The “Random Movie of the Day” served up Tombstone, from 1993—with Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. The film has held its place on lists of the greatest westerns for thirty years now, and nearly every conversation about it bends toward the same praise: supposedly, it is the most “accurate” of all screen versions of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
That word—“accurate”—was the hook. Because the gunfight it depicts lasted thirty seconds and left behind not a single disinterested witness. Thirty seconds—that is less time than it takes to watch the scene in the film itself: there, the fight runs for nearly three minutes. And the very image of the noble marshal, which two Hollywood films vie to be considered the definitive portrayal of, was born not in 1881 but in 1931, in the office of a New York writer who did not possess a single verifiable record of his conversations with the hero.
So the question is not how accurate Tombstone is. The question is: accurate to what?
Let’s start with the name, because it lies twice. The fight on October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, a town in southern Arizona Territory, did not take place at the O.K. Corral—the livestock pen and stable whose name everyone now knows. It unfolded in a narrow empty space beside the wall of C. S. Fly’s photography studio on Fremont Street, “six doors west of the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral.” The name stuck much later, after the 1957 film, and has wandered through textbooks as fact ever since.
What actually happened is known in broad outline and disputed in detail. At around three in the afternoon, four men on one side and five on the other stood facing each other at a distance of fifteen feet or less. Around thirty shots rang out in half a minute. Three were killed, three wounded, two ran away, one was left unhurt. On the side of the law were the three Earp brothers—Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan—and Doc Holliday; against them were the Clanton brothers and the McLaury brothers, accompanied by Billy Claiborne. The five belonged to a loose gang of cattle rustlers and horse thieves known locally simply as the “Cowboys.”
There were three dead. The youngest was Billy Clanton, nineteen. The only known photograph of him was taken after his death, in the window of the funeral parlor: Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Billy, from left to right, wearing the suits taken off them to wash their bodies.
Formally, it all began with a city ordinance forbidding the carrying of weapons within town limits. Virgil Earp—at once Tombstone’s city marshal and a deputy U.S. marshal, making him the senior man in this story—decided to enforce it. He appointed Wyatt, Morgan, and Holliday temporary deputies. The morning had been full of humiliations the participants would not forget: Ike Clanton, drunk and loud-mouthed, had already promised by dawn to shoot all the Earps, and Virgil calmed him with a pistol blow to the head, then fined him twenty-five dollars. An hour later, Wyatt knocked Tom McLaury flat with a revolver blow across the face. By the time of the gunfight, half the “Cowboys” had already been beaten and disarmed.
The crucial thing usually lost: this was not good versus evil in any pure form. County Sheriff Johnny Behan—a political rival of the Earps—approached the armed men and, according to testimony, lied that he had disarmed them. Believing him, Virgil tucked his revolver into his waistband and shifted Holliday’s cane into his gun hand. A moment later, he discovered that Frank McLaury had not given up his weapon and shouted: “Throw up your hands, I want your guns.” Frank replied that he would surrender his weapon only when the Earps and the city police disarmed as well. The presiding officer at the hearing would later call that demand “a monstrous and startling proposition.”
So “good versus evil” here is a later construction. That day, two armed camps stood on the vacant lot, each convinced the other wanted to kill it, and neither of them, apparently, intended to fire first.
The story of the gunfight was preserved by two documents that almost no one reads. The coroner’s inquest and the preliminary hearing before Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer, which lasted thirty days, preserved months of testimony—a source of exceptional depth for a western. The entire reconstruction rests on them, because the eyewitnesses contradicted one another and keep contradicting one another.
Significantly, even the records do not agree. Reporters from two local newspapers covered the hearing, but only one—the man from the pro-Cowboy Nugget—knew shorthand. That is why the court transcript and the newspaper versions diverge “quite substantially.” When four records of the same examination yield four different texts, any final version of events is already an interpretation.
On November 30, Spicer handed down his decision: there were no grounds for a trial. He found that the Earps and Holliday had acted within the law, and that Holliday and Wyatt had been properly appointed deputies. He charged Virgil with poor judgment—he should not have armed his brother and friend and handed them police work—but found no criminal guilt. Two weeks later, Spicer received a letter from an anonymous “miner” threatening to kill him.
As for politics, they remained offscreen in both the ruling and almost every film. The Earps stood with the Republicans; Behan and the “Cowboys,” with the Democrats; and the county feud was in many ways a continuation of party warfare by other means. For the town, it was also a matter of money. Tombstone lived on its silver mines and depended on Eastern investors; both newspapers, hostile as they were to each other, immediately began assuring readers that street bloodshed posed no danger to capital. The Nugget came out under the headline “Capital Has Nothing to Fear.”
Two months after Virgil Earp’s acquittal, he was shot from ambush near a saloon—buckshot in the left arm, which he lost forever. On March 18, 1882, an unknown gunman fired through the glass door of a billiard hall into Morgan Earp’s back. Neither attack resulted in convictions: their fellow suspects supplied them with alibis.
