Re: Wyatt Earp

I guess it’s respond-to-Kevin-Williamson-day on the Corner. Kevin makes a very strong anti-Earp case, but I still find his rejoinder a touch strange. I quote a line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for the proposition there’s been a prodigious amount of myth-making around Wyatt Earp, and Kevin responds, “I like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but romantic fantasies are a poor basis for good governance.” As if I were endorsing myths from Westerns, instead of the exact opposite. Everything I wrote about Earp is a matter of historical record. 

Kevin says “no sane society or self-respecting society would give a career criminal such as Wyatt Earp a badge and a gun.” To say this sentiment is detached from the reality of the Old West is an understatement. I wouldn’t recommend going into business with Wyatt Earp or having him referee a prize fight, but there’s a reason that Earp was widely praised in Wichita, Dodge City, and Tombstone. And it’s not because newspaper, civic leaders, and other observers had seen mythogenic movies about him; it’s because they legitimately appreciated his work. 

As I say in the piece, things went off the rails at the end at Tombstone. After the near-assassination of one of his brothers and the assassination of another, in a context when Wyatt (not insanely) thought an outlaw clique could distort the criminal-justice system and he and family members were under mortal threat, he took the law into his own hands in a way that was unacceptable and has no application today. That’s why I was careful to say “a little more Wyatt Earp would go a long way.”