In 1976, the University of Arizona Press first published "I Married Wyatt Earp," a memoir by Josephine Earp, the third wife of America's most storied frontier legend, edited by an amateur historian named Glenn Boyer. Over the years the book has sold nearly 35,000 copies, a surprising commercial success driven primarily by its never-before-seen first-person accounts of Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, Ariz., and the events surrounding the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral. There is just one problem. According to historians of the West, the book is a fraud.
"I'm really shocked by the University of Arizona Press," says Allen Barra, a journalist and the author of the recent book "Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends" (Caroll & Graf, 1998). "Fraud has been committed here, but that is no longer the story. The story is that the University of Arizona Press is perpetuating this fraud, and they've known about it from the beginning."
According to Barra, the controversy began in the early 1990s, when historians began to doubt the existence of a collection of Josephine's personal memoirs, known as the Clum manuscript, that Glenn Boyer claims he used to create the vital Tombstone section of "I Married Wyatt Earp." But the rumbling escalated into a full-fledged scandal in October 1999. That's when newly appointed University of Arizona Press director Christine Szuter wrote to Barra, who had been prodding the press for years to investigate Boyer's sources, and acknowledged that there was a problem with the book.
To remedy the problem, Szuter wrote, the press intended to "redesign the cover and rewrite the cover copy, change the authorship from Josephine Earp to Glenn Boyer, and add a publisher's note regarding sources used in the book." A puzzling response, says Barra, who was furious that a scholarly press, or any press for that matter, could be so cavalier with such fundamental issues as authorship and the authenticity of sources. Change it to "I Married Wyatt Earp" by Glenn Boyer? "Is that not tantamount to an admission of fraud?" asks Barra. "How can you say for 23 years that a book is a memoir, let it be used as a primary source for historians, and then say all of a sudden that it is fictional and that everyone should have known it was fictional all along? Can anyone offer any parallel for this?"
Even more troubling than Szuter's proposed solution is the fact that in the past month the University of Arizona has instituted a media blackout on the subject of Boyer and has referred all questions about "I Married Wyatt Earp" to university lawyers. University of Arizona attorney Mike Proctor confirmed that "a full review" of the "publication issues" surrounding the book was under way, but that no one at the press or the university would speak on the matter. "That is solely because of inaccurate media coverage, no other reason," noted an obviously peeved Proctor. "I have been very open up to the point where we got burned and now we just can't go there."
Proctor would not say on the record who in the media had "burned" the university or what "publication issues" his office is delving into. But he did angrily single out one publication for misreporting information: the Daily Wildcat, the student newspaper of the University of Arizona. Contrary to what that paper reported, says Proctor, his office would not be reviewing Boyer's questionable sources. "I am not qualified to look at sources, I am a lawyer." So what is Proctor looking at if not claims that the author fudged his sources? "I am just looking at our entire file on the book, start to finish, trying to identify objectively publication issues, and then work toward the best resolution of those issues." Would charges of academic fraud and creating fictional source material be considered publication issues? Proctor would not say. "Sorry, but you're all getting the same thing. No comment."
"A public university refusing to talk to the press? Richard Nixon would be proud," says Casey Tefertiller a Bay Area journalist and the author of "Wyatt Earp: The Man Behind the Legend" (John Wiley and Sons, 1997). Like Barra, Tefertiller has been a vocal critic of the university and Boyer. "If you feel you have been misrepresented in the press, you don't institute a blackout, you insist on a correction. For a journalist, all a blackout does is hint that there is a story there after all."
According to Los Angeles New Times reporter Tony Ortega, who was a reporter in Phoenix in 1998, there definitely is a story. Ortega is the man credited by many with blowing the cover off "I Married Wyatt Earp" in a 1998 series of articles in the Phoenix New Times by doing what many critics of Boyer had not the time or the stomach to do. Tipped off by Barra to the increasingly bizarre controversy brewing in his backyard, Ortega visited Boyer in the summer of 1998 at his sprawling Arizona ranch. There he learned that Boyer could not, indeed, produce the source material he claimed to possess, specifically, the disputed Clum manuscript.
Ortega then contacted the University of Arizona Press and filed a public records request to view its files and correspondence on the matter. He was taken aback by the press reaction to his request. "They treated me as this hostile enemy," says Ortega. "I was just doing my job, asking simple questions." After much stalling, Ortega was eventually permitted to look at the files. It was then, he recalls, that the bunker mentality of the press finally made sense.
"That's really where the smoking gun was," says Ortega. "It was bad enough that Boyer was admitting to me that he was including all these things that Josephine Earp hadn't actually done herself, but here were the documents to show that the University of Arizona Press was asking Boyer to embellish things. It was clear that the University of Arizona Press not only knew his sources were suspect, but they encouraged him to embellish."
Critics charge that the bizarre, often conflicting defenses offered by Boyer should have sent a up a red flag to University Press officials that something was amiss from the very beginning. According to respected Western historian Gary Roberts, a professor at Abraham Baldwin College in Georgia, Boyer has often claimed that he can produce every shred of the documentation that he claims to have, but somehow he never does. Boyer has also at times advanced the strange notion that his work engages in "terminological inexactitude," a tactic involving a hidden gauntlet of purposely laid-out misinformation within his books intended to trap sloppy historians. And finally, Boyer himself has admitted that he is not a historian at all but a "novelist, and a damn good one," engaged in the art of "creative nonfiction."
And then there are Boyer's wild personal attacks against those who question his work. "Boyer has accused almost everyone involved in this saga of homosexuality, pedophilia, rape or drunkenness," says Tefertiller, who has been on the receiving end of more than a few Boyer attacks. "He accused Allen Barra of being fat."
Now there's an author a university press can hang its 10-gallon hat on. But is the University of Arizona Press really staking its reputation on a work of creative nonfiction and on an author who replies to questions of scholarship with crude innuendo?
"Not true," says Boyer, claiming he never intimated that his detractors were homosexual. "But I did refer to them as the Peter Pan patrol, because they are bunch of little boys that don't want to grow up," Boyer admits. "I did say that there is so much smoke regarding people involved in this being homosexuals, whether they are or not, that it's worthy of an inquiry. If this is true, are these people for some reason fascinated with Wyatt Earp? I'm just wondering that in the larger sense. Because they are all so sensitive. But these are all people who have never been married. But that has nothing to do with it."
For all this, Boyer is a friendly, rather charming man. When asked if he has been notified by the University of Arizona that his book is under review, he chuckles modestly. "I'm aware of what they're doing," he says. But he refuses to say how he learned of this. "I'm not going to get into that, because I don't want to embarrass their position." A figure who is as much revered as he is loathed within the small but fervent community of "Earpists," Boyer is clearly tired of the controversy. "Are you familiar with the concept of creative nonfiction?" he asks.
The question recalls the stir surrounding Edmund Morris'"Dutch," a fiction-infused biography of Ronald Reagan, which dominated the books pages this summer. But unlike Boyer, Morris and his publisher made the delineation between fiction and nonfiction in "Dutch" clear from the very start. If historians were dismayed to learn that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Morris had introduced fictional elements into his authorized biography, they at least were in no danger of incorporating his fiction into their historical research. Readers of "I Married Wyatt Earp" are left with a nagging question: How much of the book is the work of Josephine Earp and how much is the concoction of Boyer?
"The author is both of us," replies Boyer. "This is the way I represented it from the beginning. If the university did anything differently then that's their problem." So why then would the University of Arizona Press choose to publish the book as a work of history, rather than as a work of creative nonfiction? "There wasn't any such genre at that time," says Boyer. "And I can show you where they wanted to change what I said and call me the collector and editor. That puts it on an arty plane. That was their decision. If they had listed me as the author I wouldn't have been surprised, but there was so much Josephine in there and other sources that you could say we're co-authors."
Is one of these "other sources" Boyer refers to the disputed Clum manuscript? Does it exist after all? Did Josephine Earp detail her life to Tombstone resident John Clum, who wrote her memories down, as Boyer once contended, or is the invention of fictional sources part of the ruse involved in making "creative nonfiction"? "Why am I compelled to tell the truth about a manuscript like that that is worth a lot of money?" Boyer continues. "I may have it and I may not. That's none of your business." At this point Boyer asks if I am free to travel. If I were to travel to his ranch, I ask, would I be able to see the Clum manuscript? "You'd see a lot of stuff," Boyer replies. But would I see the Clum manuscript?
"No," Boyer finally answers. "You'd see what amounts to the Clum manuscript. I still have a ton of stuff I'm trying to organize." And this "stuff," is that how he represented the Clum manuscript to the University of Arizona Press?
"You bet your ass," Boyer replies. "The Clum manuscript is a generic term and I've said it over and over."
"If you want to take a whole bunch of stuff, including primary sources, and write a novel, that is perfectly legitimate," says Barra when asked about Boyer's "creative nonfiction" claim. "But this book has always been represented as the memoir of Josephine Earp. The copyright is registered in her name with the Library of Congress. It says right there in the author's note that this was spliced together using the Clum manuscript."
Today, "I Married Wyatt Earp" continues to sell, and it ranks as the fourth-best-selling book in the history of the University of Arizona Press. But critics question whether relatively modest yearly sales could possibly have factored into the press' decision to stand by the book for all these years, especially as the controversy has intensified. Just how did the University of Arizona Press allow matters to get to this point? Doesn't a scholarly press have a grave responsibility to investigate charges of academic fraud? Should it not have recognized this responsibility immediately?
"We have been reviewing the situation and digging into our files more deeply than probably most people will think," claims Proctor, the University of Arizona attorney, "all with an aim toward doing the right thing. It's just difficult to reconstruct things at this point. What we do now is look at our body of knowledge and react based on that."
But critics of the press aren't buying it. "Once they looked into this, it's impossible for them not to see what everyone, and I mean everyone, has seen -- that there is an obvious piece of fraud here," says Barra. "From the outset, the University of Arizona Press and the University of Arizona have been totally uncooperative in dealing with this. They should have been calling us and saying, 'We seem to be having this problem; can you help us straighten this out?' Instead they chose to attack us."
Historians agree that the press has put its integrity on the line by allowing Boyer's bogus Tombstone account to enter the mainstream of Western history under the imprimatur of a scholarly press. "I Married Wyatt Earp" has been adopted in history classes and has found its way into the bibliographies of a number of works of serious history. For that, the University of Arizona Press may have to face a dose of frontier justice. "I know that I would never use another University of Arizona Press book again without some way to corroborate it," says Barra.
But most damaging, critics contend, is that the university, like Boyer himself, chose to attack its critics, close its doors and look at ethically unsound publishing options rather than conduct an open, scholarly inquiry to get to the truth, as would be consistent with the mission of a university press. In doing that, the University of Arizona has alienated authors and scholars. While nearly everyone involved in this saga thinks that the University of Arizona Press will eventually be forced to drop "I Married Wyatt Earp" after it completes what one observer has called a behind-closed-doors "show trial," the damage to credibility highlighted by this scandal will remain.
"At one point I think this could've quietly gone away," says historian Gary Roberts, "I don't know if it can now."
