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Issue: Spring 2004 Alumni Profile - Earl Chafin
That’s Mr. Earp to You! Earl Chafin ’54 was still a history student at USC in 1952 when he and his twin brother Carl decided that Wyatt Earp lore was, in Earl’s words, “all fouled up.” On October 26, 1881, Earp and his associates won a gunfight near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz. And that’s about the only thing Wyatt Earp historians can agree on.“I didn’t realize how much fakery there was until I got into it,” Chafin says. That realization drew Chafin into the Great Wyatt Earp Debate, where it seems everyone accuses the next guy of making it all up. To avoid the same charge, Chafin loaded his station wagon with a photocopier and set out to find every original document about Wyatt Earp and Tombstone he could. He copied census entries, birth certificates and witness accounts; court transcripts, diaries and business records. Armed with a ravenous interest and lots of hobby money from a successful career in industrial electronics sales, Chafin copied hundreds of source documents over 40 years. His brother contributed many more. After retiring in 1997, Chafin began self-publishing his collection. He is currently at 25 books, with another 10 to 15 in the works. Along the way, Chafin has become one of the world’s leading authorities on Wyatt Earp. “He’s one of many, but he has been I would say the most recently prolific, and probably contributed more to the field of Tombstone’s history than anybody else has ever done.” says Tom Peterson, director of the Southern Arizona Division of the Arizona Historical Society. The Earl Chafin Press is a no-frills operation with an emphasis on substance over style.“It’s not coffee table stuff, but there’s a great deal of information that he’s made available,” says Peterson. Nancy Sawyer, archivist at the Arizona State Archives, considers Chafin’s contribution important. “He’s helped research immensely because of the census information that he’s put together from Tombstone in the 1880s,” she says. Chafin’s clientele includes a few big names – the University of Arizona and Arizona State University both have complete sets of his tomes. But for the most part he sells to “300 to 400 Earp buffs around the country who buy everything I publish,” he explains. Though he’s no biographer, strictly a collector of source documents, Chafin has formed his own opinions about Wyatt Earp and voices them loudly on his Web site (www.wyattearpplace.com). The furious debates in the field boil down to whether Earp was a good guy or a bad guy; Chafin comes down firmly on the good-guy side. He spares no reputations in his defense of Earp, who he says was serving justice when he cut down the Clanton gang near the O.K. Corral. Chafin now spends all his time rehabilitating the reputation of the “fearless and courageous lawman” from a quiet home office in Riverside, Calif. “Finally I came to the conclusion that somebody had to defend Wyatt Earp,” he says. – Carl Marziali
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