1881 It took place in nowheresville between two buildings (not in the O.K. Corral), yet it went down in the popular memory as the most famous gunfight in the Old West. On one side were the ‘cowboys’ who came into town to raise hell from time to time. On the other were the federal marshal, Virgil Earp, his brothers Morgan and Wyatt, and a gambler called Doc Holliday. After 30 seconds it was all over. Three of the cowboys lay dead in the dust, Frank and Tom McLaury and the hot-headed Billy Clanton. Morgan, Virgil and Doc Holliday were wounded, Wyatt unscathed. From that his reputation as a gunslinger took its start.
Who shot first? Who, apart from the marshal and his ‘deputies’, was armed? Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury had been seen flaunting revolver belts, but others of the cowboys had been disarmed in pursuance of a town ordinance requiring everyone entering the area to check their guns and bowie knives at the hotel or livery stable – wherever they first dismounted.
Despite these lingering doubts, the gunfight became the stuff of legend, revisited in over 25 books, movies, TV series and documentaries. The popular culture, while maintaining a hint of Wyatt’s moral ambivalence, posed it as the paradigm conflict between civilisation and barbarism, law ’n’ order as against unruly ‘thugs and cattle thieves’ (to quote one movie’s plot summary).
The pattern was set by the classic film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Hal Wallis, 1957). ‘Here the outlaw band / Made their final stand’, as the tuneful soundtrack had it, and Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, as Wyatt and the Doc, were there to meet them. In Tombstone (1993), the costumes were period, the shooting balletic, and everyone nasty. A year later, Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp cast Kevin Costner as the romantic hero caught in the tragic dilemma of having to fight dirty to defeat evil.
It took a lot longer for the myth to get deconstructed, and it took the print medium – in the hands of probably the best novelist to come out of the West – to do it. Larry McMurtry’s Telegraph Days (2006) only brushes past the O.K. Corral as one of Nellie Courtright’s many picaresque adventures. She’s a sort of Jack Crabb (see 24 June) who doesn’t just meet and interact with all the legendary figures of the Old West, but goes to bed with them too.
What all these versions of the story leave out – whether inflating or deflating – are the economics behind the fight. The cowboys weren’t just thugs raising hell in the town’s saloons; they were ranchers come in to sell their stock and get supplies. The Earps and their like were city people, easterners, Yankee capitalists, congenitally hostile (ever since the Civil War) to the ranchers’ values and way of living. In Tombstone the conflict wasn’t metaphysical; it was political.