Today marks 145 years since the gunfight near the O.K. Corral. Those thirty seconds are the least interesting part of the man who walked out of them untouched.
Wyatt Earp is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Colma, just south of San Francisco, in the family plot of Josephine, the woman he spent his last 46 years with. The stone is modest. When I visited on a recent trip to San Francisco it was decorated the way it almost always is, with poker chips, playing cards, and a toy sheriff's badge left by strangers. I stood there a long while.
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, nine armed men faced each other in a lot off Fremont Street in Tombstone, near the rear entrance of the O.K. Corral. Around thirty shots were fired in around thirty seconds. Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were dead or dying, Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded, Doc Holliday was grazed, and Wyatt stood in the middle of it without a scratch.
He was born in Illinois in 1848 and raised partly on a farm in Pella, Iowa, a boy who kept trying to run off to join his older brothers in the Union Army and kept getting hauled home by his father. At twenty-two he was a constable in Lamar, Missouri, newly married, with a house. Within a year his wife Urilla was dead of typhoid, and he came apart. An arrest for horse theft in the Indian Territory followed, then bail jumped, drifting, and more arrests in Peoria. That record should stay in the story. He went west, hunted buffalo, and rebuilt himself on a frontier that judged a man by what he did next. By 1875 he wore a badge in Wichita, and by 1876 he was keeping the peace in Dodge City, where he became friends with a tubercular Georgia dentist named John Henry Holliday.
The gunfight settled nothing. The morning after, the Earps were defendants. Ike Clanton, who had run from the fight he helped start, swore out murder charges, and for a month Wyatt and Doc sat through a hearing that could have ended on a gallows, until Justice Wells Spicer ruled the killings justified acts of lawmen. In December hidden shotguns ambushed Virgil and maimed his left arm for life. In March an assassin fired through a window and killed Morgan while he played billiards.
Wyatt held a deputy U.S. marshal's commission and had no faith in Tombstone's courts. He put his wounded family on a train and went hunting. The vendetta ride killed the men he held responsible, beginning with Frank Stilwell in the Tucson rail yard, and it ended his life as a lawman. He left Arizona with murder warrants behind him and never stood trial. Historians still argue about where justice ended and vengeance began. He had buried one brother and nearly lost another, and he carried that for the next 47 years.
Then he kept moving with the frontier. He dealt faro in the Colorado boomtowns and lost money in the San Diego real estate bubble. He refereed a heavyweight title fight in San Francisco in 1896 and made a foul call that half the country swore was a fix. He went north to Nome in the Alaska gold rush, where he and a partner built the Dexter Saloon and finally made real money, then to the last mining booms at Tonopah and Goldfield, Nevada, then to desert claims near Vidal, California, where he and Josephine wintered in a cabin into his old age.
He ended in Los Angeles, where the Old West was being turned into film. William S. Hart and Tom Mix sought him out and sat with him for hours. When Earp died in January 1929, at eighty, the last survivor of the gunfight, Hart and Mix carried his casket, and the newspapers noted that Tom Mix wept. He was no saint and never claimed to be. He went broke and started over so many times that starting over became his profession, and he was still prospecting in his ninth decade. That is why the strangers keep leaving poker chips on his stone.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/thirty-seconds-and-eighty-years-145