Meghan McCain

One hundred and forty five years ago today, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, four men walked down Fremont Street and about thirty seconds later three men were dead. It did not happen at the O.K. Corral. It happened in a narrow vacant lot beside a photography studio belonging to a man named C.S. Fly. The back entrance of the O.K. Corral was roughly six doors away. The fight was never in it or next to it. Nobody called it the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral at the time either. The event was barely known outside Arizona until Stuart Lake's heavily fictionalized Wyatt Earp biography in 1931, and the name everybody uses comes from a Burt Lancaster movie in 1957. The real dispute was not lawmen against outlaws in any clean way. It was factional, and the factions were about as sharp as they get in a town of a few thousand people. The Earps were Republicans and Northerners, tied to the town, the mining money, and the Tombstone Epitaph. The Cowboys were rural, Southern-sympathizing ranchers with a profitable side business in rustling and stolen horses, tied to county sheriff Johnny Behan and the Tombstone Nugget. Two parties, two newspapers, two economies, one small town. The legal hook was Ordinance 9, passed in April 1881, which made it illegal to carry a deadly weapon inside Tombstone without a written permit. You checked your gun when you came into town. The night before, Ike Clanton got drunk, picked a fight with Doc Holliday, and then spent hours telling anybody who would listen that he was going to kill the Earps. Virgil Earp, the town marshal, played poker with him until dawn. The next afternoon Virgil walked up behind Ike, pistol-whipped him, and dragged him in front of a judge, who fined him twenty five dollars. Witnesses said Wyatt told Ike he was going to have to fight. Ike said, "Fight is my racket, and all I want is four feet of ground." Behan then told the Earps he had already disarmed the Clantons and McLaurys. He had not. He later testified that he had only said he intended to. So Virgil, Morgan and Wyatt Earp walked down Fremont Street, with Doc Holliday, who Virgil had temporarily deputized and handed a shotgun. Here is the part the movies tend to skip. It is not clear that every man they shot was armed. Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury certainly were. Ike Clanton said he was unarmed, ran into Fly's building, and survived. Behan testified that Tom McLaury opened his coat to show he had no gun on him. The witness accounts conflict, and they have conflicted for a hundred and forty five years. Roughly thirty shots in roughly thirty seconds. Dead: Billy Clanton, who was nineteen years old. Tom McLaury. Frank McLaury. Wounded: Virgil, Morgan, and Holliday. Wyatt Earp was not touched. And then the town made its opinion clear. The funeral for the three dead men was described by the Epitaph as about the largest Tombstone had ever seen. The town brass band led it. People packed the sidewalks for three or four blocks. Ike Clanton filed murder charges. Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer opened a preliminary hearing on October 31 that ran more than a month. On November 30 he ruled there was not enough evidence to indict, and that the Earps and Holliday had acted within the law. He also called Virgil's decision to deputize Wyatt and Holliday an injudicious and censurable act. A grand jury agreed with him. Legally it was finished. Actually it had just started. On December 28, 1881, around 11:30 at night, three men fired buckshot at Virgil Earp from an unfinished building across Allen Street and destroyed his left arm. He carried it in a sling the rest of his life. On March 18, 1882, around ten minutes to eleven at night, Morgan Earp was shot through a glass door while playing billiards. The round broke his spine and he was dead inside an hour. A second shot buried itself in the ceiling just above where Wyatt was standing. Two days later Wyatt started killing people, and over the following week his posse shot Frank Stilwell, Florentino Cruz, Curly Bill Brocius and Johnny Barnes. Five of the Earp party ended up wanted for murder in Arizona. They left the territory and never came back. Thirty seconds on Fremont Street is the part that got the movie. The five months afterward are what it actually cost. Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers are buried together in Boothill, under a marker that reads "Murdered in the Streets of Tombstone." And the photographer whose empty lot they died in took their portrait afterward, laid out in their caskets, which is the reason you can still look at their faces.