Speaking of shootouts in Arizona, 132 years ago today: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

[legcramp]

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was a gunfight that took place on October 26, 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona Territory of the United States. Despite its name, the gunfight did not actually take place at the O.K. Corral but in a vacant lot next to Camillus Fly's photography studio, six doors down Fremont Street from the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral. Although only three men were killed during the gunfight, it is generally regarded as the most famous gunfight in the history of the Old West.

The immediate cause of the conflict that led up to the fight was the arrest by Virgil Earp, acting in his capacity as deputy federal marshal, of two rural "cowboys" for a stagecoach robbery. Drunken threats made by another cowboy against the Earps set them on guard, and when family and friends of the drunken man arrived in town on horseback the next day, fully armed, there was a misunderstanding about how and where they should disarm according to city law. Within hours, both new arrivals were dead, as was a cowboy standing with them, who had illegally failed to surrender his pistol the previous day.

Same as it always was.

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Gunfight_at_the_O.K._Corral.html

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. Imagine the gall of those Earps, forcing gun control laws on those nice stage coach robbing,

second amendment protecting, cowboys.

[RagAss]

2. The fight itself was nothing like depicted in movies.

It took place in a very small area. A close quarters face-off over in seconds.

[shadowrider]

9. True. When I worked in Sierra Vista I rode my bike to Tombstone many times.

The actual area was about 12' x 18'. As I recall, 30 shots were fired in 30 seconds.

[DreamGypsy]

3. Maybe when they write history with theme songs by Frankie Laine...

...then I'll choose the facts instead of the fiction.



I must have been about 6 years old when I saw the movie, screenplay by Leon Uris, music by Dmitri Tiomkin. The song was branded into my brain...along with a few other radio hits, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (sung by Gene Pitney).

And then there was Marty Robbins' classic - the theme from The Alamo

Ah, the days of boyhood, when complete ignorance really was bliss.

[petronius]

4. It's amazing how history turns on tiny things:

If they'd called it "The gunfight at Mr. Fly's camera store" I think the whole mythology of the West would have shaped up differently. It just doesn't have the same sort of Hollywood appeal...

[Aristus]

5. Despite the inaccuracies in "Tombstone", it's still the Hollywood account

most faithful to the actual event.

I grew up about 30 miles west of Tombstone, and visited every few months. I became very familiar with both the legend and the reality of the event.

Several things that "Tombstone" got right:

The gunfight took place, not in a "corral" as we know it - an enclosed timber fence - but in a vacant lot and the street leading to it.

The town of Tombstone is situated in the mountains of Arizona, which the film depicts accurately, having been photographed at a location roughly 20 miles from the real Tombstone. Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp" was filmed in the prairie lands of South Dakota. The flat landscape doubling as Southern Arizona looks nothing like the real location. Most of the other "O.K. Corral" movies were film on studio back lots in California.

[struggle4progress]

6. This day in history: Wyatt Earp dies in Los Angeles (Jan 13, 1929)

... As a U.S. deputy marshal, Wyatt had a legal right and obligation to bring Morgan's killers to justice, but he quickly proved to be more interested in avenging his brother's death than in enforcing the law. Three days after Morgan's murder, Frank Stillwell, one of the suspects in the murder, was found dead in a Tucson, Arizona, rail yard. Wyatt and his close friend Doc Holliday were accused — accurately, as later accounts revealed — of murdering Stillwell. Wyatt refused to submit to arrest, and instead fled Arizona with Holliday and several other allies, pausing long enough to stop and kill a Mexican named Florentino Cruz, who he believed also had been involved in Morgan's death.

In the years to come, Wyatt wandered throughout the West, speculating in gold mines in Idaho, running a saloon in San Francisco, and raising thoroughbred horses in San Diego. At the turn of the century, the footloose gunslinger joined the Alaskan gold rush, and he ran a saloon in Nome until 1901. After participating in the last of the great gold rushes in Nevada, Wyatt finally settled in Los Angeles, where he tried unsuccessfully to find someone to publicize his many western adventures. Wyatt's famous role in the shootout at the O.K. Corral did attract the admiring attention of the city's thriving new film industry. For several years, Wyatt became an unpaid technical consultant on Hollywood Westerns, drawing on his colorful past to tell flamboyant matinee idols like William Hart and Tom Mix how it had really been ...

Ironically, the wider fame that eluded Wyatt in life came soon after he died. A young journalist named Stuart Lake published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, a wildly fanciful biography that portrayed the gunman as a brave and virtuous instrument of frontier justice. Dozens of similarly laudatory books and movies followed, ensuring Wyatt Earp an enduring place in the popular American mythology of the Wild West.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/wyatt-earp-dies-in-los-angeles

[struggle4progress]

7. Here's a well-known photo by Fly:

and here's his photo of Josephine

[Cerridwen]

8. "Same as it always was." Yes. An anamoly.

The "Wild, wild, west" was a mythology made up by dime-store novelists to sell...dime-store novels.

Do you really think fox "news" is a new concept?

[Recursion]

10. "The ambush at the camera store" sounds less romantic

But, hey, it sells pulp fiction.