The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

The case

The most famous gunfight in the American West did not happen at the O.K. Corral. It took place on the afternoon of 26 October 1881 in a vacant lot about fifteen to twenty feet wide beside C. S. Fly's photography studio on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, a few doors from the corral's back entrance. It lasted about thirty seconds. When the smoke cleared, Billy Clanton and the brothers Tom and Frank McLaury were dying, Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday were wounded, and Ike Clanton, whose drunken threats had done most to bring it about, had run away unhurt.

Tombstone was barely two years old and growing fast on silver. Its townspeople, merchants and mine owners looked to the Earp brothers. Virgil was town marshal and a deputy US marshal, and Wyatt and Morgan served under him. Out in the county, a loose fraternity of rustlers and smugglers called the Cowboys had the sympathy of many ranchers and of Sheriff Johnny Behan, Wyatt's political rival and his rival for the actress Josephine Marcus. Through 1881 friction built over stagecoach robberies, arrests of Cowboy associates and stolen stock. Ike Clanton had a particular fear: he had secretly discussed giving Wyatt information about stage robbers in exchange for reward money, and the Cowboys must not find out.

On the night of 25 October Ike quarrelled with Holliday in a saloon, then spent the rest of the night playing poker with Virgil, Behan and Tom McLaury. In the morning, still drinking and now armed in breach of a town ordinance against carrying weapons, he went about saying he would kill an Earp or Holliday on sight. Around one o'clock Virgil came up behind him and struck him with a pistol, and he was hauled before a justice of the peace and fined. Outside the courtroom Wyatt ran into Tom McLaury, demanded to know if he was armed, and pistol-whipped him. By early afternoon Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury had ridden in from the country, armed as riders always were, and joined their brothers. Witnesses saw them buying cartridges and heard threats against the Earps.

Virgil decided to disarm them. Behan met the Earps and Holliday as they walked down Fremont Street and told them, by their account, that he had disarmed the Cowboys; Behan later said he had only meant he had tried to. The lawmen came up to the lot. Virgil, holding Holliday's walking stick, called on the Cowboys to throw up their hands. Within moments two shots went off almost together, and then everyone was firing. Most historians follow the Earps' version that Billy Clanton and Wyatt fired first, Wyatt hitting Frank McLaury in the stomach; Holliday killed Tom McLaury with a shotgun blast to the chest. Ike grabbed Wyatt, protested that he was unarmed, and was told to fight or get away. He fled through Fly's building. Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton fought on, wounded, until both fell.

The case turned on one question: were the Cowboys resisting arrest or surrendering? Ike Clanton filed murder charges against all four lawmen. Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer held a preliminary hearing that ran from 31 October to the end of November. Behan, Ike and Billy Claiborne testified that the Cowboys had raised their hands or held open their coats and were shot down. For a time the prosecution case looked strong, and Spicer revoked bail and jailed Wyatt and Holliday for sixteen days. Then came witnesses with no stake in the feud: a railroad engineer new to town who saw Billy Clanton and Wyatt draw and fire, a dressmaker across the street who saw no hands raised, and a probate judge whose office overlooked the scene. The examining doctor added that Billy Clanton's wrist wound could not have been made with his hands in the air.

On 30 November Spicer ruled that Virgil had acted within his duty as marshal, that Wyatt and Holliday had been properly deputized, and that the evidence did not justify sending the case to trial. A grand jury declined to indict the lawmen a few weeks later. It did not end the feud. Virgil was ambushed and crippled in December, Morgan was shot dead through a saloon window in March 1882, and Wyatt answered with a ride of revenge that put him outside the law he had worn a badge for.