Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005
Back to the O.K. Corral
By Larry McMurtry
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend
by Casey Tefertiller
Wiley, 403 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp
by Steven Lubet
Yale University Press, 253 pp., $30.00
From time to time during the long settlement wars of the American West, an event would occur which somehow took on a resonance in popular culture that far exceeded its actual historical effect. The defeat of General George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 26, 1876) is, arguably, a case in point. The shock to the national psyche was undoubtedly great because the Indians won—and they weren't supposed to. The plains Indians who wiped out Custer demonstrated clearly one last time that they were a people not to be trifled with; and yet they were immediately trifled with, through treaties and removals, as the fighting decades ended and the chiseling decades continued. The Little Bighorn, or the Greasy Grass, as the Indian called it in Thomas Berger's brilliant novel Little Big Man (1964), was a twilight victory. The body count—about 250 men of the 7th Cavalry and perhaps a little more than half that many Indians—was tiny compared to the fields of the dead after Gettysburg, or Shiloh, or any of the major battles of the Civil War ended just a decade before.
Review, 4197 words
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