Gunfight at the O.K. Corral: Did Tom McLaury Have a Gun

At first the Earps and Holliday were hailed as heroes. But then they were accused of shooting down unarmed men who were trying to surrender. The ‘unarmed’ claim was bolstered by the fact that Tom McLaury’s gun couldn’t be found. After a two-day coroner’s inquest and a month-long hearing to determine whether the Earps and Holliday should be indicted for murder, Judge Wells Spicer decided that they had acted in their official capacity as lawmen. So the they were never actually tried for murder.

The vacant lot where the Old West’s most famous shootout began faced the south side of Fremont Street — with the Harwood house on the west side of the lot, and Fly’s photographic studio and boarding house on the east side. There were eight people and two horses in the front of the crowded lot, and the black powder gun smoke added to the confusion and bedlam of the gunfight. Figuring out who shot whom was difficult because the Cowboy faction told lies in an attempt to get the Earps and Holliday hanged for murder, and the Earps stretched the truth to keep their necks out of nooses.

When Wyatt Earp biographer Stuart Lake questioned him about the’street fight,’ as Wyatt called it, Wyatt answered in a September 13, 1928, letter: ‘In that affair, Billy Clanton and Frank McLowry had four or five bullet holes in their bodies, and of course it would be impossible to declare who was responsible for the shots.’ That is one of the most honest appraisals ever made in the who-shot-whom controversy, which often includes the question of whether Tom McLaury used a gun during the shootout.

When the gun smoke cleared on October 26, Billy Clanton had never gotten near his horse, and he lay with his back against the Harwood house just inside the lot on Fremont Street; Frank McLaury had never gotten behind his horse, but he had led it partway into the street before it bolted and ran, and Frank lay on the north side of Fremont Street across from the vacant lot; Tom McLaury had gotten behind Billy Clanton’s horse before it ran, and Tom lay near the southeast corner of Fremont and Third streets next to a corner house that was adjacent to the Harwood house. The coroner, Dr. Henry Martyn Matthews, later dutifully recorded the serial numbers of the Colt revolvers used by Frank McLaury (No. 46338) and Billy Clanton (No. 52196) in the shootout. But Tom McLaury’s gun was still missing.

In 1929, after Lake inspected the original handwritten documents from the coroner’s inquest and the murder hearing that historians now call the Spicer hearing, the documents were put back into storage. An anti-Earp historian, Howell ‘Pat’ Hayhurst, was commissioned to put the documents into typescript for a federal Works Progress Association (WPA) project in the 1930s. Hayhurst not only failed to decipher some of the handwriting but also arbitrarily edited out wording that he decided was not relevant. As Lake later put it, Hayhurst ‘mutilated’ the text and context. Furthermore, the original documents were never returned after Hayhurst transcribed them. They have never been found.

Fortunately, reporters from Tombstone’s two newspapers — the pro-Earp Epitaph and the pro-Cowboy Nugget — also recorded the testimony at the coroner’s inquest and the Spicer hearing. But only the reporter from the Nugget knew shorthand. Thus, the wording of the testimony that the court recorder and the two newspaper reporters put on paper varied greatly. It takes months examining all three versions of the testimony word by word to fully understand how much of it was altered by Hayhurst in what historians now call the Hayhurst transcript.

Most of the pro-Cowboy witnesses who testified during the murder hearing fudged their answers by saying things like, ‘I didn’t see Tom McLaury with a gun’ or by agreeing that Tom McLaury had yelled to Virgil Earp words like, ‘I am disarmed,’ just before the shooting started. And the few objective newspaper articles that were written in the first days following the shootout could only report on hearsay. In its October 29 dispatch that appeared in the November 3 San Diego Union newspaper, stringer Clara S. Brown wrote, ‘At the inquest yesterday, the damaging fact was ascertained that only two of the cowboys were armed, it thus being a most unequal fight.’

7 Comments to “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral: Did Tom McLaury Have a Gun”
i’m having trouble finding the serial number for wyatt earp’s gun. my grandfather has a very old colt 45 buntline sp. and he was curious of the serial number on earp’s gun

By Travis Bragg on Aug 4, 2008 at 3:01 pm
The character of Wyatt is established, at least in my mind, when he lets Ike Clanton run away. The one whom for almost two years had been the chief instigator of the conflict between the two factions. Instead Wyatt let him go. It is unreasonable, then, to think that he would shoot an unarmed man who, by comparison, played only a bit part in the feud. Were the cowboys armed? Yes. Was this against the law? Yes. Did Virgil have a legal right to form a posse to disarm the cowboys? Yes.

