John Flood and Wyatt Earp

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Then, in February 1927, Bobbs Merrill editor Anne Johnston was highly critical and painfully constructive with the “stilted, florid and diffuse” comment. She added, “Now one forgets what it’s all about in the clutter of unimportant details that impedes its pace, and the pompous manner of its telling.” Of all the turndowns, this was at last the wake-up call Earp, Hart and Flood needed.

Although he still suspected Burns of plagiarism in the Billy the Kid volume, Hart now suggested him as collaborator-reviser to Earp soon after editor Johnston’s rejection. The light had come on. Apparently that idea, though, died aborning, as Wyatt learned that Doubleday, Page & Company was planning to publish Burns’ Tombstone: Iliad of the Southwest . Burns had put it together from other sources and hadn’t checked his facts with Earp. Feeling that it would probably treat him unkindly, Earp fired a letter to Doubleday with a copy and letter to Burns. Even though he might have fumed, his approach in the Doubleday letter was restrained. He suggested that Burns’ request to do a book about him was untimely and “impossible as already a manuscript to that nature was being prepared by myself.” He wrote, “I appeared that the story of Doc Holliday [Burns' expressed intention to Earp] had faded out and that the story was being built more about myself….I could not sanction any story about myself, the material for which had been gathered elsewhere….I am somewhat perplexed as to Mr. Burns’ intentions.” Still, the book come out.

By mid-December 1927, Hart had another provocative suggestion for a collaborator. Burns’ Tombstone had been critiqued in the Literary Review by a virtual unknown named Bernard DeVoto. “I do not know who this gentleman is but I believe that this is the man you should go after to try to write your history,” Hart wrote Earp. DeVoto went on to become one of the most distinguished and disciplined Western historians of his time, if not of all time.

Earp was taking action against Burns and Doubleday for publishing Tombstone without his approval. He was also contacted by a little-known San Diego writer, Stuart N. Lake , whose personable approach may have shortstopped any enthusiasm Earp might have had about a DeVoto connection. He found Lake’s inquiry, he wrote Hart, written “in a modest unassuming manner and explains that his material has been used by the Saturday Evening Post , The Outlook , and others.” His confidence in Lake was underscored in two subsequent letters to Hart. July 4, 1928 : “Mr. Lake came up from San Diego in June….We had an enjoyable visit—a nice, modest fellow….There is a feeling of assurance.” November 13, 1928 : “He knows his business, and I am sanguine that the story will be a winner.”

Still, to the very end, Wyatt had publishing concerns. “Perhaps my health will be back to normal when this business is all done with,” he wrote Hart on December 30. His last letter to Hart on January 7, 1929 , six days before his death, dealt with the Houghton Mifflin possibilities.

He died dissatisfied with the work of Walter Noble Burns. When Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal appeared after Earp’s death, the outspoken emotional Josephine Marcus Earp was infuriated by certain liberties she felt Lake had taken with what she considered the truth (see article in the April 2008 issue of Wild West Magazine).

But what of the unpublished Earp-Flood manuscript? It remained in limbo for 50 years among the effects of Josephine Earp. It surfaced in 1981, and a limited number of facsimile copies of the manuscript were made, bound and sold. Typical of its “stilted” style is the excerpt from the opening of the monumental O.K. Corral Gunfight, which made Wyatt Earp a legend:

“Throw up your hands, Clanton!” “All of you.”

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