Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Tombstone

A couple of weeks ago I visited Tombstone for the first time. For a guy who loves the West and Western movies, the town bears the same mythic power as Camelot, Troy or Olympus. I believe the location should be treated with the same respect as Colonial Williamsburg or Gettysburg battlefield. The reality of modern Tombstone, however, falls a little short of the mythology. And that is a real shame.

I had a lot of book-learnin’ about Tombstone, but no experience. A couple of years ago I wrote A&E's BIOGRAPHY episode on Doc Holliday, and I read as much as I could about the town, the Earps and the OK Corral. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to visit the hallowed ground. So when we had a wedding invitation to Tucson, my sweet wife agreed to add a side trip to “The Town Too Tough To Die.” We only had an afternoon, but I felt that would be worth it. Jackleg historians know there is no better way to research history than to just find the place and walk around. You'll discover insights you could never get from reading primary documents and you'll see connections you never could have imagined even from first-person accounts. In the streets of a place like Tombstone, even a multiple-degree-carrying head of a major History Department becomes a Jackleg Historian.

Tombstone today is a strange place -- an uneasy mix of History and Commerce, with Commerce dominating. In fact, Commerce swaggers about the street, bullying bystanders and frightening the curious, like the Cow-Boys of old, and the whole place might benefit if a frontier marshal were to come in to clean up the town.

I have no problem with commercial aspect of historic tourism… but it was hard to find the History between the Commerce. Iconic Allen Street, site of the famous walk-down to the Corral, is a string of nearly identical tourist shops. They all seemed filled with the same cheap junk -- shot glasses and coffee mugs and t-shirts -- all apparently made at the same Authentic Western Curio factory in Guangzhou, China.

There were a couple of stand-out stores that were truly extraordinary, and worth the trip -- the Tombstone Western Bookstore, the antiques at Tombstone Mercantile and Spangenberger's Gun Store (now, oddly enough, called "Larry's Corner Store'). But between these were the ice cream shops and "old-tyme photos" and souvenir stands that all seemed to carry identical gimcrackery. I know that people need to eat – especially after a 90 minute drive from Tucson – and people want to buy stuff, so I don’t want to fault folks just trying to make an honest living.

But it's hard to hear the footsteps of the Earps, or feel the hot wind of a coming apocalyptic showdown when your eyes are ears are assaulted with cheap crap from China.

And apparently, I’m not the only one who is bothered. The National Park Service threatened to yank the town’s National Historic Landmark District designation in 2004 because the domination of Commerce over History was so bad. Some steps have apparently been taken… but at this point, it’s hard to see them. And if you have only an afternoon to see Tombstone, you could easily miss the historic significance of the place.

The high point for me was the "OK Corral Gunfight site" museum. By the time I got there, I wasn’t expecting much, especially since the site of the world’s most famous gun battle was a for-profit enterprise. But the museum has been upgraded fairly recently, and the "life-sized figures" (a little worse for wear) have been placed as closely as possible to the spot that Wyatt himself claimed they stood. A building called "Fly's Boarding House" stands next to the gunfight site (though it's unclear if it was the actual building from 1881), and in it stands a very interesting exhibit of Camillus Fly's photography and a replica of Doc Holliday's room. I was surprised at how un-commercial this section was -- the museum exhibit seemed professional, the descriptions and text (on the walls and in plastic handouts) seemed well-written and well-researched. It was a breath of fresh air – of real history – in a town full of t-shirt shops.

My favorite bit of Tombstone weirdness is the Tombstone Historama. Built in the early 1960s, it's not a movie... not a diorama... but a "Histo-rama." You sit in a small theater and the curtain opens to reveal a room-sized three-dimensional sculpture on a turntable. The first view is of ancient Tomsbtone, and spotlights pick out various details in the diorama. Some of the tiny figures actually move in a jerky, toy-robot fashion. Meanwhile, the inimitable voice of Vincent Price intones the fabled history of the town. Then a screen drops for a brief slide show, and when the screen rises, the Historama has rotated on its turntable to reveal another diorama. There are five scenes, and the entire show lasts about a half-hour.

I'm sure The Historama was a mind-boggling experience when it opened -- not too far off from Disney's "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" ride. But now 40 years later, the term “multimedia” refers to a million web pages, not herky-jerky robots and miniature dioramas. The literally-creaking scenery, the static displays and the bizarre voice of the long-dead Vincent Price makes the Historama more of an artifact than an exhibit. They've tried to spiff it up with some live action video (while the diorama loudly rumbles to its next scene) but the re-enactments are sub-par. I supposed the exhibit remains where it is because it is too big and ungainly to replace (and besides what would you replace it with?). And if you like kitsch (which I do), this is quite a find.

But The Historama is the default introduction to the town and its history… and it’s not a very grand introduction. My wife and I were the only people in the 50 seat theater. Meanwhile, cheap trinket stores proliferate… and visitors to Tombstone drop precipitously.

So I’m concerned that the American Camelot, the Gettysburg of the Old West, is being overwhelmed by the Cow-Boys of Commerce. Even though the town fathers are trying to beef up its historic draw, I fear that History is getting beaten and battered in Tombstone… and folks are staying away. After all, why drive all the way to Tombstone if all they offer is cheap souvenirs that you can get at the airport giftshop? The only reason to drive to Tombstone is the History. And that seems to be in short supply.

