Gunfights and killings were news in Tombstone, Arizona but not headline news. One town paper had a regular column for such things titled ‘Death’s Doings’; the paper itself was mordantly named The Tombstone Epitaph. Not gallows humour exactly; trigger-finger humour, perhaps.
Justice was rough to non-existent in the post-Civil War American south west. A bank robber named John Heath, who gave up associates and escaped execution, was dragged from prison and hanged from a telegraph pole. The town coroner recorded cause of death as “emphysema… a disease common to high altitudes”.
But this gunfight, on October 26 1881, was different. Eight men, three dead, three more wounded. In the street. In the middle of the afternoon. ‘Three Men Hurled Into Eternity in the Duration of a Moment’ was the Epitaph’s headline. Two of the dead, Tom and Frank McLaury, were brothers; the third, Billy Clanton, was still in his teens.
From the beginning, what happened was disputed. On the side of the law – in theory at least – town marshall Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and a friend: John Henry ‘Doc’ Holliday – gambler, gunslinger, sometime dentist. On the other, four cattle rustlers and bandits known locally as ‘The Cowboys’. Many in town thought the killings no more than murder: three hundred citizens followed the funeral cortege to the cemetery the following day; some two thousand lined the route. The Earps and Holliday stood trial but were acquitted.
It seems apt that the gunfight took place not outside the OK Corral but in a vacant lot beside a photographer’s studio. Although news of the killings reached as far as San Francisco, it is film that made it famous.
Wyatt Earp alone lived to shape public memory. He was in Hollywood himself by 1915; he met Charlie Chaplin and a young John Wayne. He is reportedly somewhere in the crowd scenes in Douglas Fairbanks’ The Half-Breed, indistinct, already fading into myth.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the October 2023 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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