By Mike Higgins on Sep 2, 2008 at 10:24 am
There are indications that Wyatt tried to gut shoot Ike during the scuffle. Some say that Wyatt later admitted to that. Ike says Wyatt fired during the scuffle.

By dave stephens on Oct 9, 2008 at 4:46 pm
According to Mr. Webster reckoning is the ‘settling of a bill or
account’. Could we be coming into the biblical time of ‘the
reckoning’ that is ‘the end of days’ in which the second coming of
Jesus Christ as the warrior Lion of Judah coming back to settle
accounts on a bill owed by defeating and extinguishing the
spiritual and human forces of evil that bow to the person and
influence of ‘the prince of the world’ Satan. Being an avowed
American history buff, and having grown up in a region of the
Wild West, one of my favorite movies which I have seen many
times is the 1993 version of the most famous Old West gun fight
in history, the infamous Gunfight at OK Corral – ‘Tombstone’,
with an all star cast: Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliot, Bill
Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Jason
Priestly, Thomas Haden Church and Dana Delany.

The tagline in that movie leading up to the infamous shootout
came from Kilmer’s John Henry ‘Doc’ Holiday, born into a
Georgia aristocratic planter family turned dentist, gambler
and ‘shootist’ AKA gunfighter. To me it was the most memorable
line in the movie describing a settling of accounts by way of
justice being served. Kilmer’s Doc Holiday, having been handed a
shotgun by Elliot’s cool-headed lawman Virgil of the legendary
Earp brothers, to keep out of sight of the townspeople by putting it
under his long-coat, looks at the brothers and says, “It’s the
reckoning”, implying the Apocalyptic rider on the pale horse –
Death.

Having been born and raised in a region in which the Chisholm
Trail on which cowboys herded cattle from Texas into Kansas
border towns bound for the East Coast crossed through, I have
been captivated by that wild and wooly living history. My own
hometown in North central Oklahoma evolved around cowboys,
Indians, and oil barons. One of the last shootouts between lawmen
and outlaws took place about 10 miles from my hometown in the
late 1800’s.

Two of those reputedly vice-ridden cattle towns, Wichita and
Dodge City, infamous in their own right were marshaled during
that era by renowned lawmen-gamblers-gunfighters Wyatt Earp,
Bat Masterson and James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, who I
discovered while going through a genealogy on my mother’s
family side was in my family tree by way of my great-great-
great grandmother Hickox-Brown.

Many books and movies have been written and made
surrounding events that led up the well-known gunfight between
lawmen and outlaw cowboys. The movie ‘Tombstone’ is as
historically correct as we can expect from Hollywood, base on the
book ‘Hellderado’. I got a chance to visit the old mining town of
Tombstone five years ago while visiting my sister and brother-in-
law. It can rightly be said that were the primary players of the
shootout allowed to come back to the place of the event they
would feel at home in this now tourist attraction. With the
exception of some modern conveniences surrounding the town,
nothing much has changed.

Being interested in historical reality from a firsthand account, I
scoured the shops for such a book and found it – ‘And Die In The
West: History of The OK Corral Gunfight. What I gathered from
eye-witness accounts, both in trial manuscripts and newspaper
accounts that instead of being ‘the reckoning’ between forces of
good represented by the lawmen and forces of evil represented by
the outlaw-cowboys it was ‘the reckoning’ between two political
factions over lucrative commerce that turned deadly.

The two sides were northern born Republican lawmen in the
persons of the Earp brothers – Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan, aided
by a tuberculosis ravaged Georgia Democrat ‘Doc’ Holliday; and
Texas born cowboy-bandits Democrats in the persons of the
brothers McLaury’s – Frank and Tom and Clanton’s – Ike and
Billy, aided by Billy Claiborne and Wes Fuller. The political prize
was the Johnny Behan position of sheriff of Tombstone and his
deputies who stood to make a fortune in miners pay at various
enterprises.

The fight took place at 3:00 PM, Wednesday, October 26, 1881,
not inside the OK Corral as the legendary name implies but in a
15 foot wide vacant lot, known as lot 2, in block 17, directly
behind the corral. The combatants faced off in this small lot
approximately 5 feet apart. Thirty shots in thirty seconds with
lots of suffocating smoke later, the McLaurie brothers and Billy
Clanton lie dead in the lot and on Freemont St.

