Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City

by Robert Rebein

Overview

In Dragging Wyatt Earp essayist Robert Rebein explores what it means to grow up in, leave, and ultimately return to the iconic Western town of Dodge City, Kansas. In chapters ranging from memoir to reportage to revisionist history, Rebein contrasts his hometown’s Old West heritage with a New West reality that includes salvage yards, beefpacking plants, and bored teenagers cruising up and down Wyatt Earp Boulevard.

Along the way, Rebein covers a vast expanse of place and time and revisits a number of Western myths, including those surrounding Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, George Armstrong Custer, and of course Wyatt Earp himself. Rebein rides a bronc in a rodeo, spends a day as a pen rider at a local feedlot, and attempts to “buck the tiger” at Dodge City’s new Boot Hill Casino and Resort.

Funny and incisive, Dragging Wyatt Earp is an exciting new entry in what is sometimes called the nonfiction of place. It is a must- read for anyone interested in Western history, contemporary memoir, or the collision of Old and New West on the High Plains of Kansas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804040525
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	236
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Robert Rebein grew up in Dodge City, Kansas, where his family has farmed andranched since the late 1920s. A graduate of the Universityof Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis, as wellas England’s Exeter University, Rebein teaches creative writing and directs the graduate program in English at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis.

In addition to Dragging Wyatt Earp, he is the author of Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists, a study of the role of place in contemporary American fiction.

He lives in Irvington, on the east side of Indianapolis, Indiana, with his wife, Alyssa Chase, and their two children, Ria and Jake.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents Prologue Part I House on Wheels In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyared Dogs The Identity Factory Dragging Wyatt Earp Part II The Greatest Game Country on Earth Sisyphus of the Plains A Most Romantic Spot The Search for Quivira Part III Horse Latitudes Wild Horses Feedlot Cowboy How to Ride a Bronc Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

An affecting memoir of life in small-town Kansas…. For a young Rebein, the world of wrecked cars became a wonderland, and he writes lyrically of the things that turned up in them, from porn to lighters to photographs to ammunition…. A well-crafted work, and an all-too rare glimpse of daily life in rural America.”—Kirkus Reviews


“In many ways, (Rebein’s) experience mirrors that of a whole generation who grew up in rural places knowing that they would leave. And then they return as visitors to a place where they can’t stay, but can’t stay away from.”—Rex Buchanan, Kansas Public Radio


“Rebein…evocatively reconstructs what it was like growing up in Dodge in the 1970s and ‘80s as the farming and ranching economy soured. The result is a riveting meditation not just on the Old West versus the New West but on how to treat the past with reverence while refusing to become trapped by it.” —Reason.com


“Language and stories are two vital aspects of memoir. Dragging Wyatt Earp excels on both counts…. Rebein’s memoir gives us a chance to think about our own relationship with our own hometown, recall our own stories, our own dreams. The book helps us remember the things we treasured in our town, what we took away from that place and what we left behind.”—Emporia Gazette


“Charming, searching, and haunting all at once, this book makes me nostalgic for my own handful of years on the Great Plains.”—Bob Cowser, Jr., author of Green Fields


“‘We'd been raised for export,’ Rebein notes of his Dodge City upbringing. Yet this expatriate warmly merges his personal history with Dodge's history and culture to find his own place under the stars of the Great Plains of Western Kansas.”
— Thomas Fox Averill, author of rode

From the Publisher

An affecting memoir of life in small-town Kansas. Wyatt Earp's old haunt is still haunted by him, or at least some version of him, the heroic lawmaker that brings in tourists. Rebein (Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism, 2001) will have none of that: His Earp is "the greatest bouncer the West ever knew," a man skilled at rolling drunk cowboys and shaking down former Confederate soldiers. More than that, Earp lends his name to a strip of asphalt that runs through the heart of Dodge City, where drag racing and beer drinking formed the heart of Saturday night. Rebein's upbringing was eccentric but not particularly hard, by his account. His father was the master of the add-on and the remodeling project, but was otherwise fairly normal, though with twists. The owner of scrap heaps and habitué of body shops and other places where metal was king, he had a penchant for accumulating junkyard dogs, "all of them troubled in some way, unmanageable by anyone but him." For a young Rebein, the world of wrecked cars became a wonderland, and he writes lyrically of the things that turned up in them, from porn to lighters to photographs to ammunition. Elsewhere, he deconstructs aspects of small-town life on the Western plains, including the rodeo, which as a teenager he shunned as yet one more thing that spelled hick-dom but for which he has an older fellow's appreciation, and the casino, which has become a mainstay of Dodge City--and even more of a draw than the legend of Wyatt Earp. A minor but well-crafted work, and an all-too-rare glimpse of daily life in rural America.

Kirkus Reviews