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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 26, 1881
Tombstone, Arizona Territory, USA
145 years ago
The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the thirty-second shootout in Tombstone on October 26, 1881, between lawmen led by Virgil Earp and members of a loose band of outlaws known as the Cowboys.
At about three in the afternoon on Wednesday, October 26, 1881, four men in long dark coats walked down Fremont Street in the silver-mining boomtown of Tombstone. They were the town marshal, Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, whom he had deputized, and their friend John Henry 'Doc' Holliday, a tubercular dentist turned gambler carrying a shotgun under his coat. They were on their way to disarm a group of men who had been making threats around town all day and were carrying weapons in violation of a local ordinance.
They found Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne in a narrow vacant lot beside C.S. Fly's boarding house and photography studio. The two groups stood perhaps six feet apart. Virgil called on the Cowboys to give up their arms. Who fired first has been argued ever since. About thirty shots were exchanged in about thirty seconds. When the smoke cleared, Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were dead or dying. Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded, Holliday was grazed, and Wyatt was untouched. Ike Clanton, who had done most of the threatening, had run away unarmed at the first shot.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Wyatt Earp, the gambler, saloonkeeper, and sometime lawman who survived the gunfight unhurt, outlived everyone else involved, and became the central figure of its legend.
The shooting took place on Fremont Street, around the corner from the rear entrance of the O.K. Corral, a livery stable the men had walked through. The catchier name was attached later. The feud behind it mixed politics, business, and personal grudges. The Earps were Northern-born Republicans allied with the town's mining and commercial interests. The Cowboys were mostly Southern Democrats, ranchers and rustlers who ran stolen Mexican cattle and were suspected of stagecoach robberies. A failed secret deal between Wyatt Earp and Ike Clanton over reward money had left Ike terrified of exposure and drinking heavily in the days before the fight.
Tombstone was split over whether it had been law enforcement or murder. The dead men were displayed in a hardware store window under a sign reading 'Murdered in the Streets of Tombstone.' Ike Clanton filed murder charges, and after a month-long hearing Judge Wells Spicer ruled that the Earps and Holliday had acted within the law, though he criticized Virgil's judgment in choosing his deputies. The Cowboys took their own revenge. In December Virgil was ambushed and lost the use of his left arm. In March 1882 Morgan was shot dead through the window of a billiard hall. Wyatt then led a posse on what became known as the Vendetta Ride, killing several men he held responsible, before leaving Arizona for good with a murder warrant behind him.
At the time the gunfight was a regional news story, soon forgotten. Wyatt Earp drifted through mining camps and boomtowns from Idaho to Alaska and ended up in Los Angeles, where he befriended early Western film actors and tried for years to get his story told. He died in 1929 at eighty. Two years later a highly embellished biography, Stuart Lake's Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, turned him into a national hero. Hollywood did the rest, with My Darling Clementine in 1946, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957, Tombstone in 1993, and dozens of others. Tombstone today stages a reenactment of the fight several times a day.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The gunfight became the defining story of the Wild West. The image of lawmen walking down a dusty street to face outlaws comes largely from this one event as retold by Hollywood, and it has shaped how the world pictures the American frontier.
The reality was murkier than the legend. The Earps were gamblers and saloon investors as well as lawmen, the dispute was as much political and economic as moral, and contemporaries were sharply divided over who was in the right. Historians still are.
It shows how popular culture manufactures history. A half-minute street fight, largely forgotten for fifty years, became world famous through one admiring biography and a run of films, a reminder that what is remembered often depends on who tells the story last.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 26, 1881, nine men faced each other across a vacant lot in an Arizona mining town, and thirty seconds later three of them were dead. It was not at the O.K. Corral, and nobody at the time agreed on who the heroes were. Wyatt Earp lived long enough to meet the movie people, and that turned out to matter more than anything that happened that afternoon.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Three Men Hurled Into Eternity in the Duration of a Moment.”
— Headline in the Tombstone Epitaph, October 27, 1881
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, the Clantons and McLaurys, the Vendetta Ride, and how Hollywood built the legend?
