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Robert Rebein

Robert Rebein teaches in the creative writing program at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis. He is the author of, among other works, Hicks, Tribes, & Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism (University of Kentucky Press, 2001). “Dragging Wyatt Earp” is the title piece of a series of essays that explore the concept of place through the juxtaposition of personal and regional history. Other essays in the series cover such figures as George Armstrong Custer, Chief Black Kettle, and Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, while at the same time documenting what it means to grow up and live in a place where history is at once invisible and omnipresent.

Dragging Wyatt Earp

Hear the words Dodge City, Kansas, these days and you’re apt to think, depending on your age, either of a moribund 1960s TV series—the wildly fictitious Gunsmoke, featuring Miss Kitty, Festus, and Marshal Matt Dillon—or else of a favorite phrase…