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The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the Ok Corral and How it Changed the American West

The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the Ok Corral and How it Changed the American West

by JeffGuinn (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2011

    $6.14
Synopsis

On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, a confrontation between eight armed men erupted in a deadly shootout. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral shaped how future generations came to view the old West. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons became the stuff of legends, but the truth is even better. As The Last Gunfight makes clear, the real story of the O.K. Corral and the West is far different from what we've been led to believe by countless Westerns. Drawing on new material from private collections-including diaries, letters, and Wyatt Earp's own hand-drawn sketch of the shootout's conclusion-as well as documentary research in Tombstone and Arizona archives and dozens of interviews, Jeff Guinn gives us a startlingly different and far more fascinating picture of what the West was like, who the Earps and Doc Holliday and their cowboy adversaries really were, what actually happened on that cold day in Tombstone, and why. The gunfight did not occur in the O.K. Corral, and it was in no way a defining battle between frontier forces of good and evil. Guinn depicts an accidental if inevitable clash between competing social, political, and economic forces representing the old West of ruggedly independent ranchers and cowboys and the emerging new West of wealthy mining interests and well-heeled town folk. With its masterful storytelling, fresh research, and memorable characters The Last Gunfight is hugely entertaining and illuminating.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 320
 Publisher: Biteback
Published: 29 Sep 2011
ISBN 10: 1849541671
ISBN 13: 9781849541671

Media Reviews
Guinn . . . delivers another double-barrel blast of history and true crime. . . . Superbly detailed . . . . A thorough, thrilling account of the crime and its influence on the history of the West. . . . Absolutely buy this dazzler.

-- Library Journal Express (Starred Review)


The most thorough account of the gunfight and its circumstances ever published.

-- The Wall Street Journal


Scrupulously details how this isolated act of violence attained such heroic status. . . . A deeply researched and colorfully written history of one of those dramatic oddments of Americana that never fails to captivate us.

--Dale L. Walker, Dallas Morning News


Jeff Guinn took readers down the back roads of Louisiana in his book Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. He's back in The Last Gunfight , displaying the impeccable research that is his trademark. . . . Guinn's story is what really happened. . . . A terrific read.

Craig Wilson, USA TODAY


A gripping revisionist account of the famed 1881 showdown. . . . Exhaustively researched, stylishly written. . . . As grimly compelling as a Greek tragedy.

-- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)


Jeff Guinn is a straight shooter when it comes to facts. He investigated the story from every imaginable angle, separating truth from tall tale, and now he delivers a factual account of what happened--and why--that's every bit as riveting as the fantasy.

--David Martindale, Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, TX)


Advance Praise for

The Last Gunfight

Jeff Guinn gives us not only the clashing egos and the mythic gunslingers, but also the larger social forces that converged on a roistering mining town in southeastern Arizona that fateful day in 1881. The result is a kind of anti-Western: The cliches are stripped away, the black hats removed, the 'rugged individualists' unmasked, leaving us with real human beings who are swayed and shaped by the forces of history, and trapped in time.

--Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder


The Last Gunfight is a portrayal of criminality, greed, ambition, rivalry, fidelity, and law enforcement gone awry. Add in the aspects of vengeance, lust, and enduring love, and you have a riveting book every bit as good as, if not better than, Go Down Together , Jeff Guinn's much-lauded book about Bonnie and Clyde.

--Lynn R. Bailey, Tombstone historian and author of Too Tough to Die


Jeff Guinn has come up with a new angle and approach to the events of that bloody day in Tombstone. Without that gunfight, Wyatt Earp would have never become a household name a hundred years later. Guinn delves into the myth and separates it from the facts. A terrific read about the West's most famous lawman.

--Clive Cussler


An absorbing, meticulous account of the famous O.K. Corral gunfight as it really happened. . . . Guinn places his complex and nuanced story firmly within the context of the evolving Western frontier. . . . A great story.

-- Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio
Jeff Guinn is the author of Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie & Clyde, which was a finalist for an Edgar Award in 2010. An award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction, he was books editor and senior writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and has appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation , CNN's Headline News, CBS Sunday Morning, and Fox and Friends . He lives in Fort Worth, Texas.