WYATT
EARP ON SHOOTING VS. GUNFIGHTING
Interview taken from “Wyatt Earp: Frontier
Marshall” by Stuart N. Lake
“I was a fair hand with pistol, rifle, or shotgun, but I learned
more about gunfighting from Tom Speer’s cronies during the summer of ’71 than I
had dreamed was in the book. Those old-timers took their gunplay seriously,
which was natural under the conditions in which they lived. Shooting, to them,
was considerably more than aiming at a mark and pulling a trigger. Models of
weapons, methods of wearing them, means of getting them into action and
operating them, all to the one end of combining high speed with absolute
accuracy, contributed to the frontiersman’s shooting skill. The sought-after
degree of proficiency was that which could turn to most effective account the
split-second between life and death. Hours upon hours of practice, and wide
experience in actualities supported their arguments over style.
The most important lesson I learned from those proficient
gunfighters was the winner of a gunplay usually was the man who took his time.
The second was that, if I hoped to live long on the frontier, I would shun
flashy trick-shooting—grandstand play—as I would poison.
When I say that I learned to take my time in a gunfight, I do
not wish to be misunderstood, for the time to be taken was only that split
fraction of a second that means the difference between deadly accuracy with a
sixgun and a miss. It is hard to make this clear to a man who has never been in
a gunfight. Perhaps I can best describe such time taking as going into action
with the greatest speed of which a man’s muscles are capable, but mentally
unflustered by an urge to hurry or the need for complicated nervous and
muscular actions which trick-shooting involves. Mentally deliberate, but
muscularly faster than thought, is what I mean.
In all my life as a frontier police 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. In later years I read a great deal
about this type of gunplay, supposedly employed by men noted for skill with a
forty-five.
From personal experience and numerous six-gun battles which I
witnessed, I can only support the opinion advanced by the men who gave me my
most valuable instruction in fast and accurate shooting, which was that the
gun-fanner and hip-shooter stood small chance to live against a man who, as old
Jack Gallagher always put it, took his time and pulled the trigger once.
Cocking and firing mechanisms on new revolvers were almost
invariably altered by their purchasers in the interests of smoother, effortless
handling, usually by filing the dog which controlled the hammer, some going so
far as to remove triggers entirely or lash them against the guard, in which
cases the guns were fired by thumbing the hammer. This is not to be confused
with fanning, in which the triggerless gun is held in one hand while the other
was brushed rapidly across the hammer to cock the gun, and firing it by the
weight of the hammer itself. A skillful gun-fanner could fire five shots from a
forty-five so rapidly that the individual reports were indistinguishable, but
what could happen to him in a gunfight was pretty close to murder.
I saw Jack Gallagher’s theory borne out so many times in deadly
operation that I was never tempted to forsake the principles of gunfighting as
I had them from him and his associates.
There was no man in the Kansas City group who was Wild Bill’s
equal with a six-gun. Bill’s correct name, by the way, was James B. Hickok.
Legend and the imaginations of certain people have exaggerated the number of
men he killed in gunfights and have misrepresented the manner in which he did
his killing. At that, they could not very well overdo his skill with pistols.
Hickok knew all the fancy tricks and was as good as the best at
that sort of gunplay, but when he had serious business at hand, a man to get,
the acid test of marksmanship, I doubt if he employed them. At least, he told
me that he did not. I have seen him in action and I never saw him fan a gun,
shoot from the hip, or try to fire two pistols simultaneously. Neither have I
ever heard a reliable old-timer tell of any trick-shooting employed by Hickok
when fast straight-shooting meant life or death.
That two-gun business is another matter that can stand some
truth before the last of the old-time gunfighters has gone on. They wore two
guns, most of six-gun toters did, and when the time came for action went after
them with both hands. But they didn’t shoot them that way.
Primarily, two guns made the threat of something in reserve;
they were useful as a display of force when a lone man stacked up against a
crowd. Some men could shoot equally well with either hand, and in a gunplay
might alternate their fire; others exhausted the loads from the gun on the
right, or the left, as the case might be, then shifted the reserve weapon to
the natural shooting hand if that was necessary and possible. Such a move—the
border shift—could be made faster than the eye could follow a top-notch
gun-thrower, but if the man was as good as that, the shift would seldom be
required.
Whenever you see a picture of some two-gun man in action with
both weapons held closely against his hips and both spitting smoke together,
you can put it down that you are looking at the picture of a fool, or a fake. I
remember quite a few of these so-called two-gun men who tried to operate
everything at once, but like the fanners, they didn’t last long in proficient company.
In the days of which I am talking, among men whom I have in
mind, when a man went after his guns, he did so with a single, serious purpose.
There was no such thing as a bluff; when a gunfighter reached for his
fortyfive, every faculty he owned was keyed to shooting as speedily and as
accurately as possible, to making his first shot the last of the fight. He just
had to think of his gun solely as something with which to kill another before
he himself could be killed. The possibility of intimidating an antagonist was
remote, although the ‘drop’ was thoroughly respected, and few men in the West
would draw against it. I have seen men so fast and so sure of themselves that
they did go after their guns while men who intended to kill them had them
covered, and what is more win out in the play. They were rare. It is safe to
say, for all general purposes, that anything in gunfighting that smacked of
show-off or bluff was left to braggarts who were ignorant or careless of their
lives.
I might add that I never knew a man who amounted to anything to
notch his gun with ‘credits,’ as they were called, for men he had killed.
Outlaws, gunmen of the wild crew who killed for the sake of brag, followed this
custom. I have worked with most of the noted peace officers — Hickok, Billy
Tilghman, Pat Sughre, Bat Masterson, Charlie Basset, and others of like caliber
— have handled their weapons many times, but never knew one of them to carry a
notched gun.
There are two other points about the old-time method of using
six-guns most effectively that do not seem to be generally known. One is that
the gun was not cocked with the ball of the thumb. As his gun was jerked into
action, the old-timer closed the whole joint of his thumb over the hammer and
the gun was cocked in that fashion. The soft flesh of the thumb ball
might slip if a man’s hands were moist, and a slip was not to be chanced if
humanly avoidable. This thumb-joint method was employed whether or not a man
used the trigger for firing.
On the second point, I have often been asked why
five shots without reloading were all a top-notch gunfighter fired, when his
guns were chambered for six cartridges. The answer is, merely, safety. To
ensure against accidental discharge of the gun while in the holster, due to
hair-trigger adjustment, the hammer rested upon an empty chamber. As widely as
this was known and practiced, the number of cartridges a man carried in his
six-gun may be taken as an indication of a man’s rank with the gunfighters of
the old school. Practiced gun-wielders had too much respect for their
weapons to take unnecessary chances with them; it was only with tyros and
would-bes that you heard of accidental discharges or didn’t-know-it-was-loaded
injuries in the country where carrying a Colt was a man’s prerogative
