Republican Epitaph, published by the mayor who backed the Earp brothers, and the Democrat Nugget, owned by the sheriff sympathetic to the Clanton clan. Stuart Lake's own findings backed the Earp narrative 50 years later but would be unlikely to resolve their debate, as he was punching up Earp's unpublished autobiography to duel with Billy Breakenridge's unflattering "Helldorado." Lake is charged with embellishment, and his prose certainly shows plenty of embroidery: Boot Hill victims are "buried with their footgear in place," and there's no need for horse or jail when words like cayuse or calaboose are available. Newspaper prose of the day was just as purple though, and twice as opinionated. Much of the fun therein lies. Lake is skeptical of elements of the Earp legend, noting for example that keeping Dodge safe was a job limited to the more prosperous side of the tracks, but does not plumb dark corners of his subject's resume as peace officer, law student, surveyor, teamster, buffalo hunter, politician, miner and owner of casinos and racehorses. Earp ranged widely, which makes this a satisfying survey of frontier life, and the author comes as close to capturing cowboy cadence as any writer before David Milch. Out of print and pricey on Amazon, I picked up the paperback for a buck at a Newberry Library book fair.… (mais)