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

2012 | Biography

"The genius of this book is that, for all its historical accuracy and sophistication, it still tells a story as stirring as any western." The Sunday Times "A book I've been reading with enormous pleasure." Simon Hoggart, The Guardian On the afternoon of 26 October 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.

Jeff Guinn (Author)