Silver town became famous for lead

Shootout at the OK Corral

The weather had turned cold in Tombstone, Arizona, but things were about to heat up. In October 1881 (140 years ago this month) two cowboys, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury, came to town and set in motion the events that would lead up to the most famous showdown in the period known as the “Wild West” - the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

On one side of the fight, the cowboys, were a group of men who made their living on the land, partly from stealing horses, rustling cattle, taking part in robberies and other criminal activities. On the other side was a group of men that included Virgil Earp, a US Marshal for Pima County, who had sworn in his brothers Wyatt and Morgan as temporary lawmen along with their associate, a dentist, gunslinger and gambler named John “Doc” Holliday, and were not above indulging in their own illegal activities.

Although it has been the subject of numerous films and TV shows, as well as dozens of books, and is a huge tourist drawcard for the town of Tombstone, the actual shootout only lasted a mere 30 seconds, although the events that led to it stretched back months and it resulted in months of inquiries and legal action. It was also not actually at the corral but mostly in a nearby vacant lot.

While many films have depicted it as a fight between outlaws and those who had sworn to uphold the law, it was not as simple as a showdown between the good guys and bad guys. This was not just a fight about enforcing the law, at best it was a fight over conflicting perceptions of what was lawful and what was justice. But it has come to represent the kind of lawlessness that prevailed in frontier towns in the US in the late 19th century.

The argument began with a group of men who belonged to a sort of local gang, known by some as the Cochise County Cowboys, although it was probably not what they called themselves. At the time being called a cowboy was no badge of honour. It referred to the sort of itinerant workers who sometimes did legitimate labour as farm and ranch hands, or drovers of livestock, but who mostly drifted around occasionally dabbling in crime to keep themselves fed and getting into trouble with people who saw them as a threat to good order.

The Clanton clan, father Newman and his sons Ike and Billy were at the heart of a group of cowboys who were trying to make a place for themselves as ranchers and cattle farmers, while still keeping their hand in other suspect sidelines, like robbing stagecoaches. Among their close accomplices were gambler Billy Claiborne and brothers Tom and Frank McLaury.

The cowboys lived on ranches outside the Town of Tombstone, a town founded in 1877 that had grown rapidly over its short life because of a boom in silver mining in the area. This had brought about a divide between those dependent on mining and the businesses that thrived because of it and the ranchers in the area who were trying to make their living off the land (but there were also some ranchers who found the movement of silver and money rich pickings for some of their sideline ventures). The cowboys often found that their interests were thwarted by other powerful figures in the town, particularly lawmen, like the Earps, working on behalf of the businessmen in Tombstone. A city ordinance banning people from carrying guns or large knives in town gave lawmen an opportunity to search and, if they found good reason, detain or eject any cowboy who wandered into Tombstone. For the gun-loving cowboys this was another reason to resent the power of some of the more overbearing lawmen like Wyatt.

Virgil, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, had come to Tombstone in 1879. Virgil had been appointed a marshal, but Wyatt was trying to leave his past as a lawman behind and try to establish himself as a businessman. When his venture running a stagecoach failed, he tried to return to policing, but was beaten out of the job of Sheriff of the recently created Cochise County, which included Tombstone, by John Behan, who tended to side with the cowboys.

Earlier in 1881 a stagecoach robbery had taken place, the Earps believed the Cochise County Cowboys were behind it, while the Clantons tried to implicate the Earps. The Earps cut a deal with the Clantons and McLaurys that they would turn in some suspects in the robbery, be allowed to keep the money, and allow Wyatt to take the glory for capturing the robbers.

But the suspects Clanton named ended up dead before the Earps could catch them and Ike Clanton and the others feared that the Earps would reveal the secret that they had turned snitch. Ike and Tom went to Tombstone on October 25, 1881, ostensibly to get supplies for their ranch and to arrange to sell some of their cattle, but also intending to confront the Earps over the details of their deal, to make sure they had not revealed the secret to their friend Doc Holliday. A drunk Ike confronted Holliday at a saloon and a heated argument grew but it was broken up by Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil. But Clanton warned Wyatt and Holliday he would come for them in the morning. Fortunately the ordinance banning people from carrying guns prevented the argument becoming a gunfight.

