OK Corral: Thirty Seconds and Two Centuries of Mythology
Near Tombstone, Arizona
The fight lasted approximately thirty seconds. Eight men, close range, a narrow vacant lot near the rear of the OK Corral on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona. When it was over, Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were dead. The Earp brothers and Doc Holliday were alive. It was October twenty-sixth, eighteen eighty-one, a Wednesday afternoon.
At the time, the Tombstone newspapers covered the inquest and the subsequent legal proceedings with considerable ambiguity about who was right. Wyatt Earp and his brothers were charged with murder before the charges were dropped. The civic situation in Tombstone in eighteen eighty-one was complicated: the Earps had aligned with the town's business and Republican interests while the Clanton and McLaury factions were associated with the ranching community and the Democratic county sheriff's office. The thirty seconds on Fremont Street was not an abstraction about law and order. It was a local political and economic conflict that ended in gunfire.
The mythology arrived later. A dime novel tradition had already made Western gunfights into moral allegories. In nineteen thirty-one, a journalist named Stuart Lake published a biography of Wyatt Earp based on interviews with Earp himself, a book that established the heroic frame. Hollywood then amplified it across decades of Westerns, television series, and several different actors playing Wyatt Earp as a lawman standing between chaos and civilization.
Subsequent scholarship has complicated every element of that frame. The Earps had business interests in Tombstone that the Clantons threatened. The legal aftermath was ambiguous. The town's politics were not a morality play. None of this appears on the souvenir T-shirts.
Three hundred thousand people visit Tombstone each year to see a reenactment of thirty seconds that has been retold so many times it bears only a general resemblance to what happened on that particular Wednesday. The town has built an industry on contested memory, which is itself an honest thing to say about the frontier.
