The gunfight at the OK Corral occupies a unique place in American history. Although the event itself lasted less than a minute, it became the basis for countless stories about the Wild West. At the time of the gunfight, however, Wyatt Earp was not universally acclaimed as a hero. Among the people who knew him best in Tombstone, Arizona, many considered him a renegade and murderer. This book tells the nearly unknown story of the prosecution of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday following the famous gunfight. To the prosecutors, the Earps and Holiday were wanton killers. According to the defense, the Earps were steadfast heroes—willing to risk their lives on the mean streets of Tombstone for the sake of order. The case against the Earps, with its dueling narratives of brutality and justification, played out themes of betrayal, revenge, and even adultery. Attorney Thomas Fitch, one of the era’s finest advocates, ultimately managed—against considerable odds—to save Earp from the gallows. But the case could easily have ended in a conviction, and Wyatt Earp would have been hanged or imprisoned, not celebrated as an American icon.
Four men waited and four men walked ... clearly a confrontation was coming. You've walked that walk before with the Earps and Doc Holliday through the streets of Tombstone always focused on the inevitable showdown with gunpowder. It never gets old. But the distance is getting shorter; the distance between truth and the legend. This time we walk this walk with the cowboys. The story has been told and retold and will go on being the one gunfight to remember above all. But should it not be told from the side of the cowboy as well? What was their purpose in coming to town on that chilly afternoon? How did they trigger, in little more than half an hour, a deadly confrontation with four of the Old West's most notable town tamers? In Murdered on the Streets of Tombstone Joyce Aros carefully examines a minute by minute evaluation of the events as they unfolded before the eyes of the startled townsfolk that chilly October afternoon in 1881. Citing the Inquest and Hearing testimonies and comparing them to the various legends that have surrounded that fateful day for over a century, the author's presentation may just lead you to concur that Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton were Murdered on the Streets of Tombstone!
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be. Praise for Son of a Gun “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly
THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Tombstone is written in a distinctly American voice." —T.J. Stiles, The New York Times “With a former newsman’s nose for the truth, Clavin has sifted the facts, myths, and lies to produce what might be as accurate an account as we will ever get of the old West’s most famous feud.” —Associated Press The true story of the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the famous Battle at the OK Corral, by the New York Times bestselling author of Dodge City and Wild Bill. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, eight men clashed in what would be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were exchanged in thirty seconds, killing three men and wounding three others. The fight sprang forth from a tense, hot summer. Cattle rustlers had been terrorizing the back country of Mexico and selling the livestock they stole to corrupt ranchers. The Mexican government built forts along the border to try to thwart American outlaws, while Arizona citizens became increasingly agitated. Rustlers, who became known as the cow-boys, began to kill each other as well as innocent citizens. That October, tensions boiled over with Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne confronting the Tombstone marshal, Virgil Earp, and the suddenly deputized Wyatt and Morgan Earp and shotgun-toting Doc Holliday. Bestselling author Tom Clavin peers behind decades of legend surrounding the story of Tombstone to reveal the true story of the drama and violence that made it famous. Tombstone also digs deep into the vendetta ride that followed the tragic gunfight, when Wyatt and Warren Earp and Holliday went vigilante to track down the likes of Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, and other cowboys who had cowardly gunned down his brothers. That "vendetta ride" would make the myth of Wyatt Earp complete and punctuate the struggle for power in the American frontier's last boom town.
With grit, courage and dogged determination, Joanne challenged the status quo -- and won. Now, as newly elected Sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, she must battle the prejudice and hostility of a mistrustful, male-dominated police force -- and solve a grisly double homicide that threatens to tear the sleepy desert community to pieces. For the two bodies baking in the harsh Southwestern sun are connected by sinister threads that reach back generations -- and by devastating family secrets of greed, hatred and shocking abuse that could destroy the innocent along with the guilty.
The story of how a young Wyatt Earp and his brothers defeated the Old West’s biggest outlaw gang, by the New York Times–bestselling author of Texas Ranger. Wyatt Earp is regarded as the most famous lawman of the Old West, best known for his role in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. But the story of his two-year war with a band of outlaws known as the Cowboys has never been told in full. The Cowboys were the largest outlaw gang in the history of the American West. After battles with the law in Texas and New Mexico, they shifted their operations to Arizona. There, led by Curly Bill Brocius, they ruled the border, robbing, rustling, smuggling and killing with impunity until they made the fatal mistake of tangling with the Earp brothers. Drawing on groundbreaking research into territorial and federal government records, John Boessenecker’s Ride the Devil’s Herd reveals a time and place in which homicide rates were fifty times higher than those today. The story still bears surprising relevance for contemporary America, involving hot-button issues such as gang violence, border security, unlawful immigration, the dangers of political propagandists parading as journalists, and the prosecution of police officers for carrying out their official duties. Wyatt Earp saw it all in Tombstone. Praise for Ride the Devil’s Herd A Pim County Public Library Southwest Books of the Year 2021 A True West Reader’s Choice for Best 2020 Western Nonfiction Winner of the Best Book Award by the Wild West History Association “A marvelous book. By means of meticulous research and splendid writing John Boessenecker has managed to do something never before attempted or accomplished, tying together the many violent clashes between lawmen and outlaws in the American southwest of the 1870-1890 period and showing how depredations by loosely organized gangs of outlaws actually threatened “Manifest Destiny” and the successful taming of the Wild West.” —Robert K. DeArment, author and historian “A ripsnortin’ ramble across the bloodstained Arizona desert with Wyatt Earp and company. . . . Boessenecker displays a fine eye for period detail. . . . A pleasure for thoughtful fans of Old West history, revisionist without being iconoclastic.” —Kirkus Reviews
An account of the famine that killed roughly thirty-six million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward examines how the communist ideologies and collectivization campaigns perpetuated by the country's leaders caused the catastrophe.
This account of the court case that followed the gunfight at the OK Corral “will interest Wild West buffs as well as readers interested in legal history” (Publishers Weekly). The gunfight at the OK Corral lasted less than a minute—yet it became the basis for countless stories about the Wild West. At the time of the event, however, Wyatt Earp was not universally acclaimed as a hero. Among the people who knew him best in Tombstone, Arizona, many considered him a renegade and murderer. This book tells the nearly unknown story of the prosecution of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday following the famous gunfight. To the prosecutors, the Earps and Holiday were wanton killers. According to the defense, the Earps were steadfast heroes—willing to risk their lives on the mean streets of Tombstone for the sake of order. The case against the Earps, with its dueling narratives of brutality and justification, played out themes of betrayal, revenge, and even adultery. Attorney Thomas Fitch, one of the era’s finest advocates, ultimately managed, against considerable odds, to save Earp from the gallows. But the case could easily have ended in a conviction—and Wyatt Earp would have been hanged or imprisoned instead of celebrated as an American icon. “This trial has everything: a family feud, famous outlaws and lawmen, politics, sex, and the most famous shootout in frontier history . . . Lubet’s accessible and highly original book will set a standard for scholarship in a field laden with folklore.” —Allen Barra, author of Inventing Wyatt Earp