No gunfight has so captivated the attention and minds of the
American people, although more people have been killed in other
gunfights, such as the Newton Kansas Massacre than the
Tombstone event. Legends sprang up immediately surrounding
the cast of characters of the place and time. But, since politics
was the motivation turned very ugly very quickly we should
remind ourselves that nothing much has changed in that arena,
especially in light of another prize being fought over by
politicians of opposing sides today.

By howard reed on Oct 23, 2008 at 1:02 pm
My name’s Kieran McLaury Taylor, and the way my grandfather told it to me was thus: Wyatt Earp was looking to make a name for himself, gambling and
running whorehouses for a living just wasn’t enough I guess. Shooting an unarmed man in front of witnesses simply would not do, so Ike was saved.
Wyatt went to his death swearing Tom McLaury had a gun at the shootout. He didn’t, but to admit so would have been an admission of murder, and that
was too low, even for the likes of Wyatt Earp. Character indeed.

By Kieran Taylor on Oct 25, 2008 at 12:34 am
Few lawmen in the Old West were without a dark side. It seemed
most them walked on both sides of the law. Of the three Earp
brothers that represented the law that day Virgil was probably
the least soiled.

Movies depict one side of a story that unless you were there the
truth of the matter lies smouldering in the graves of participants
and witnesses. As I said above, politics, greed and I might add the
Civil War that was 16 to 21 years removed was the motivation
for the bad blood between the two factions, represented by two
regions of the country and two political ideologies.

Was Tom McLaury ‘heeled’, the term used in the day for carrying
a gun? The debate will rage on into infinity without satisfying
answers. I am sure that Ms. McLaury-Taylor’s family does not
hold Wyatt Earp in a good light since he personally shot and
killed their relative. They have their side of the story passed
down from family members as I am sure the Earp family has
their side of the story. Two sides, that was the devils brew in
Tombstone held tight within by abject bias was the legal tender of
the day also.

Wyatt Earp had a reputation as a man not to be trifled with from
his earlier occupation as lawman-gambler-outlaw. It is said he
and Morgan ran a house of ‘ill repute’ in Peoria, which I take to be
in their homestate of Illinois, but could have been in Kansas
where Wyatt had been a police officer in Wichita. Their wives
were reputed to be ’soiled doves’ that worked there.

One of the Wild West notables in my homestate was Frank ‘Pistol
Pete’ Eaton, whose image as a mascot is emblazened on three
western universities colors. Mr. Eaton was a cowboy-lawman-
shootist claimed by experts to be the fastest man with a gun that
ever lived. He also served as a deputy sheriff under the
infamous ‘Hanging Judge’ Rou Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas.

In a recording now on tape and CD about two years before he died
in Perkins, Oklahoma Mr. Eaton said that he met Wyatt Earp in
Wichita and Wild Bill Hickock in Dodge City in their law
enforcement capacities. He was in his late teens at the time, but
with a reputation already that no man would dare challenge. He
thought highly of both men that he described as gentlemen, but
with gray clouds hanging over them.

It was Mr. Eaton’s opinion that all the cowboys behind the OK
Corral were ‘heeled’ that day, including Tom McLaury and that it
was a righteous shoot. He also stated that Wyatt Earp and Bill
Hickock would rather ‘buffalo’, or take down with a sharp rap to
the head with a pistol barrel than shoot them, as he had
witnessed them do on several occasions.

The bottom line is that there was bad blood between not only the
players but other factions in Tombstone of the day. The
Tombston Epitaph (Republican) and Nugget (Democrat) helped
keep the factions riled up with fiery epitomes accusing the other
of every kind of dirty deed done dirt cheap. Both papers had their
own desctiption of the event based on their ideological belief.
Neither side was clean in this affair, having lots of skeletons in
their personal and collective closets. It was the way of the West in
those days.

By howard reed on Oct 25, 2008 at 2:19 pm
As an aside. As depicted in the movie ‘Tombstone’ and in eye
wintess accounts, that Wyatt Earp didn’t shoot Ike Clanton who in
the heat of the gathering storm ran up to Wyatt unarmed and
was allowed by Wyatt to leave the scene, Wyatt having seen he
wasn’t armed attests to his character and reputation thatpretty
much leaves the loaded question of Tom McLaury not being
armed during the shootout as moot.

It has been rightly said in scripture that “Those who live by the
sword will die by the sword.” All the cast of characters on that
infamous day, other than Wyatt who died peacefully of old age
and Doc Holiday who died from the disease that took him out of
Georgia into the history of the Wild West in Colorado, the rest died
by the sword turned gun.

By howard reed on Oct 25, 2008 at 2:51 pm

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral: Did Tom McLaury Have a Gun

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