Description: "Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday: legendary gunfighters and friends who gained immortality because of a thirty-second shootout near a livery stable called the O.K. Corral. Their friendship actually began three years before that iconic 1881 gunfight, in the rollicking cattle town of Dodge City. Wyatt, an assistant city marshal, was surrounded by armed, belligerent cowboys. Doc saw Wyatt's predicament from a monte table in the Long Branch saloon and burst out the door with two leveled revolvers shouting, 'Throw up your hands!' The startled cowboys did, and Wyatt and Doc led them off to jail. Wyatt credited Doc with saving his life, and thus began their lasting--and curious--friendship. In this ... dual biography, ... the lives of these two men, one a sometime lawman and the other a sometime dentist, are chronicled in a swirling tableau of saloons, brothels, gambling dens, stage holdups, arrests, manhunts, and revenge killings"--
Review Quotes: Praise for Brothers of the Gun:
"Brothers of the Gun illustrates this fascinating aspect of the old west: friction between law and lawlessness, authorities trying to exert control over newly forming societies, or those societies attempting to rule themselves. The amount of bureaucracy that follows a gunfight - hearings, affidavits, orders for compensation - might be surprising, at least to a reader raised on Clint Eastwood movies, men with no names brooding in vast and terrible lands." --The Guardian "Gardner brings his charismatic, fact-filled prose to the forefront in Brothers of the Gun, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of these complicated characters and the significance of their lives to American Western history." --True West "The author has done extensive research, painting a picture of Tombstone in its heyday, with its saloons, prostitution and gunfights." --Denver Post "The book shows us an Earp and Holliday we haven't seen before: not bigger-than-life legends, but real men who lived in a real, vividly realized time period.... Their story in the years leading up to the brief shoot-out that catapulted them into legend is a Wild West saga as exciting as anything you'll read in the pages of a novel or see on-screen. A must-read for fans of the history of the American West." --Booklist "[A] must-read....the well-paced story is rollicking, peppered with bullies and bullets." --New Mexico Magazine"Brothers of the Gun is a terrific read....The lives and deeds of Wyatt and Doc turn out to be more provocative than their fictitious exploits." --National Review "Sprinkled with a bit of logical speculation, Gardner, in his usual down-to-earth writing style, weaves together a huge amount of research, facts, and memories into a book that offers us a fresh perspective on Earp and Holliday, and those around them. The author yanks us back to those dusty days where we get to see the real person, their true self, and all the struggles they faced." --Jeffery Payne, Poor Richard's Books "Gardner's retelling of this famous incident paints a colorful, atmospheric panorama of the Wild West as an archipelago of saloons, gambling dens, and whorehouses where brutal violence was status quo. Gardner conveys it all in two-fisted prose that smacks of a Hollywood western; while he brings some nuance to the tale...he still finds a lot to admire about the duo. The result is a raucous and entertaining slice of Americana." --Publishers Weekly "A revealing account that adds shades of gray to black-and-white legends of the Wild West." --Kirkus "The prose and pacing is terrific, and it should appeal to general readers as well as the more seasoned ones. As for style and story, the book is spell-binding." --Wild West History Association "The gunfight at the OK Corral stands as one of the most iconic moments in the annals of the West, and participants Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday have become legendary figures. In Brothers of the Gun, renowned Western historian Mark Gardner has produced not only a riveting and nuanced portrayal of the enigmatic friendship between Earp and Holliday but also the clearest and most compelling account of the OK Corral yet written. Thanks to Gardner's wonderful narrative skills and superb research, fact replaces legend in this essential Western work." --Peter Cozzens, author of Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West "Mark Lee Gardner has emerged as one of our leading western historians, and this crisply written, well-researched book only adds to his sterling reputation. Here is the story of the Damon and Pythias of the Old West--Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday--told from an entirely fresh perspective. Gardner brings history alive in a way few authors can--you can almost smell the gun smoke as he corrects long-held myths about the events surrounding these two frontier legends, Tombstone and the O.K. Corral --a must read that makes it clear why the West was Wild!" --Paul Andrew Hutton, New York Times bestselling author of The Undiscovered Country "These are familiar stories made fascinating and new with fresh insights, deft storytelling, and diligent, curated research. I loved it. Simply put: as a historian of the Old West, Mark Lee Gardner is without parallel." --Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford