O.K. Corral

Thirty seconds in October 1881 changed everything. The name tells you where it happened — everyone calls it the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral — but the actual fight took place in a narrow lot six doors from the corral's rear entrance, beside C.S. Fly's photo studio on Fremont Street. Tombstone was booming then, silver money pouring into the town from the surrounding mines, and with the money came trouble: Cowboys, they were called, cattle rustlers and smugglers working the Mexican border. Long-simmering friction between the Earps and the Clanton-McLaury gang came to a head when City Marshal Virgil Earp decided to enforce an ordinance prohibiting the carrying of weapons in town.

Virgil, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday walked down Fremont Street to disarm the Cowboys. What happened next was over in less than a minute: about thirty shots fired in thirty seconds. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers — Tom and Frank — were killed. Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded. Holliday was grazed. Ike Clanton, who had been publicly threatening the Earps for weeks, ran from the fight unarmed.

A month-long preliminary hearing followed. The judge ruled that Virgil had acted within his authority as marshal and that there was insufficient evidence to indict the Earps and Holliday for murder. But the fight wasn't over. On December 28, 1881, Virgil was ambushed and maimed. On March 18, 1882, a Cowboy fired through the glass door of a saloon and killed Morgan.

The gunfight became famous decades later, after Stuart Lake's 1931 book *Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal*, and then cemented by the 1957 film *Gunfight at the O.K. Corral*. The site today stages daily reenactments. Stand in the lot where they stood — the narrow space still feels too small for that much gunfire — and the whole American myth of lawmen and outlaws comes down to this: six men with pistols, a city ordinance, and thirty seconds that nobody could take back.