But the next day, October 26, Ike collected his guns from the West End Corral and went looking for Holiday. Virgil caught Ike with his weapons and clocked him over the head from behind with his pistol. Clanton was arrested and taken before a justice of the peace to be fined for violating the city ordinance.

Outside the courthouse, while Ike was being fined, Wyatt, acting as an unpaid deputy for Virgil met Tom McLaury in the street and pistol whipped him when he saw that McLaury was carrying a pistol.

Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury heard what had happened to their brothers and were enraged. They met up with Ike and Tom and were seen at a gun and hardware store buying cartridges for their rifles before they headed toward the OK Corral, a place where horses were kept while people were visiting town. One theory is that the OK is short for Old Kindersley, apparently Kindersley was the name of a past owner.

The Clantons and the McLaurys and their accomplice Billy Claiborne headed out of the back of the corral toward a vacant lot near a boarding house and photographic studio owned by photographer C.S. Fly. The boarding house was where Doc Holliday kept a room.

The Earps and Holliday headed toward the lot to confront the cowboys. Before the Earps and Holliday arrived, Behan had tried, unsuccessfully, to disarm the cowboys and had told Wyatt he had asked for their guns, which the Earps assumed meant that they had been disarmed. So when they confronted the cowboys, they realised too late that there would be a gunfight.

Virgil tried to get the Clantons, McLaurys and Claiborne to drop their weapons but the cowboys refused unless the Earp group did the same. Shooting broke out, while some insist that Wyatt fired first it seems that he fired simultaneously with Billy Clanton, setting off a series of blasts. Virgil was the best shot, continuing to empty his guns even after taking a shot to the leg.

Most movies drag out the length of the fight and don’t give a good idea of the rapid chaos and confusion of that thirty seconds. The guns they had would have used black powder, which would have created a cloud of smoke that obscured much of what was going on. The guns were also not very accurate over a long distance so the action would have had to have been close up.

At the end of those thirty seconds Billy Clanton and both McLaurys were dead, and Virgil, Morgan and Doc were all wounded. Behan had stood back for most of the fight, but soon rushed in to disarm those left standing.

Behan charged the Earp brothers and Holliday with murder. But they were later found not guilty. Ike tried for months afterwards to gain some justice through the courts and an inquiry was held, but the Earps were found to have acted legally. No one was ever put in prison for what happened. Virgil was badly injured and his arm crippled in an assassination attempt in December 1881, and Morgan killed in March 1882. Wyatt tracked down and killed three suspects after one was released by the courts. Claiborne was shot dead in an argument in a Tombstone saloon in November 1882 and Ike was shot dead by lawman Jonas Brighton while resisting arrest after he was caught stealing cattle in 1887.

It took some time for the legend of the gunfight to grow. The first reports called it a “shootout near the OK Corral” because it had a better ring than “shootout in a vacant lot near the C.S. Fly boarding house”. But later reports opted to say it took place at the corral, for the sake of brevity and because “Gunfight at the OK Corral” had a poetry about it.

But it was anything but poetic for the participants. The war between the cowboys and the lawmen made the Earps unpopular in Tombstone, so Wyatt’s reputation took a beating for years until he decided to get his side of the story in print. It led to a 1931 bestselling biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, written by Stuart Lake, a former wrestling promoter and one time publicist for Teddy Roosevelt. Wyatt died in 1929, before seeing it in print, but it rescued his reputation. It depicted the shootout, which Lake called the “Gunfight at the OK Corral”, as a battle between lawless cowboys and brave lawmen trying to bring order to the frontier. It became the version of events that informed films such as My Darling Clementine and Gunfight at the OK Corral, and raised the violent encounter to legendary status. It made a town founded on a silver boom more famous for its 30 second expenditure of lead.