Being 21, I’m a little young for “Star Trek.” Not the “Next Generation,” “Deep Space 9” or “Voyager;” those were great. No, I’m talking old school, you know, with Captain Kirk.

But reruns do come along from time to time. One episode is particularly sweet. It’s called “Spectre of the Gun.” and it was Star Trek’s way of showing its audience a western. I’m not going to bore you with all the nerdy details, but long story short, Captain Kirk and friends engaged in some douchebaggery, and the whole posse had to re-enact an event drawn from Kirk’s mind, the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz.

In case you live under a cultural rock, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral occurred when a town marshal — Virgil Earp — his two brothers, and a friend set out to arrest a group of cowboys in Tombstone on Oct. 26, 1881. The cowboys made a point of carrying holstered weapons through the town, which was illegal at the time, in protest of Earp’s recent jailing of their associate. So, the Earp posse squared off against the cowboys, killing three of the five in a shootout.

After that day, one of the Earp brothers was assassinated, the remaining Earp posse engaged in a “vendetta ride” to kill the two cowboys that escaped the shootout and some of the remaining posse members were tried but exonerated of murder for killing the cowboys and others during that ride.

Apparently, a modern feud has developed in Tombstone, a small town in Cochise County. As featured in an article in The Arizona
Republic, a group of actors had been re-enacting the shootout for about a year before their performances became illegal.

Before the actors came to Tombstone, residents had reenacted the shootout. But the professional actors stole the show from the local, inexperienced actors. So, the residents voted for a new mayor who promptly changed the law to bar the professional actors from performing.

My question is this: Why is an acting feud in Tombstone worthy of statewide news? For that matter, why would the writers of Star Trek think someone from the 24th century would have ever heard of the relatively minor, controversial police action that occurred there?

Well, since the shootout and its aftermath, the stories surrounding the shootout have become cornerstones in the “Old West” mythos of cowboys, Indians and lawlessness. The shootout has been immortalized in numerous books, television shows and films. The players have been cast as the forces of good and evil, the Earps against the cowboys.

But in seeing the shootout at the O.K. Corral in a
pseudo-mythological light, we manufacture reality. A plethora of recent scholarship on the shootout contends that the mythological models we have accepted — especially the good versus evil bend — simply aren’t accurate. The Earps were pimps, drunks and gamblers. They shot the cowboys as part of a power struggle to control Tombstone.

But we seem unable to accept this proposition. Rather, we, along with Captain Kirk, continue to be entranced with the drama of Tombstone, and even the drama of its dramatists.

Reach Brett at blivingo@asu.edu.