Today a real event was fictionalized.
The gunfight at the O.K. Corral is arguably the most famous Western shoot-’em-up story in American history, yet nobody outside of Tombstone, Arizona Territory knew about it for the first 50 years after it happened. There was a month-long local judicial hearing that was covered extensively by the Epithath and Nuggett newspapers, each favoring one side’s version of the event over the other, but their reporting of courtroom testimony was spotty, at best (none of the reporters knew shorthand). The story of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday standing up to the Clanton gang was most crafted in a fictionalized 1931 book entitled Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, written by Stuart Lake (he specialized in Old West dramas). Director John Ford would later develop the story into a movie, My Darling Clementine (in 1946), and John Sturges would create his own movie version of it, Gunfight At The O.K. Corral in 1957.
The actual event is far more complex and unsatisfying than the socialized version. First off, Wyatt wasn’t even the main player, but rather his brother, Virgil (who was the marshall when Wyatt was a sometimes deputy). There was a simmering conflict between the landed, or development interests (represented by the Earp clan, which had interests in mining and retail), and the free-ranger cowboys (embodied in the Clantons, who evidenced their philosophy through not just a little crime at the expense of said landed interests). When they met for the famous gunfight on this day in 1881, it was a spontaneous event that lasted all of 30 seconds (half of the participants ran away), prompted by the Earps’ attempt to relieve the Clantons of their weapons.
It resolved nothing, and the two clans would spend the next few years assassinating one another out of revenge.
