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.

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.

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.