Wyatt Earp Quotes
The most important lesson I learned...was that the winner of a gunplay usually was the one who took his time. The second was that, if I hoped to live on the frontier, I would shun flashy trick-shooting--grandstand play--as I would poison...In all my life as a frontier peace officer, I did not know a really proficient gunfighter who had anything but contempt for the gun-fanner, or the man who literally shot from the hip.
Lake, Stuart N. Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. Houghton Mifflin, 1931, p. 39.
The great cowboy gunslinger was much a myth in that the few that were very good shots became legends. The best shots in America generally were the hunters of small game like Annie Oakley and the military and sportsmen who studied the gun and practiced endlessly. Almost all were in the Midwest and East. In the case of Oakley, she learned to shoot small game for food in rural Ohio. Her first shooting contest was not on the frontier but in the big city of Cincinnati.
This quotation is very controversial among historians. Beverly was in a sense the first American historian, although he had no formal training. His extolling the military and sharpshooting virtues of his fellows may or may not have been an exaggeration both as to their skill with firearms and their ability as soldiers. There is much evidence that only a minority of the people of Virginia possessed firearms at the time yet Beverly’s image is the one that has come down to us in the romanticized view of early America. Even fellow Virginian, George Washington {613056} complained that his Virginia civilians made poor soldiers compared with “regulars” who had been trained to shoot, and when Virginia militia reported for duty less than one quarter had firearms which were very expensive and not very accurate at the time.
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was an American law enforcement officer and businessman who worked in several places in the American West, including Dodge City, Kansas and Tombstone, Arizona Territory. He worked in a variety of trades and took part in the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, during which lawmen killed three outlaw Cochise County Cowboys.
