The Gunfight Behind the O K Corral
Near Tombstone, Arizona
Stand on Fremont Street and you are steps from the most famous thirty seconds in the history of the American West. On the afternoon of October twenty sixth, eighteen eighty one, tension that had been building for months between the town lawmen and a loose band of ranchers and rustlers called the Cowboys finally broke. Town Marshal and Deputy United States Marshal Virgil Earp, along with his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and their friend, the gambler and dentist Doc Holliday, walked down to confront Ike and Billy Clanton and the brothers Tom and Frank McLaury.
Under a town ordinance, carrying firearms inside the limits was illegal, and Virgil meant to disarm them. Here is the detail that surprises almost everyone. The gunfight did not happen inside the O K Corral at all.
It erupted in a narrow vacant lot beside a photography studio run by a man named Camillus Fly, along Fremont Street, several doors west of the corral's back entrance. The two groups stood only a few feet apart, close enough to reach out and touch one another. No one is certain who fired first, and that question has been argued for more than a century.
What is certain is that in roughly thirty seconds, around thirty shots tore through the cold afternoon air. When the smoke cleared, Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers lay dying. Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded, and Doc Holliday was grazed along the hip.
Ike Clanton, who had loudly threatened the Earps the night before, was unarmed at the crucial moment and ran for cover. Wyatt Earp walked away without a scratch. The reckoning was not over.
Sheriff Johnny Behan, who sided with the Cowboys, charged the Earps and Holliday with murder. A month long hearing followed before Judge Wells Spicer, who ruled that the men had acted within the law and set them free. But the verdict settled nothing.
Within months the feud would turn to ambush and vengeance in these very streets. The thirty seconds you are standing near did not end the trouble in Tombstone. It lit the fuse.
