A Book Needing Cliff Notes -- And Die in the West

Tempted to start this review: "OK," I know who the principle players are: Earp, Holliday and the bad guys died, so. But I found this book impossible to follow. Paula Mitchell Marks is writing from a "socioeconomic" perspective. That's fine; I just finished Coors/Colorado and I recognize that there is an entire business angle going on behind many story settings. What's difficult to follow are the many ancillary characters intruding into the main ring -- Wyatt's brothers, their wives, the other "marshalls" of various jurisdictions, townsfolk, cowboys, miners, until the scenes are crammed like a Wagnerian opera, or perhaps more appropriately, like an oater with a cast of thousands.

I got the Tombstone DVD out of the library, thinking that would clarify things in my mind, and fell asleep, taking it back unwatched. I eventually did a Wiki search, and that reference itself runs to 18 pages. So, all right, it's not a cut and dried event despite America's making a mass-market legend of the gunfight at the corral.

So, I will shirk off my analysis of character motivation by quoting Marks' last paragraph: "The significance of the 'gunfight at the O.K. Corral,' then, does not lie in its existence as a morality play between 'good' lawmen and 'bad' cowboys, or between 'bad' lawmen and 'good' cowboys. Rather, the gun battle, the personalities involved in it, and the events surrounding it are significant for what they tell us about the real complexities of the western frontier experience. The story of the troubles in boom town Tombstone reminds us that the whys and wherefores of living and dying have never been as simple as we might wish them to be -- particularly in the crucible that was the American frontier west."

From the Slackers' perspective, And Die in the West is marvelous history of a place created out of nothing ... out of discovering silver and populated by prospectors and a 19th century selection of "entertainment industry" (read saloons and brothels) at which the successful could spend their money. From the conversion of tents into buildings and cow paths into roads comes the underlying theme of the story: that many of the characters arrived in Southern Arizona to get away from the restraints of Eastern civilization, only to have them come crashing too quickly into town, as mores followed money. Tombstone was a town drawn on flash paper, populated with people looking to make it big, quickly, whether through a silver stake, bullet or badge.