Friday, February 29, 2008

R.I.P. PAT GARRETT

February 29, 2008 -- the 100th anniversary of the death of Pat Garrett.

Among Billy aficionados, Pat Garrett’s name is mud. He’s the guy who shot his best friend, the former pard who sold out, who waited in a dark room and blasted the Boy Bandit into kingdom come for a reward. He got his thirty pieces of silver… or maybe he didn’t – some say Pat Garrett never received the $500 reward for killing Billy the Kid.

Pat was an instant hero for shooting the famous outlaw… with headlines in London and New York trumpeting Garrett’s fame as a lawman. But within months it seemed that popular opinion had turned against him. Billy the Kid was a beloved anti-hero, and without knowing it, Pat had killed a legend. Oscar Wilde put it best a few months later, when talking about the death of that other great outlaw Jesse James: “Americans are certainly great hero worshippers and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to have a sneaking admiration for the Kid-killer. Pat was a guy with a job, a guy looking to make his name and make his fortune, just like everyone else in the West, just like everyone else in America. He was older than Billy, he had a family to support. He needed the money. Unlike the legend, he may not have been Billy’s best friend – or known him very well at all. But I prefer the poetic justice of the legend – an older guy given an unpleasant task, who does his best at it… and gets shafted by history for it.

Sam Peckinpah told the legend best in PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID. The title really sums it up, because the real hero of the legend is Pat, not Billy. Billy the Kid is a force of nature, a god-like young man with nearly supernatural powers and charm. And just as the Greek legends tell us, when you get involved with a God, you get involved with tragedy. So Peckinpah places Garrett at the center of the tale – he has the biggest goal, he has the greatest challenges, he has the most to lose. And lose he does, with that wonderful image at the end, a twist on SHANE, where a young boy runs after the tall lonesome stranger as he rides out of town… only this boy spits and throws a rock. Pat Garrett is our Judas-goat, taking on the sins of the American West.

Well, that’s the legend anyway.

The legend ends there… Pat’s real story continues for decades. Pat goes on to have a fairly long and successful (though controversial) career as a lawman and public servant.

He’s still a sheriff 15 years after Billy’s death when he’s assigned one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Old West – the disappearance of Albert Fountain and his young son. Fountain was a crusading lawyer – the defense attorney for Billy the Kid himself – who disappeared after getting indictments against a cattle-rustling ring. It’s a strange twist that the killer of Billy the Kid seeks justice for the defender of Billy the Kid. Garrett tracked down the reputed killers after a long hunt and at least one gunfight – only to see them declared not guilty. The killers were linked to some of the most powerful people in New Mexico. The mystery still has never been solved, but it was Garrett’s last job as a sheriff.

Teddy Roosevelt himself personally appoints Garrett to the post of customs collector in El Paso in 1901, 20 years after Billy’s death. But the appointment is withdrawn five years later, for reasons that are not altogether clear.

And a quarter century after the death of Billy the Kid, something very strange begins to happen to Pat Garrett. So strange, in fact, that historians tend to go to great lengths to say “nothing strange happened!”

It begins with Pat’s money problems. He had no job, he was in debt, and told people he was in serious trouble... though he never said what the trouble was. What is clear is that Pat was involved in a complex land dispute with his neighbors. A young cowboy named Jesse Wayne Brazel was grazing goats on Pat’s land – much to Pat’s dismay. On February 29, 1908, Pat was riding in a buggy with his neighbor Carl Adamson, when they ran into Brazel. Words were exchanged. Guns were fired. A couple of hours later Brazel showed up at the local sheriff’s office and confessed to killing the famous lawman Pat Garrett in self-defense.

The murder was bizarre, and nearly inexplicable. Brazel said that in the argument, Pat went for his gun and Brazel fired. When the sheriff arrived at the scene, Pat was lying face down, one bullet wound in the back of his head, another in his chest, apparently killed while urinating. His shotgun was lying nearby, disassembled, still in its case. Clearly, this was not “self-defense” – though a jury declared Brazel not guilty in his murder trial.

Brazel apparently had no reason to kill Garrett. Various theories and various killers have been suggested as the real murderers. A federal investigator named Fred Fornoff suggested that a ring of illegal alien smugglers were responsible (in fact, the man driving Pat’s buggy was convicted of smuggling Chinese laborers just one year later). Some have suggested that professional assassin “Killin’ Jim” Miller was responsible, or the local powerful rancher W.W. Cox, or the cattle-rustling ring that killed Albert Fountain a decade before.

I think author Bill Brooks has the best theory of all in his novel THE STONE GARDEN… Billy the Kid did it, after surviving Pat’s bullet and living in hiding under the name John Miller.

No one knows who killed Pat Garrett or why. The man who was once the West’s most-lauded lawman died along a lonely stretch of desert road, shot in the back of the head, the killer unknown, the motive unclear.

Is it poetic justice -- or justice denied -- that this mystery of the West has never been solved? Does anyone remember how Judas died? And did Garrett die with the same last words as Billy the Kid: “Quien es?” – “Who is it?”

All I know is that as I’ve gotten older – given up some dreams, made compromises, done what I had to – I see myself reflected less in Billy and more in Pat.

So 100 years to the day, I say Adios, Senor Garrett -- mon semblable -- mon frère.