Thursday, October 26, 2006

The Shots Heard Round the West

I’m stumped on how to make this into a crime-fiction-related item, but I can’t let the anniversary simply pass by, unremarked upon: It was 125 years ago today--October 26, 1881--that Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp, Virgil Earp, and Doc Holliday faced down Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, Billy Clanton, Ike Clanton, and Billy Claiborne in a dusty vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. The resulting “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” lasted--at best--30 seconds, but resulted in three deaths, the same number of woundings, and a mythologizing of the Earp brothers and Holliday that has grown ever since, abetted greatly by novels and re-enactments of the gunfight in movies.

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