Chris Kyle - American Gun

“You sons of bitches,” yelled one of the lawmen at the cowboys as the two groups met. “You’ve been looking for a fight, and you can have it!”

They were a few yards away from each other. They were all good shots, but at least one of the cowboys was drunk. The Clantons were also tired from all their drinking, and seemed to have left some of their orneriness in the dust of the nearby streets.

“Don’t shoot me,” declared Billy Clanton. “I don’t want to fight!”

Tom McLaury opened his coat to show he was unarmed and announced, “I have got nothing.”

But then both Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury, maybe sensing that the Earps and Holliday were in no mood for negotiation, reached for their Colt Single-Action Army six-shooters. Tom McLaury moved toward his horse and a Winchester lever-action rifle in a scabbard in the saddle.

“Hold, I don’t mean that!” shouted Virgil Earp. “I have come to disarm you!”

In the next thirty seconds, somewhere between seventeen and thirty shots were fired, one of the cowboys ran away, and an episode of American history was written that would fascinate and confuse people for generations to come. As the prominent gun historian Massad Ayoob wrote, “Seven men shoot at each other. Six get shot. Three die. And a century and a quarter later, people are still trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

Black smoke from the gunfire lingered in the cramped lot, and it obscured details of the shoot-\out. “The gunfight came in bursts, snippets and spurts so rapid that witnesses and participants never agreed on an order of events,” wrote author Casey Tefertiller. “Gunfire exploded in the cold afternoon air; cowboys struggled to control their twisting, bounding horses. It was a scene of disarray, where impressions were left frozen in time.” What follows is an approximation of what happened, based on legal testimony and press accounts.

Doc Holliday drew his pistol, shoved it into Frank McLaury’s belly, and moved a few steps back.

Wyatt Earp later testified that he didn’t draw his pistol until after he saw cowboys Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury draw their pistols. But an analysis done in the 1930s by trick-shooting expert Ed McGivern demonstrated that to “beat the drop” on someone who has already started to draw on you would require a nearly impossible degree of speed. So it’s likely Wyatt had the gun out before them, though he hadn’t fired.

Ike Clanton, who was unarmed, lunged at Wyatt to plead for mercy. Wyatt, according to Clanton, stuck his gun in his belly and said, “You son of a bitch, you can have a fight!” Ike tried to grab Wyatt’s gun hand, but Wyatt shoved him away. “The fight has commenced,” Wyatt reported telling Ike. “Go to fighting or get away.” Ike ran to safety at high speed.

Gunfire erupted from several guns almost simultaneously, probably first from Doc Holliday and Morgan Earp.

Holliday switched from his revolver to his double-barreled shotgun. He swung around Tom McLaury’s horse, and shot McLaury in the chest at close range as he was trying to grab his Winchester rifle out of the saddle scabbard. Tom staggered out of the alley into Fremont Street, then fell down permanently, the twenty-eight-year-old victim of a tight-patterned, 12-pellet buckshot blast through the rib cage.

Holliday chucked away the shotgun and switched back to his revolver, no doubt to save critical reloading time in such a close-quarter, rapid-fire environment. He fired his revolver at Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton, both of whom were hit. Despite their wounds, Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury kept on shooting.

Morgan Earp caught a round across his shoulder blades and vertebrae, fell down, then managed to get up. Virgil was flattened by a bullet in his calf muscle, but he, too, popped up shooting.

Hit in the gut, Frank McLaury pulled his horse by the reins into Fremont Street, where the horse wisely decided to run off, taking Frank’s protective cover away with him, not to mention his Winchester rifle. Doc Holliday ran up, and the wounded McLaury took aim and growled at him. “I’ve got you now!”

“Blaze away!” snapped Holliday.

This is not always the smartest thing to say during a gunfight, as it might serve to focus your opponent’s intentions. In this case, Frank obliged by firing a round at Holliday, clipping the dentist’s pistol pocket and grazing his skin.

“The son of a bitch has shot me,” yapped Holliday, “and I mean to kill him!”

A bullet found its way into Frank’s head moments later, though it was probably fired by Morgan Earp. In any event, the thirty-three-year-old Frank hit the ground. For good.

“They have murdered me,” gasped Billy Clanton nearby. “I have been murdered. Chase the crowd away and from the door and give me air.” Shot in both the chest and belly, he asked for a doctor and some morphine, and some more cartridges for his pistol. His last request wasn’t honored, as he quickly died on the spot. He was nineteen years old.

Three cowboys dead, three lawmen wounded. Ike Clanton fled unharmed. Wyatt had come through without a scratch.

Ike filed murder charges against the lawmen, claiming that his brother and friends had been killed in cold blood. In Tombstone, the event was initially praised by much of the local populace, who were grateful that the Earps and Holliday had cleared the town of four dangerous cowboys. But opinion started shifting when word spread that Tom McLaury appeared to have been unarmed, and that he and Billy Clanton made peace gestures at the start of the gunfight. Worse still, a credible court witness quoted Virgil Earp saying before the fight, “Those men have made their threats; I will not arrest them but will kill them on sight.”

It started looking like premeditated murder might well be a viable charge. But evidence was missing and many questions stayed unanswered, details unknown or in conflict. The lawmen were eventually cleared by both a local judge and a grand jury.

Vendetta killings of friends on both sides ensued. Morgan Earp was slain by a bullet in his back while he was playing pool, less than five months after the fracas in the corral. He was thirty years old. Billy Claiborne was killed in a gunfight in Tombstone, and Ike Clanton was shot to death by a lawman who caught him stealing cattle.

Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis at age thirty-six. Virgil Earp survived an assassination attempt in Tombstone and became a lawman in California, where he died at age sixty-two in 1905, still on the job as a peace officer.

Wyatt Earp took a lady friend and wandered around the American West with her for decades, squeaking out a living as a professional gambler. He died in Los Angeles at the ripe age of eighty, the last survivor of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

None of the guns used in the shoot-out has ever been found.

The gunfight triggered press coverage across the United States, and inspired movies, articles, and reenactments all the way into the twenty-first century. As the Tombstone Nugget wrote of the triple killing: “The 26th of October, 1881, will always be marked as one of the crimson days in the annals of Tombstone, a day when blood flowed as water, and human life was held as a shuttle cock, a day to be remembered as witnessing the bloodiest and deadliest street fight that has ever occurred in this place, or probably in the Territory.”