Gunfight at O.K. Corral: Lawmen Meet Outlaws in Legend

Thirty seconds of gunfire in a vacant lot near Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881, produced the most famous shootout in the history of the American West, though nearly everything the public believes about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is wrong, starting with the name. The fight did not take place at the O.K. Corral but in a narrow alley next to C.S. Fly's photography studio, roughly six doors west of the corral's rear entrance on Fremont Street. Town Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and their ally Doc Holliday walked down Fremont Street shortly after 3:00 p.m. to confront a group of Cowboys, the loosely organized faction of cattlemen and rustlers who had been feuding with the Earps for months. Ike and Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury were waiting in the lot. The two groups faced each other at a distance of roughly six feet. What happened next remains disputed despite more than a century of scholarship. The Earps claimed they were attempting a lawful disarmament under Tombstone's ordinance against carrying weapons in town. The Cowboys' allies insisted the Earps fired without warning. Roughly thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were killed. Virgil, Morgan, and Holliday were wounded. Wyatt was untouched. Ike Clanton, who was unarmed, fled at the first shot. The aftermath was more consequential than the fight itself. Ike Clanton filed murder charges against the Earps and Holliday. Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer conducted a 30-day hearing and ruled the killings justified. But the Cowboys retaliated: gunmen ambushed Virgil in December 1881, permanently crippling his left arm, and assassinated Morgan in March 1882, shooting him through the glass door of a billiard hall. Wyatt Earp then embarked on a vendetta ride, tracking down and killing several suspected Cowboys before fleeing Arizona Territory with warrants outstanding. The gunfight was largely forgotten until Stuart Lake's fictionalized biography of Wyatt Earp was published in 1931. Hollywood adopted the story enthusiastically, and the O.K. Corral became an American myth about frontier justice. The real story was messier: a local power struggle between competing factions in a mining boomtown, settled not by law but by bullets and revenge.