Wyatt Earp: Was he a lawman or an outlaw?
That question has been explored in history books, newspapers, and countless westerns since the famed Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that exploded in Tombstone, Ariz., over 30 brief seconds on Oct. 26, 1881. After the smoke cleared, three men lay dead in an empty lot, and two Earp brothers had gunshot wounds. Teetotaler Wyatt Earp was unscathed; his ride-or-die best friend Doc Holliday sustained a scratch. Cowboy leader and drunken hellraiser Ike Clanton had scampered off at the start of gunfire, begging for his life, setting himself up for future deadly mischief.
In Netflix’s new, granular docuseries, “Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War,” premiering today, historical re-creations (led by Tim Fellingham as Wyatt Earp), informed talking heads, contemporary newspaper accounts, and court records are woven together once more. The narration by Ed Harris, with his gravelly voice of authority, ties the six episodes together.
Wyatt Earp, born in Illinois in the revolutionary year of 1848, and dead at 80 in Hollywood, Calif., in 1929, has been cast as the most memorable 19th-century gunslinger. Still, there’s no avoiding some of his less noble behavior. Following the famed half-a-minute duel in the sun, cowboy assassins shot his older brother Virgil and slayed his favorite younger brother guerilla style. In response, having lost faith in the justice system, the frontiersman launched what’s been called the Earp Vendetta Ride in which he gunned down the culprits without due process in cold blood. Those actions have muddied the heroic waters ever since.
Advertisement
Throughout Earp’s long lifetime, he continued to wage a public-relations battle worthy of the best professional crisis PR firms. Black hat or white hat: Which was it?
Advertisement
While the Netflix series is ultimately Team Earp, it contextualizes the battle among individuals that represented larger conflicts in post-Civil War America. There were the law-and-order Northern Republicans who were trying to make the frontier safe for capitalism, versus the Southern ranchers and cattle thieves who had migrated west from the Confederacy seeking freedom from Northern domination. Tombstone was a town where Civil War conflicts collided two decades after the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865.
While it is easy to consider the young silver boomtown of Tombstone as remote from America’s centers of industry, the fact that the settlement had two thriving newspapers, one Earp-leaning and the other pro-cowboy, and the telegraph meant that the battle played out on a national stage. Would the west remain wild, or would it be tamed with the help of the intercontinental railway and titans of industry who wouldn’t mine for silver themselves but were happy to profit from others’ hard labor?
The docuseries makes progress in how it introduces Josephine Sarah Marcus (played by Dana Delaney in 1993′s “Tombstone”). She ran away from her immigrant Jewish home in San Francisco seeking romance and adventure in Arizona. The drop-dead beautiful brunette came to Tombstone with the promise of marriage from Sheriff Johnny Behan. Jilted, and still unwed, she fell into Wyatt’s arms, where she remained for 50 years. This jealous rivalry had consequences, lighting a match in the tinderbox that was Tombstone, with a bitter Behan becoming a staunch supporter of the Clanton clan.
Advertisement
Like the movie “Tombstone,” the series avoids the messiness of Wyatt’s domestic life. Wyatt already had a common-law wife in residence, Mattie Blaylock, a prostitute with a laudanum habit who’d accompanied the family from Dodge City, Kan. Virgil’s wife, Alvira Sullivan, treated Mattie like a sister, nursing a hatred for usurper Josephine. Blaylock ultimately committed suicide, still blaming Wyatt for her abandonment.
While Wyatt and Josephine did live together for half a century, from buying racehorses during the San Diego real estate boom and bust, to seeking gold in Nome, Alaska, they ended up living modestly in Hollywood. In his 70s, Wyatt became an adviser for early westerns. The legendary screen cowboy Tom Mix was a pallbearer at Wyatt’s funeral.
There may never be consensus about whether Earp was a lawman or an outlaw. It was through the movies like John Ford’s 1946 classic, “My Darling Clementine,” and Marcus’s lifelong efforts to curate her man’s heroic image that Earp came to be seen as the ultimate justice fighter, who occasionally had to kill a bad fella to keep the peace.
“Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War” leans to characterizing him as a white hat. However, the docuseries doesn’t spare the vendetta slaughter that still makes the American icon a controversial figure, and a meaty documentary subject, over a century and a half later.
Thelma Adams is a cultural critic and the author of the best-selling 2016 historical novel, “The Last Woman Standing,” about Josephine Marcus, the Jewish wife of Wyatt Earp.
An earlier version of this article mispelled Nome, Alaska. The Globe regrets the error.