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American Experience: Wyatt Earp

American Experience: Wyatt Earp airs on PBS tonight at 8 pm, (that's 9 eastern). There are some familiar faces that were involved in making this documentary, see the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4FPakqyFmU. I'm looking forward to seeing this special and hearing what feedback the members have on this in depth look at the man that history has turned into a legend.

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Permalink Reply by Zeke Thundercolt on January 25, 2010 at 8:27pm

A great show which presented a comprehensive look at the life, family and economic environment that helped shape the path that Wyatt walked. It set the social, economic and political stage for the choices Wyatt made and the motivating factors and stress that he lived with and helped to bring a clearer understanding of who Wyatt Earp was, and why. I enjoyed hearing each historian give their views of Wyatt, because it helped me to form my own opinion of his mindset, and what drove him to make the hard choices he did throughout his life.

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Permalink Reply by George D Rodriguez on January 25, 2010 at 9:00pm

Saw it and thought well of it. It gave a better insight to what the man was really like without all the movie and tv hype.

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Permalink Reply by Danny Meadows on January 27, 2010 at 8:36pm

Yeah , I liked it... kind of a fresh perspective without having to do another reenactment of the gunfight. I heard they got a couple of SASS guys as firearm consultants... so I thought there'd be more info about the guns.

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Permalink Reply by Justin Dovenmuehle on March 12, 2012 at 12:33pm

I saw the show and loved one of the photos they used. I wrote PBS and they said it came from the Craig Fouts Collection. I'm trying to get in touch with him so I can possibly purchase I high resolution copy of the photo to make a print for my home. Does anyone know how to get in contact with him? Any help would be appreciated. This is the photo I'm talking about. Wyatt Earp

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Permalink Reply by C. F. 'Charley' Eckhardt on April 15, 2012 at 5:44pm

Since my machine was down for the entire month of March--costing me a bundle in writing sales--I didn't find out about the special. If anybody knows when PBS will repeat it, please post here. I hope they had Ben Traywick as an authority, because what Ben doesn't know about Wyatt in Arizona isn't worth knowing. It's too much to ask that they'd have Glenn Boyer, because the 'Earp establishment,' with the exception of Ben--he and Ben are friends--hates his guts. He's also the only writer on the subject who knew both Josie Marcus Earp and Allie Earp when he was a young man--and got a lot of his Earp knowledge 'from the horse's mouth,' so to speak.

The letter Tefertiller 'discovered,' where Wyatt resigned from the US Marshal's service, was actually published in one of Ben's books about Earp ten years before Tefertiller's book came out--a fact Tefertiller doesn't like folks knowing.

The guy they should have had on the guns was Lee Silva. He was the firearms consultant on Tombstone, but likely PBS couldn't afford him. He doesn't work cheap.

The first vol of his bio of Wyatt will set you back all but a corner off a C-note, but he's got a 100+ page appendix on the Buntline Special in it. If you didn't believe there was a Buntline before you read it, you'll change your mine afterward. There are 2 more vols to come if he lives long enough to complete them.

I got mine as a review copy, because Lee & I have been friends since '89, courtesy of the late R.C. 'Dick' House, who was known in the muzzle-loading press as 'Beau Jacques.' Dick is also the only guy I ever met who knew as many dirty limericks as I do. We used to sit in his room or mine after hours at WWA conventions, sip sour mash, & turn the air blue with smoke from his cob pipe & my cigars while we tried to top each other's limericks. It was usually judged a tie.