Bookin' It
The perfect literary companion for your Old West vacations.
Categories: Featured Travel Stories
By: TW Editors 03/01/2008
TOMBSTONE, AZ
“A mining town in the heart of cattle country, it had the picturesqueness of a boom silver camp and the colour of a trail-end, cowboy capital. It was a town of lawlessness and law, saloons and schools, gambling halls and churches, lurid melodrama and business routine, red lights and altar candles,” wrote Walter Noble Burns in Tombstone, adding “It was all the hectic, mad romance of the old Western border, but in a stage setting of modern comforts and conveniences.”
If you’re looking for the book that started the Wyatt Earp legend, chances are you’ll start with Stuart Lake’s 1931 effort Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. Four years before that came out, Walter Noble Burns did his best to put Wyatt on a pedestal in his book Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest. It is not a nuanced look at the events in southeast Arizona.
The good guys (Doc Holliday and the Earps—especially Wyatt) are absolutely good; the bad guys (the Cowboys) are totally bad. Burns had gotten some of his material from Wyatt, but not much, so Iliad is more fiction than fact.
Along with Wyatt, the city of Tombstone became a legend, too tough to die. Buildings that survived the 1882 fire include Big Nose Kate’s Saloon, Bird Cage Theatre, Crystal Palace Saloon and the largest adobe building in the Southwest, Schieffelin Hall.
The Tombstone Epitaph is still in business (started in 1880), and the O.K. Corral still hosts gunfights—though the Earp Gang and Cowboy shoot-out is staged for your entertainment.
Trip Lit:
Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest by Walter Noble Burns
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