In 1877 a prospector named Ed Schieffelin walked into Apache country in southeastern Arizona. He was warned that the only stone he would find in those hills would be his own tombstone. He found silver instead, and within three years a boomtown of saloons, faro halls, theatres and mining offices stood on the desert. Money came fast, and so did gamblers, rustlers and men with reputations to protect.
Walter Noble Burns tells the story of that town and the quarrel that made it famous: Wyatt Earp and his brothers, the consumptive dentist and gambler Doc Holliday, Sheriff John Behan, and the Clanton and McLaury cowboys whose feud ended in thirty seconds of gunfire near the O.K. Corral in October 1881. He follows what came after as well: the ambush of Virgil Earp, the murder of Morgan Earp, Wyatt's vendetta ride, and the fates of Curly Bill Brocius and Johnny Ringo. Burns interviewed survivors and old-timers in the 1920s, and his book, first published in 1927, did more than any other to shape how America remembers Tombstone.
This illustrated annotated edition presents the complete original text, newly typeset, with material that lets you enjoy Burns as a storyteller and check him as a historian:
- An editor's introduction on the book, its author and its place in the Earp legend
- 1,009 footnotes identifying people and places, explaining period vocabulary and marking where Burns departs from the record
- A guide to the characters and a guide to the places
- An essay on the narrator's reliability
- A chronology of events
- A glossary of mining, ranching, gambling and frontier terms
- 21 illustrations
For readers of Western history, lovers of classic frontier stories, and anyone curious about how a legend of the American West was built.
