Boyer: ‘Writing about Earp and failing to mention me and my work is something like writing about Catholicism and neglecting to mention the Pope’

The interviews that follow originally appeared in Wild West, October 1998. Glenn Boyer’s body of work includes Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp, I Married Wyatt Earp and Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone Vendetta. Casey Tefertiller’s Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend came out in 1997. These books are all sold as nonfiction; however, each author tells a very different story of Earp’s life. In his book’s bibliography, Tefertiller does not list any of Boyer’s books. Tefertiller and others have questioned Boyer’s sources. “Writing about Earp and failing to mention me and my work is something like writing about Catholicism and neglecting to mention the Pope,” Boyer has said. In separate interviews with Wild West, each author was given the opportunity to present his side of the controversy. The word “side” troubled Boyer. “The issue is supposed to be the truth,” he said. “The truth is one side all by itself and there are no others.” Tefertiller said: “I hope Western readers will recognize the importance of this problem and why it is a concern to us all. If we do not demand the truth about history in nonfiction books, there is no reason for studying history at all.” The first interview is with Tefertiller, a longtime newspaperman who spent three years writing Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

What prompted your interest in Earp?
Tefertiller: When I was growing up, my grandfather, who was a working cowboy in California, told me stories he had heard from old Arizona ranch hands who drifted West to work on California ranches about this evil stage robber and criminal mastermind named Wyatt Earp. Then I saw Hugh O’Brian on TV [The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp] and movies about the greatest hero who ever lived—Wyatt Earp. Since my childhood days I have been fascinated by the dichotomy of these divergent legacies. I was interested in finding the truth rather than the various fictions that had been promulgated through the years…and I attempted to approach everything without bias.

You were able to provide quite a bit of new material about Earp’s life.
Tefertiller: For many years most researchers had believed that just about everything that could be found had already been found. I was very fortunate, first, that I received a great deal of help from many outstanding researchers who contributed material and, second, that I investigated many areas that had not been mined for material. I pulled a great deal out of the Arizona archives, and I found that much of the Tombstone-related material wound up in repositories in California. There were nine San Francisco newspapers, and Tombstone was treated almost as a suburb with many, many reports on Arizona events. It was a combination of hard work and good fortune by which I was able to discover so much new material.

What do you feel is the most significant piece of new information you discovered?
Tefertiller: It is hard to identify just one piece that is the most significant. There is something new on almost every page of Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend. There was probably two things that surprised me most. The first was finding some confirmation that Wyatt Earp actually disarmed Ben Thompson, which had long been considered a historical fable. The second item actually appeared in a small book [by Ben Traywick] between the time I found it and the time Life Behind the Legend was published, so I can’t claim first publication. It is Wyatt Earp’s resignation, when he resigned with one of the most moving statements ever made by a western lawman. I can remember sitting in a dark room at the Bancroft Library, reading it and having my jaw fall open. It was such a shocking discovery.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to