[Makes some interesting connections]
[BTW, that reminds me -- in our perennial thread on westerns, the movie Tombstone (1993) is proof that you can make a non-revisionist western in these our times and score at the box office.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/opinion/26barra.html
The New York Times
October 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Their Political Tombstone
By ALLEN BARRA
South Orange, N.J.
EXACTLY 125 years ago today, about 2:40 p.m., three lawmen -- Marshal
Virgil Earp and his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and their friend Doc
Holliday -- walked down Fremont Street, today Highway 80, in the
silver-mining boom town of Tombstone, Ariz., and into a lot behind the
O.K. Corral to confront four cow-boys (as cattle thieves were then
called), the brothers Ike Clanton and Billy Clanton and Tom McLaury
and Frank McLaury.
What happened next made newspapers across the country. The New York
Times account, except for the misspelling of a few names, mostly got
it right: The marshal ordered them to give up their weapons, when a
fight was begun, about 30 shots being rapidly fired. Both of the
McLowery boys were killed; Bill Clandon was mortally wounded and died
soon after.
The street fight in Tombstone would eventually become known as the
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Though the shooting lasted for perhaps 30
seconds, and the gunfight was far from the bloodiest of hundreds in
cow towns and mining camps on the frontier, it occupies a prime place
in American mythology.
Today, some 3,000 tourists will jam the streets of Tombstone to watch
re-enactments of the event, aiming to come into contact with a piece
of distant American history and encounter a time completely separate
from our own. Whats odd about this, however, is that the social and
political issues that created the context for the gunfight remain
alive, and for the most part unresolved, in the American West today.
For instance, theres the debate over federal versus local law
jurisdiction. Back then, the county sheriff, a Democrat named John
Behan, was at odds with the Republican Earps, who, in addition to
being town policemen were federal officers resented by the small
ranchers who benefited from the cow-boys illegal trafficking. Locals
still debate over who, legally was in charge on the day of the
gunfight Behan, a friend of the cow-boys, couldnt or wouldnt disarm
them; the Earps, no nonsense-lawmen who eschewed political solutions,
saw, in the parlance of the time, no duty to retreat.
Then theres gun control. The Earps didnt debate gun control; they
enforced it, alienating those who considered it their God-given right
to carry guns. A decade ago, Pat Buchanan, with gun belt, made a
campaign stop in front of the O.K. Corral. If he had done that 125
years ago, he might have met the same fate as the cow-boys, at least
two of whom were carrying guns in blatant defiance of town ordinance.
And then there is the question of illegal immigration. In 1881, most
of those who came under this heading were Americans, gangs of cow-boys
crossing the Arizona-Mexico border into Sonora to steal cattle from
the haciendas and killing Mexicans in the process. Cowboy
depredations, as United States government reports referred to the
organized thievery, enraged Mexicans who still had vivid memories of
the time when the Southwest was their country.
The Mexican government protested vehemently, but the Posse Comitatus
Act, passed in 1878, prohibited federal troops from acting in a law
enforcement capacity and threw the border-crossing problem back on the
county sheriffs. Sheriffs like John Behan, in many cases friends of
the cow-boys, had no inclination to stop their activities.
Yes, the personal animosities that brought violence to Tombstone that
day have been obscured or forgotten by time. But to a great extent,
the political factors that fueled it continue to echo as loudly as
will the faux gunshots today fired in the lot behind the O.K. Corral.
Allen Barra, a contributing writer for American Heritage magazine, is
the author of Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends.