Brent Towns (who also
writes as B. S. Dunn, Jake Henry, and Sam Clancy) tells me a favourite of his
own novels is BROTHERS OF THE GUN –
credited to B. S. Dunn.
Buford Lance is a rancher who sees his hard-won New Mexico range
threatened by homesteaders. To ward them off he hires two gunmen – Lucas Kane (nicknamed
the Gun King) and his brother Jordan (the Prince) - but ends up setting brother
against brother.
There
are a number of ‘brothers of the gun’ who feature in Old West history,
including the James Brothers, The Youngers and Ben and Billy Thompson. And then
of course there were the Earp Brothers.
Of
the six Earp Brothers only NEWTON never served in a law-enforcement position.
The remaining brothers all did, and three of them paid a high price.
WYATT
(born 1848) lived longest, until 1929, surviving into the age of western motion
pictures, meeting JOHN FORD among others, and was available to sell himself as
the most important figure of the clan. Some authorities claim, however, that Wyatt
inflated his own leadership role and VIRGIL was the real brains of this outfit.
It was Virgil, after all, that enemies of the clan went after first in the
aftermath of the legendary ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral.’
Virgil (born 1843) served in the
Union Army during the American Civil War. He worked
at a variety of jobs, including peace officer, farmer, rail construction,
stagecoach driver, sawmill sawyer, mailman and prospector.
A reporter whose story was printed in
the ‘San Francisco Examiner’
described Virgil in 1882: ‘His face, voice and manner were prepossessing.
He is close to six feet in height, of medium build, chestnut hair, sandy
mustache, light eyebrows, quiet, blue eyes and frank expression. He wore a
wide-brimmed, slate-colored slouch hat, pants of a brown and white stripe, and
a blue diagonal coat and vest.’
Virgil
was a constable in Prescott, Arizona in 1878-79. In 1879 he served briefly as
deputy U.S. marshal for the Tombstone District of Arizona. The next year Virgil
was also appointed acting town marshal of Tombstone, becoming permanent city
marshal in 1881. So he was the highest-ranking lawman, both deputy U.S.
Marshal and Tombstone City Marshal, when he led his brothers Morgan and Wyatt,
plus Doc Holliday, into the ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’ – they were merely his deputies,
appointed as temporary assistants.
But two months after the OK Corral,
on the night of December 28 1881, Virgil was ambushed on the streets of
Tombstone. He was shot in the back, hit with three shotgun rounds, shattering
his left arm and leaving him permanently maimed. He then left Arizona.
Despite his injuries Virgil served once more as a
lawman, as city marshal in Colton, California 1887-1888.
He died from pneumonia in 1905, aged 62.
In 1875, MORGAN (born 1851) became a deputy marshal in Dodge
City, Kansas. In1879-1880, he served three months as a policeman in Butte,
Montana. He joined his brothers in Tombstone in time to participate at
the OK Corral.
Four
months later came a reckoning.
At
10:50 p.m. on Saturday, March 18, 1882, Morgan was playing billiards in a
Tombstone billiard parlour while Wyatt watched. A shot through a windowed door struck
Morgan in the back, fatally wounding him. Before dying, he reportedly said, ‘This
is the last game of pool I'll ever play.’
WARREN
(born 1855) occasionally served as a deputy for his brothers in Tombstone. But
his father reportedly said of him: 'If
Warren ever dies he will be shot. He is too hasty, quick-tempered and too ready
to pick a quarrel. Besides he will not let bygones be bygones, and on that
account, I expect that he will meet a violent death.’
Earp Senior was proved right. In 1900 Warren was involved in a
drunken argument with a local cowboy in a saloon in Wilcox, Arizona. When it
came to guns, Warren was shot in the chest and killed.
JAMES
(born 1841) was only briefly a lawman, serving as a deputy marshal in Dodge City in 1878-1879 and once or twice
as Virgil’s deputy in Tombstone.
This deadly fraternal clash in BROTHERS
OF THE GUN reminded me of NIGHT PASSAGE, where Audie Murphy and James
Stewart are the brothers pitted against each other
Audie Murphy and James Stewart in ‘Night
Passage’ (1957)
or SADDLE THE WIND, where the clash is between Robert Taylor and John
Cassavetes.
Robert Taylor and John Cassavetes in ‘Saddle the Wind’ (1958)
Reviews of BROTHERS OF THE GUN:
‘Awesome …A gun slinger who takes you by surprise.’
‘What an exciting book. …a gun slinger who would not just kill for the
money, he actually had a heart and a code he lived by.’
‘Fast
paced, action packed, solid characters… This one ticks all the boxes of what I
want in a Western.’
