Guns Blaze In Blountville

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. – Showdown at the Deery Inn.
“Sometime today I will be killed by Wyatt Earp,” said Jeff Pierce of Elizabethton. Check that. That’s Pierce talking as Florentino “Indian Charlie” Cruz, a rangy varmint with treachery in his eyes.

Old West outlaws tangled with legendary lawmen in a quartet of gunfights staged Saturday in the street fronting the Deery Inn, all for Old West Day in Blountville.

Colt .45s drawn from holsters fired loud and righteous amid a myriad of shotgun and rifle blasts. Smoke flew. Folks hollered, and folks fell.

And watching from the sidewalk, folks such as Larry Branch of Blountville loved every gunsmoking second.

“I think this was a very good reenactment of how it was back then,” Branch said.

One of the time-traveling galoots was John Lyle as Phineas “Fin” Clanton of the notorious Clanton Gang. Dressed in black – hat, pants, coat, and you-bet attitude – he came prepared. One gun? Two? No, he came armed with three lawmen mowers. “Most desperadoes carried more than one gun,” Lyle said while clutching his shotgun and showing his two holstered Colts. “In a gunfight, you don’t have time to reload.”

Patrons, however, were allowed time to visit the Deery Inn during Old West Day. The centuries-old white-clapboard inn actually predates the Old West. Over its long history, such luminaries as Presidents Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, James K. Polk and Jimmy Carter visited the Deery Inn.

Sheila Steele Hunt, director of the Sullivan County Department of Archives and Tourism, stood in front of the inn and made sense of the staging if an Old West gunfight in front of a Southeastern landmark.

“Blountville was the gateway to the Old West,” Hunt said. Long before Lewis & Clark headed out from St. Louis, the Deery Inn was a major stagecoach stop on the way West.
“This is the first time we’ve done this,” she said of the gun fights. “It’s a way for people to come together and feel like they were part of the 1880s.”

That’s thanks to a couple dozen members of the 12th Cavalry and 61st Infantry re-enactment groups. They shed their Civil War garb, shifted ahead in time to 1881, and depicted Old West outlaws and lawmen.

Richard Northington of Fall Branch played outlaw Ike Clanton. He wore a ZZ Top junior beard, a flop-rimmed black hat, and a look that said look out.

Gunfight on.

Clanton cocked his shotgun, aimed and blew to bits one of his pursuers. OK, he used blanks, of course, but play along. His target fell like a hangman’s conquest – a dead man in the middle of the road was his end of the rope.

Lance and Peggi Harding of Blountville watched excitedly from their lawn chairs.

“This is entertaining. I’ve seen ‘Tombstone’ 25 times,” Lance Harding, 70, said, referring to the Hollywood movie. “I like the Old West. I think it was a safer time then than what we’re living in today.”
Safer, that is, except for those sad sacks on the wrong end of a load of Clanton lead.

“It’s fun,” said a grinning Northington. “It’s the only way I can walk around in public armed to the teeth and shoot my friends and have my friends shoot me.”

Grant W. Hardin, 70, of Hampton, Tenn., portrayed Doc Holliday, a good guy in cahoots with the lawmen about to gun down the outlaws of the Clanton gang.

But about that good guy thing. As with Wyatt Earp and most any lawmen of the day, they were not exactly church-going choirboys.
“No, sometimes it took somebody as mean as the outlaws were to take care of them,” Hardin said. “Wyatt Earp was a stone cold man with ice water in his veins.”
Ditto Doc Holliday. One look at Hardin as Holliday and yes, he wore a badge, but a well-played steely glint in his eye indicated a nefarious nature, too.

Details.
Some such as Hardin, who has appeared on The History Channel, wore clothing and toted shotguns not made to look as if from the 1880s but that are actually from the 1880s.
Authenticity matters, said Pierce as Cruz, moments before he met a bullet with Wyatt Earp’s name on it.
“It’s big,” Pierce said. “You have to play it as close as you possibly can. There’s always going to be someone who knows.”

Know this.
Under a blue East Tennessee sky, spurs on boots met the road outside the Deery Inn for a final showdown in the sun.
Eyes squinted. Hands flew to waists. Guns blazed.
The Clantons waged in vain their final gunfight with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, this one at the O.K. Corral by way of the Deery Inn.
“Lot of noise,” Branch said of the day’s gunfights. “They take you back in time.”

TOM NETHERLAND is a freelance writer. He can be reached at features@bristolnews.com.