I SAW TWO-GUN BLUFFERS WHO DIDN'T LAST LONG

Editor's Note: Old West lawman and gunslinger Wyatt Earp was a regular in Denver before and after the legendary showdown at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. The following is based on an interview Earp gave in the early 20th Century.

By Wyatt Erp
Special to Daily Sketch

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 forty-five, 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.