The Last Gunfight Quotes

“As Americans embraced Wild West mythology by ignoring inconvenient facts and exaggerating or inventing more palatable ones, they also altered the meaning of a traditionally negative term. In Wyatt’s real West, anyone referred to as a cowboy was most likely a criminal. But in movies the word was used first to describe hardworking ranch hands and then, generically, those who rode horses, toted six-guns, and, when necessary (and it always became necessary) fought to uphold justice at the risk of their own lives. Cowboys were heroes, and their enemies were outlaws. So far as his growing legion of fans was concerned, Wyatt Earp was a cowboy in the new, best sense of the word. B”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West

“Like his adversaries back in Wichita and Dodge, many hailed from Texas. But these weren’t drovers intent on a little wild fun. They dealt in cattle, too, but instead of herding them, they stole them. For that they acquired a generic nickname that eventually evolved into a complimentary description, but one that in 1880 was intended as a slur, a means of identifying men so low and violent that no evil act was considered beneath them: Cowboys.”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West

“One thing the army didn’t do very often was swoop in to deflect Indian attacks on wagon trains of settlers—there weren’t that many such assaults. Between 1842 and 1859, about thirty thousand Western emigrants died while en route by wagon train, but fewer than four hundred were killed by Indians. The wagon train death rate was 3 percent, compared to the 2.5 percent average among all Americans. Ninety percent of wagon train fatalities came from disease, with cholera the leading cause.”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West

“Belief is frequently a matter of convenience rather than the result of objectively weighing evidence.”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral--And How It Changed The American West

“Much of history results from apparently unrelated dominoes tumbling one over another.”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West

“As the frontier contracted and crimes such as rustling began attracting more official notice, “cowboy” became a generic term to describe habitual thugs or lawbreakers.”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West

“add and the contributions it might”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West

“on Tombstone’s streets. It took the judgment”
― Jeff Guinn, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West