Bloody Season, therefore, is not, nor is it intended to be, the last word on the circumstances surrounding the thirty second-long engagement that has come down to us as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. In the interest of clarity, some of the complexities of regional politics in the 1880s have been toned down, and some of the peripheral figures, such as Wyatt Earp’s gunman friend Texas Jack Vermillion, have been eliminated because their participation was minor and ephemeral and would only snarl further an already tangled skein. Much of the dialogue is the author’s invention. Personal memoirs seldom recall the exact words spoken by a given person at a given time, only their drift, and in all cases where the conversations have not been taken from existing quotes they have been constructed upon these summaries and crafted after the fashion of the individuals’ speech patterns as recorded elsewhere.
The author offers no apologies for these and other presumptions, because the book is fiction based on fact and is not intended as pure history. At the same time he has attempted to tell the story of the Earp-Holliday-Clanton-McLaury feud with as much accuracy and objectivity as is possible after all this time. It should be noted that the issues were as confused when the smoke was still turning in the lot next to Fly’s boardinghouse as they are now after a century of tampering by dime novelists, Hollywood directors, and self-styled revisionists who imagine that by making a hero of Ike Clanton and a villain of Wyatt Earp they have done something different and startling. Everyone involved lied about the events; the challenge now is to decide who was lying about what, piece together the few points of agreement, and apply common sense to the others to form a logical picture. This task, performed for the first time by Justice Wells Spicer a month after the fight and by hundreds of others many times since, can only increase one’s respect for the pressures faced by that jurist when lives, including his own, depended upon his verdict.
Some cherished icons have fallen in the course of this assembly. Gone from the fight are the romantic funeral-black skirted coats of the Earps and Holliday, often seen in movies and book jacket illustrations—Wyatt and his brothers had on mackinaws that brisk day, and Doc wore gray—and firearms enthusiasts will search in vain for Wyatt’s storied long-barreled Buntline Special; the best research indicates that the gun never existed. The Earps’s whorehouse interests on the circuit should shock no one in these exposé-conscious times; perhaps more disturbing is the lack of evidence to dispute Big Nose Kate’s assertion that Doc Holliday had never killed anyone before the Tombstone fight. It is a hard thing to give up a hero, harder still to relinquish a scoundrel.
The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable assistance of Earp historian Alford E. Turner, editor of The Earps Talk (Creative Publishing Co., College Station, Texas, 1980) and The OX Corral Inquest (Creative Publishing Co., 1981), who took an hour out of his busy schedule in Tombstone to clear up the mystery of when Big Nose Kate left that city.
Words are not adequate to thank Richard S. Wheeler, to whom this volume is dedicated, for suggesting the book and for providing much helpful information to get the project started. He is, in addition to being one of our finest historical novelists, a living muse.
When Bloody Season first appeared in 1987, another Tombstone historian, Glenn G. Boyer, was mentioned for his contribution to the author’s research. Because of this, as well as Boyer’s expressed enthusiasm for the project, the author was surprised when Boyer led an attack against the novel, disputing some of the very points that he himself had contributed. Later it became apparent that this particular historian was in the habit of defaming any work involving the events surrounding the O.K. Corral that did not carry his byline. Recently, Boyer’s own methods and practices have come under attack by other historians who allege that his entire body of work may be spurious. (Certainly Boyer’ s statements on public record of laying “traps” in his books to “snare” other researchers raise questions about his reliability as a source.) This kind of wrangling is by no means rare in academia, but is especially personal among Earp specialists.
For Wyatt Earp is not dead. Like Custer on his hill, he stands tall and terrible in that dusty lot on Fremont Street, and no amount of unwanted truth or iconoclastic rhetoric will topple him. “Not a bullet touched me,” he wrote of his myth-enshrouded shoot-out with Curley Bill’s gang at Iron Springs, and he might have been speaking of all the fictions to come. Bloody Season is not history. It is an attempt to touch Earp, his friends, his enemies, their women, their time, and their place.
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
Whitmore Lake, Michigan,
January 17, 1999