cover image Brothers of the Gun: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and a Reckoning in Tombstone

Brothers of the Gun: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and a Reckoning in Tombstone

Mark Lee Gardner. Dutton, $35 (336p) ISBN 978-0-593-47189-0

This rollicking account from historian Gardner (The Earth Is All That Lasts) revisits the Wild West exploits of Wyatt Earp, an itinerant policeman known for his coolheadedness, and Doc Holliday, a part-time dentist and full-time gambling addict. Holliday saved Wyatt from getting jumped in Dodge City in 1878, and later became a regular in the Earp posse in Tombstone, Ariz., where Wyatt and his brothers Virgil and Morgan became lawmen. There they squared off against a gang known as the Cowboys, eventually precipitating the shoot-out at the OK Corral. The Earps and Holliday prevailed, but the Cowboys later assassinated Morgan, provoking the Earps and Holliday to a monthlong vengeance campaign that made national headlines. Gardner’s retelling of this famous incident paints a colorful, atmospheric panorama of the Wild West as an archipelago of saloons, gambling dens, and whorehouses where brutal violence was status quo. Gardner conveys it all in two-fisted prose that smacks of a Hollywood western; while he brings some nuance to the tale—highlighting, for instance, that Wyatt pivoted easily between lawbreaker and lawman—he still finds a lot to admire about the duo (“Their odd but endearing friendship [is] a bona fide saga if there ever was one”). The result is a raucous and entertaining slice of Americana. (Nov.)