When Wyatt Earp and his brothers and Doc Holliday walked Front Street Tombstone to meet the Clantons at OK Corral and so perpetrate the only real western gunfight that ever actually occurred in history, American pioneer history began to die, and the funeral took place in Hollywood fifty years later. Like its bloodbrother—Custer’s Last Stand—it became a myth and once it was so, it became impossible to tell that or any other related history with any truth. As with all self-respecting myths, there was always a better way to tell it than the way it really happened.

Along Fourth Street the Earp party had been two abreast, Wyatt and Virgil in the lead, with Virgil on the outside, Morgan behind him, and Doc Holliday in back of Wyatt. Each sensed instinctively what could happen if they rounded the corner of Fly’s Photograph Gallery abruptly in close order, and at that street intersection they deployed catercorner to walk four abreast, in the middle of the road…

    The degree to which westerns distorted American history became even more evident to me when I read Stuart N. Lake’s The Life and Times of Wyatt Earp. Earp exploited his US Marshal’s badge to settle a personal feud with the Clantons, and in doing so sensationalised the use of handguns for individual purposes for the first time.

 Frank McLowery and Billy Clanton jerked and fired their six-guns simultaneously. Both loosed on Wyatt Earp, the shots with which they opened the famous battle of the O. K. Corral echoing from the adobe walls as one.
Fast as the two rustlers were at getting into action from a start with guns half drawn, Wyatt Earp was deadlier. Frank McLowery’s bullet tore through the skirt of Wyatt’s coat on the right. Billy Clanton’s ripped the marshal’s sleeve, but before either could fire again, Wyatt’s Buntline Special roared; the slug struck Frank McLowery squarely in the abdomen, just above the belt buckle. McLowery screamed, clapped his left hand to the wound, bent over and staggered forward. Wyatt knew that Frank was the most dangerous of the five outlaws and set out deliberately to dispose of him….

    The gunfight at the OK Corral was the basis of all westerns and entrenched the personal use of handguns in American culture, to its great loss. There were many eye-witness accounts, including that of a journalist, and Lake used them to reconstruct the gunfight in this sort of detail. So it wasn’t as if the facts of the incident weren’t known. Yet at the time I read the book, many films had been made involving Earp and the OK corral shootout—some of them masterpieces like My Darling Clementine (the credits of which said it was based on Lake’s book)—none of them the slightest bit accurate. In that movie, Doc Holliday is killed (he wasn’t) and Morgan Earp is already dead and replaced in the shoot-out by brother James, for instance. Mostly, it was the fifteen second duration of the fight that movie makers distorted, far too short for the climax of their melodramas.

… Tom McLowery was firing his third shot, this at Wyatt as Ike Clanton clung to the marshal’s arm, when Doc Holliday turned loose both barrels of his shotgun simultaneously from the road. Tom’s shot went wild and McLowery started on a run around the corner of the assay office toward Third Street. Disgusted with a weapon that could miss at such range, Holliday hurled the sawed-off shotgun after Tom with an oath and jerked his nickle-plated Colt. Ten feet around the corner, Tom McLowery fell dead with a double charge of buckshot in his belly and a slug from Wyatt Earp’s six-gun under his rubs which hit him as he ran…

    No movie version that I know of has Doc carrying a shotgun, which would have messed up the formulaic image of a movie gunfighter. Five or six more movies on the subject have been made since then, all equally inaccurate; except the little regarded Doc, but that was too heavy biased against the Earps.

The four cowboys had fired seventeen shots; Ike Clanton, whose brag and bluster had brought on the battle, none. They had scored three hits, not one of which put an adversary out of action.
The three Earps and Holliday had fired seventeen shots, four of which Doc Holliday had thrown at random into the gallery window after Ike Clanton. The remaining thirteen had been hits.
As the smoke of battle lifted, Wyatt turned to look up Fremont Street. A yelling mob was heading toward him. The Citizen’s Safety Committee had started for the corral in a column of two’s, but excitement had overcome discipline.

    Films based upon this incident and the further exploits of Wyatt Earp as he hunted down and killed the rest of the gang had already been made many times earlier. More notable efforts were Law and Order in 1932 with Walter Huston as the Earp-like character, Frontier Marshal in 1934 with George O’Brien as Earp, Frontier Marshal in 1939 with Randolph Scott as Wyatt Earp and Cesar Romero as Holliday, and Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die in 1942 with Richard Dix). Other films of more recent years include Gunfight at O.K. Corral (1957), with Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as Holliday; Hour of the Gun (1967), with James Garner as Wyatt and Jason Robards, Jr. as Doc.  But I read an account that up to circa 1970, some 37 movies had been made featuring the incident, and not one of them is the slightest bit accurate.
    The story goes that when they were making an early version of these events, Wyatt Earp was discovered to be still alive and living in Cuba. The producers invited him on the set as technical advisor but the old man made such a nuisance of himself carping about the innumerable errors and inaccuracies of the production that they soon had to fire him so they could get on with the proper business of making movies.
    I believe America’s inability to face up to its own history is the greatest source of its present problems. Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles in 1929, aged 81—his mentor Ike Clanton died of a similar old age in California. Movies just couldn’t cope with such a messy ending. Lake’s book, based on both historical records and Earp’s account of his life, was published two years later.