And this is where what Tombstone presents as a spectacular final act of revenge begins, while the documents make it look much dirtier. Wyatt, granted federal authority, assembled a posse of around eight men—for five dollars a day, plus horse feed. The men were suited to the job: Sherman McMaster, a former Texas Ranger who knew the “Cowboys” personally and, rumor had it, worked for Wells Fargo too; “Turkey Creek Jack” Johnson, who joined the posse in gratitude for help securing his brother’s pardon; John “Texas Jack” Vermillion, a Confederate veteran; two gamblers. The vendetta party was assembled according to the price list: hired guns and men with debts.
Four “Cowboys” were killed during the vendetta. Frank Stilwell—at the Tucson railroad station, where the Earps had gone to guard Virgil’s train; his corpse was later found to have no fewer than five wounds, “one for each member of the posse.” Florentino Cruz. “Curly Bill” Brocius—in a gunfight at Iron Springs, where Wyatt blasted him from the saddle with buckshot. Johnny Barnes. Warrants were issued for the Earps and Holliday, and in early April 1882 they left Arizona for Colorado, whose governor refused to extradite them at the territory’s request.
In other words, thirty seconds on a vacant lot were not the climax but the prologue to six weeks in which a federal marshal effectively waged a private war—and won it. The documentary story is more interesting than the movie version, and it is precisely the one films rarely touch: it is too inconvenient when the “good guy” pursues revenge outside the law and simply gets there first.
The real turning point came half a century later, in New York. During his lifetime, Wyatt Earp was known, but he was not a legend—to the point that in the 1920s he complained: “Fame has been the bane of my life. I hate it.” He agreed to interviews only so he could correct the endless inventions: “I am tired of seeing so many stories about me which are not true.”
On December 25, 1927, writer Stuart Lake wrote to him, recommended by Earp’s old friend Bat Masterson. Eighty-year-old Earp did not answer at once. He stalled for eight months, fell ill, then finally sat down at the table—he needed money, and probably wanted the chance to tell his own story before it was too late. There were only eight interviews. In January 1929, he died, and Lake was left alone with the widow, Josephine, who demanded a “decent, clean story” and feared that the biographer would dig into her own past—as a dancer and, most likely, a woman of considerably freer morals than befitted a hero’s wife.
In 1931, the book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal came out. It became a bestseller and set the image for decades to come. The problem was that its verifiable foundation amounted to eight conversations and an old man’s memory. Wikipedia’s entry on the book now honestly lists its genre, comma by comma: “biography, later historical fiction.” Lake invented the famous “Buntline Colt,” a long-barreled revolver with which Earp supposedly felled men dead and which, researchers believe, he never owned. He invented the duel with Ben Thompson in Ellsworth: neither the local newspaper report nor Thompson’s own account of Earp mentions it. Lake, incidentally, sold the rights to Fox for seven and a half thousand dollars and honestly split the fee with the widow.
And this is what is worth keeping in mind: before 1931, the press in and around Tombstone was more likely to criticize the Earps. It was books and films that turned murder suspects into infallible sheriffs. The legend did not “survive”: it was rebuilt from scratch, and an old detail—like the line in Billy Breakenridge’s 1928 book that the Clantons were unarmed and raised their hands—simply did not fit into the new version. The very term “gunfight at the O.K. Corral” entered common use through books and film: twenty years later, the 1957 movie cemented both the name and the wrong location.
Now we can return to the original question. Tombstone was made from a script by Kevin Jarre, who was so obsessed with the subject that he took on directing it himself—and was removed after one month of a three-month shoot: a perfectionist demanding take after take, he could not stay on schedule. The studio did not want the project—Hollywood Pictures, a Disney subsidiary, was the only distributor willing to take it on, and it demanded that Willem Dafoe be removed from the cast—the first and, apparently, best choice for Holliday—because of his role in The Last Temptation of Christ. That is how Val Kilmer got into the film—the second name on the list.
Costner turned down the script for his own Wyatt Earp, released six months later with a budget of sixty-three million and worse reviews. Tombstone had twenty-five million and—on paper—director George P. Cosmatos. According to Kilmer, Kurt Russell actually directed the film intermittently: he laid out the shot list and re-edited the screenplay. Russell remains the only key participant who knows the whole truth, and he is silent.
Is it any wonder that in such a kitchen, historical accuracy was the first thing sacrificed. Historian Michael Grauer, curator of collections at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, watched the gunfight scene, gave it six out of ten, and added the crucial part: “How much can we really know about what happened there, when every witness had his own agenda?” He also formulated what neither side of the conflict would have liked: in this story, the Cowboy gang is trying to take over the town, while “another criminal element known as the Earps is trying to push them back.”
Three minutes of screen time against thirty real seconds. The complete absence of that very thirty-day trial—though Spicer’s hearing is the era’s central document; the film does not show it at all. Gone are the Republican-Democrat party wars behind the entire machinery of the feud. Gone is James Earp, the elder brother who was in Tombstone. What remains is the main thing—and that is a precise feat of engineering: myth works better than fact.