MY LIBRARY

“…Tombstone flames no more. Its wild days are a tale that is told. It lives with its memories and its ghosts. Sunshine and a peace are its portion. Once it was romance. Now it’s a town”.

Last words of the book “Tombstone, an Iliad of the Southwest” by Walter Noble Burns.

It’s a great book with foreword by Casey Tefertiller . “Tombstone”, a mixture of fact and fiction, defined the legend of lawman-gunfighter Wyatt Earp. Walter Noble Burns’s portrayal of Earp has profoundly influenced subsequent generations of historians, novelists and screenwriters. Born in 1849, Earp grew up on the Missouri-Kansas frontier and first came to notice as a no-nonsense town marshal in rip roaring Dodge City, Kansas. Moving to wide-open Tombstone, Arizona, in 1879, he became a businessman and deputy United States marshal and was soon joined by four brothers. In Burns’s narrative, the Earp clan represented law and order in the lawless, chaotic Old West. These antagonistic forces explode in the bloody and legendary gunfight at the OK Corral between the Earps and the Clanton-MacLowery gang. The Earps prevailed, but the subsequent shooting of two Earp brothers drove the calm, courageous and somewhat emotionless Wyatt to take the law into his own hands. In a personal vendetta, he hunted and killed the treacherous “assassins”. Wyatt Earp’s most recent biographer, Casey Tefertiller, discusses the influence of Tombstone on the history and legend of Wyatt Earp and the Old West. The edition of Tombstone includes a letter from Wyatt Earp to Walter Noble Burns. Writing from Vidal, California, in 1927, Earp outlined his version of the public explosions and personal tragedies that engulfed his life in Tombstone.

© 1927 by Doubleday, Page & Company, Inc.

Renewed by Rose Marie Burns.

Introduction © 1999 by the University of New Mexico Press.

First University of New Mexico Press Edition.

Cover illustration by Thom Ross, Ravenswork Studio. Seattle, Washington.

Covers design Robyn Mundy.

Illustrations by Will James.