What really happened at the OK Corral? I’ve consulted a couple history books, and they don’t even mention it, yet it’s the stuff of Wild West legend. My suspicion is that it was far tamer than the kind of thing that goes on in some parts of my own city, yet it’s been in a whole bunch of movies and even an episode of Star Trek. What’s the real story on Wyatt Earp? –Stephanie Faul, Washington, D.C.
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Three men died at the OK Corral, Steph, and three others were wounded. Not my idea of tame, even by D.C. standards. Exactly what happened between Earp and friends and the rival Clanton gang on October 26, 1881, will never be known. The shootout took less than 30 seconds. Eyewitness and newspaper accounts and later trial testimony were highly partisan and contradictory. Vilified at the time, the Earp bloc got the upper hand in the long-term public-relations war on the strength of an adulatory biography of Wyatt that appeared two years after his death, in 1929. TV writers subsequently created the myth of Wyatt Earp the righteous western hero. But many have always regarded him as a murderer.
The trail of events that led to the face-off between the Earps and the Clanton-McLowry crowd is tangled. In March 1881 a gang attacked a stagecoach and killed the driver. Doc Holliday was friends with one of the principal suspects and was rumored to have pulled the trigger. A reward having been offered, Wyatt offered a deal to Ike Clanton: Ike could have the money if he’d betray the bandits, who were friends of the Clantons. Ike later testified he refused; Earp supporters say he didn’t, and that he went gunning for Wyatt later for fear his treachery would be revealed.
