Posted on 06/27/2008 7:47:38 AM PDT by epow
*THAT* is a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with...
the infowarrior
Your history is correct. The Clantons and their friends refused to disarm in the town as the Earps' policy required them to, and the Earps and Doc Holliday were apparently waiting for an excuse to provoke a fight with the Clanton-McLaurey gang of ruffians and cattle rustlers.
That potentially explosive confrontation between two well armed cliques who hated each other was almost sure to end in a gunfight. But the fact that the OK Corral fight made headlines in eastern cities 2000 miles away is a good indication of how seldom such a relatively large scale gunfight actually occurred in the old west.
Right. The county sheriff's faction, i.e. John Behan and the Clanton/McLaurey ruffians, and the town marshall's faction, i.e. the Earps and Holliday, were bitter enemies. A large part of that mutual enmity was due to the Earps' well known status as Union Army veterans and the Clanton faction's history of sympathy for the Confederate cause, and if what I have read is correct both sides were much less than innocent in the shooting incident which claimed 3 lives and achieved notoriety all over the country.
It seems that the role of honest, brave LE officers assigned to the Earps and the role of cowardly cattle thieves assigned to the Clanton faction were assigned by the popular dime novels of that era rather than by the actual residents of Tombstone who knew the truth about both groups of gamblers, small time thieves, and politically motivated opportunists.
Was there really a robbery of that stage? Did Holliday do it? Was it a put-up job by the Clanton McLaurey faction to discredit the Earps?
Nobody will ever know the truth of it, but anyone who has done even a modicum of research into the whole thing knows that the dime novel version of the whole affair is just so much bunk...
the infowarrior
While Virgil Earp was, indeed, a veteran of the Union army, Neither Wyatt, nor his younger brother Morgan were (both were too young at the time). This actually worked in Wyatt's favor, when he became "peacekeeper" in both Witchita, and Dodge City, during the cattle boom.
Since the majority of the herds arriving for sale in these boom towns came from Texas, and were driven by ex-Confederates. The "powers that were" *wanted* these ex-Confederates to hang around long enough to put most of the herd sale money back into their pockets, in the form of entertainment for these cowboys who had spent long, hard months driving the herds to these market towns. A local lawman with a Union Army background, with an obvious axe to grind, didn't fit in with these plans.
Enter young Wyatt Earp, an ambitious, rather mercenary, young man, without *any* of that baggage. He became a good fit as their "town super-bouncer", and I'll admit, he was quite successful at it, moving from one boom town to the next. But in the final analysis, his actual "career" as a lawman reads more like the career of a Patrick Swayze "Roadhouse" style bouncer than anything else...
the infowarrior
An inherent right is unalienable whether or not it is recognized as such by government. But the practice of a right can be forbidden by government, and as we all know the right to keep and bear arms often is. Therefore I think it would be correct to say that our ability to practice the right to keep and bear arms needs to be restored rather than to say the right itself needs to be restored.
I have said before that a right is legitimate only when it is recognized by the courts. If the courts don't recognize a right, then it effectively does not exist.
A right doesn't exist in effect when denied to the people by government, but it can't be made non-existent by government. People have inherent, unalienable rights, government only has certain enumerated powers granted to it by the people it governs, but not inherent rights.
Sounds to me like you’re splitting hairs. If government forbids the exercise of a right then government has effectively rejected that right... just as I stated.
You're right of course, Virgil was the only actual Union veteran of the Earp brothers. But I think Virgil's Union veteran status had at least something to do with the enmity between the Earp clan and the Clanton/McLaurey bunch. OTOH I don't think that either group's hostility toward the other was primarily motivated by loyalty to one side or the other of that fratricidal war.
I tend to believe that both cliques were motivated more by monetary greed and a desire for raw political power than by any other factor. Neither faction was worthy of the adulation heaped on the Earp's and Holliday by the eastern press and the dime novel authors.
Definitely agree.. Been fun discussing this with you!
the infowarrior
Perhaps I am. I just wanted to emphasize that an unalienable right doesn't cease to exist just because a government doesn't recognize it as a right and denies it to the people it governs. An inherent human right may become moribund in practical terms due to the people's inability to exercise it in a dictatorial state, but it still exists nonetheless.
Great, then we agree.
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