Guinn places the relationship between Wyatt and Josephine Marcus, the Jewish girl from San Francisco who was mistress to Wyatt's rival, Sheriff John Behan, at the center of the story. ' But when the bullets start flying, he seems to have a definite idea as to who fired which bullet and when. In his chapter notes he writes, 'This should be made clear: no one living knows exactly what happened during the fabled gunfight. More serious, perhaps, is that Guinn often rests his key arguments on unsubstantiated assertions. Phrases are carelessly repeated both the Clantons and McLaurys, the cattle rustlers who clashed with the Earps at the gunfight, are described as 'pragmatic businessmen' - which might be true if stealing and fencing stolen property can be regarded as business. He relies too heavily on interviews with other authors instead of going back to original documents, which undermines the originality of the book and makes it difficult to discern the author's own voice.

On Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt he writes: 'Few frontier lawmen had clean records the idea was that men who had broken laws themselves would understand best how to prevent others from doing the same.'īut when the Earps arrive at Tombstone, the vast amount of historical material about the politics, economics and personal feuds that led up to the famous gunfight and its bloody aftermath seems to overwhelm Guinn. Guinn, author of a highly readable account of Bonnie and Clyde, Go Down Together, is good at understanding the thankless lot of the frontier lawman. The reader's attention is already wandering a bit before the Earp family even shows up.

The cover isn't the author's fault, but he can be blamed for long rambling opening chapters such as 'The West,' which attempts to sum up decades of the American frontier in a handful of pages.

Second, the subtitle promises to tell 'how it changed the American West,' but there is no evidence that it changed the West at all unless one means through its depiction in Hollywood films. Corral) was far from the last gunfight of the Old West. Corral (in fact the gunfight in back of the O.K. Jeff Guinn's The Last Gunfight hits a bump- two bumps, actually - on the cover.

The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn