Larry McMurtry: The Charm and Violence of Tucson
[Larry McMurtry, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is the author of 30 novels, including "Lonesome Dove," "Terms of Endearment" and "The Last Picture Show." He lives in Tucson.]
The shooting of 19 innocents in Arizona, one of them a girl only 9 years old, brought forth a flood of commentary, raising questions not easily answered about the possible effect that overheated political invective might have on the least stable elements of the body politic....
It was from Tucson, in 1871, that the perpetrators of the Camp Grant massacre - more than 100 Apache women and children were clubbed to death - set out, and it was in Tucson that a hundred of the killers, at the insistence of President Ulysses S. Grant, were put on trial and acquitted in 19 minutes. The killers stole 27 Apache children, only six of whom were returned. This border has always been cruel....
The folks who run Tucson naturally do not want it compared to Tombstone, a mining community that, like other mining towns in Arizona, has always been hard. Tombstone, on Oct. 26, 1881, was the site of the most famous gunfight in American history - an accident, really. The three available Earp brothers - Morgan, Virgil and Wyatt - plus their friend Doc Holliday, merely wanted to run the troublesome Clantons out of town. But someone panicked, and the balloon, as we now say, went up.
Even so, only three people died, whereas Loughner alone accounted for six in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains....
Read entire article at WaPo
The shooting of 19 innocents in Arizona, one of them a girl only 9 years old, brought forth a flood of commentary, raising questions not easily answered about the possible effect that overheated political invective might have on the least stable elements of the body politic....
It was from Tucson, in 1871, that the perpetrators of the Camp Grant massacre - more than 100 Apache women and children were clubbed to death - set out, and it was in Tucson that a hundred of the killers, at the insistence of President Ulysses S. Grant, were put on trial and acquitted in 19 minutes. The killers stole 27 Apache children, only six of whom were returned. This border has always been cruel....
The folks who run Tucson naturally do not want it compared to Tombstone, a mining community that, like other mining towns in Arizona, has always been hard. Tombstone, on Oct. 26, 1881, was the site of the most famous gunfight in American history - an accident, really. The three available Earp brothers - Morgan, Virgil and Wyatt - plus their friend Doc Holliday, merely wanted to run the troublesome Clantons out of town. But someone panicked, and the balloon, as we now say, went up.
Even so, only three people died, whereas Loughner alone accounted for six in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains....