My recent reading includes THE LAST GUNFIGHT by Jeff Guinn.
This is a 2011 publication, fromSimon & Schuster, about the showdown popularly known as the Gunfight atthe OK Corral. More broadly the book is about Tombstone AZ and its surroundings in itsheyday as a mining town.
And a mining town is what it was. Its brief golden age beganwith a major strike in 1878 of so-called “horn silver” in the San Pedro Valley. The location of thestrike was too far away from Tucson for that town to serve as a home base forthe wave of prospectors who inevitably followed the first strike. So Tombstonegrew up -- impression one gets from this book is that it almost immediately sprouted up out of the Arizona Territory desert floor! and fulfilled just that function.
At its height it was important enough that when a SanFrancisco based acting troupe did a tour of the southwest, bringing aperformance of the hot new comic opera “HMS Pinafore” to the unwashed –Tombstone was inevitably one of its stops.
But nowadays we only remember Tombstone for theconfrontation on October 26, 1881, when seven men faced off, four to three,separated by only six feet of air, and fired about thirty shots at one anotherover the course of about as many seconds. It would have been four against four exceptthat Ike Clanton, who had been very busy for hours provoking thisconfrontation, actually fled the scene just as guns were being drawn, or perhaps even five to four had not another of their companions likewise made himself scarce.
Ike Clanton’s brother and two of his friends were killed inthat exchange. Among the party opposing, Doc Holliday and two of the Earps wereseriously injured. Only Wyatt Earp walked away unscathed.
The fight was not literally at the OK Corral, although it isknown as the “Gunfight at the OK Corral” because that became the title of amovie in 1957, which was still the golden age for westerns. John Sturges’ movie made no pretense ofhistorical accuracy.
Nonetheless, the connection between this confrontation (ablock away) and that particular corral is not entirely accidental. At one point in the crowded timeline leadingto those terrible 30 seconds, the Clantons and their allies postured in thatcorral, in what Guinn calls “the worst tradition of overweening male pride”they were there “boasting loudly about what they would do if the Earps were foolishenough to bother them any further.”
There are a lot of reasons to recommend this book. I won’trecite them now, though. I’ll simply say that it inspires thought not onlyabout what happened, but about how we know what happened, about theepistemological troubles in sorting through the conflicting accounts.
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