With Gun & Sewing Machine

THE EARP BROTHERS OF TOMBSTONE (247 pp.}--Frank Waters-- Clarkson N. Potter ($5).

In the legendary West, women are supposed to be out of place except possibly as dance-hall girls. In fact, social historians have built an entire theory of American male behavior (putting women on pedestals, etc.) on the notion that females were scarce and cherished in the old West. The theory is open to question. This book, for one, suggests that, in the West as elsewhere, behind the man behind the gun stood a little woman.

In the case of "Aunt Allie" Sullivan Earp, wife of Virgil, the little woman even had a sewing machine; she took it with her wherever the trigger-happy Earp brothers moved and, sneer as they might, she refused to give it up, even threatening to leave her husband rather than the machine. The money Aunt Allie earned by taking in sewing supported the whole Earp tribe much of the time, and not their gambling "br their holdups.

The Only Man. The dashing legend surrounding the Earp brothers--Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan--has been debunked before, but not from this special feminine viewpoint. That is what lends interest to this sagebrush history, based largely on the reminiscences of the late Allie Sullivan Earp, who sat down with Author Waters in 1936 to recall the days when her family's menfolk were the scourge of Tombstone, Ariz.

Born to poor Irish immigrants at a Mormon wagon stop in Nebraska, Allie Sullivan was a pert 17, working as a waitress, when tall, red-mustached Virgil Earp shambled into a Council Bluffs cafe for grub one day in 1864. "Virge was the only man I ever loved or got married to," recalls Allie. "For any woman one good man's plenty and one poor one's too many."

On the Town. In his own way, sullen, brooding Virgil Earp was plenty good to the woman he considered his wife. (Among other bits of Earpiana, Waters has discovered that Virgil and Allie never bothered with a wedding.) But over and over again, Allie's few belongings were packed into a Studebaker wagon as Virgil drifted west from Council Bluffs to Tombstone, where he joined forces with the rest of the Earp clan.

Allie knew only by hearsay of the men-folks' downtown gambling and gun toting, because the men always kept their women out of sight; to her, the legendary Tombstone years were primarily a time of waiting and worrying about whether Virgil would come home at night alive. Lodged at the edge of the Mexican quarter with the other Earp women--Bessie, wife of Jim Earp, a half brother; Wyatt's wife Mattie; and "Big Nose" Kate Elder, the Kansas prostitute who married an Earp sidekick, "Doc" Holliday--Allie sewed, cooked, gossiped and quarreled. Time and again, Allie and Mattie got tired of being cooped up while the men were on the town. Once they decided to explore the place themselves, and were promptly picked up. As Allie remembered it: "I ain't goin' to say who it was even now. We crossed our hearts never to tell and we never did, even after what happened. I wasn't sure what happened or just when, but our friend was given' us a sip of all different kinds of wines, fancy good ones in pretty bottles, and then it happened all right, all right."

The women got home eventually, and everything would have been all right, all right if Wyatt and Virgil had not been home earlier--for the first time in weeks --and made a row big enough to raise all the dead in Tombstone.

Toward the Sun. Eventually, the Earp men met their various grim ends. Aunt Allie herself lived on until 1947, a spry pioneer widow who entertained her friends with stories tall and small. "Nature's good to folks," she used to say. "They never remember the rain and the storm when the sun comes out. That's why at my funeral I don't want nothin' but heaps of sunflowers. They're so full of life, always turnin' their faces toward the sun."

Piecing out Allie's recollections with other pioneer recollections and his own archive diggings, Historian Waters has produced a flavorful, though poorly organized book that presents the Earps as little better than cow-country Capones. Yet, if he has deflated one dream, Waters, unlike most debunkers. has offered a pleasant vision in its place: that of a gay, gallant old lady in her rocking chair, dreaming of corn-tall buffalo grass and a dead, handsome lover.

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