OK Corral Inquest Transcript Found in Arizona Jailhouse Store Room

Two court clerks stumbled upon the original transcript from the 1881 coroner’s inquest while reorganising files in a jail storage room in Bisbee, Arizona. 

In vivid detail, it describes the fateful day that tensions between Wyatt Earp, the local lawman, and a gang of outlaws ended in bloodshed. The gun battle in the frontier town of Tombstone left three men dead and ensured Earp’s place in Wild West folklore.

The 1957 film, Gunfight at the OK Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as his sidekick, John ‘Doc’ Holliday, presented the two men as heroes. To this day, however, debate rages over who drew their guns first.

Born in 1848, Earp worked in several professions – saloon keeper, farmer, boxing referee – and moved around the Old West before settling in the silver-mining town of Tombstone in 1879, where he established himself as a toughtalking lawman.

Holliday was a once-respectable dentist who gave up his profession after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, and who turned to drink and gambling. According to legend, he met Earp in Dodge City and saved him from a gunman. That act cemented a lifelong friendship.

One of the eyewitnesses was Mrs MJ King, a landlady who was on her way to the butcher’s when she sensed trouble. “I saw quite a group of men standing on the sidewalk with two horses, near the market,” she told the inquest.

“I inquired what was the matter, and they said there was going to be a fuss between the Earp boys and cowboys.”

The Earp boys were Wyatt and his brothers, Virgil and Morgan, who acted as deputy marshals. The “cowboys” – a name given to suspected cattle rustlers – included brothers Ike and Billy Clanton, and Frank and Tom McLaury.

Mrs King said: “I heard the man on the outside kind of stop or looked at Holliday. And said, ‘Let them have it’.

Holliday said, ‘All right’. Then I thought there would be shooting, from what these parties said, and ran for the back of the shop, but before I reached the middle of the shop I heard shots.”

According to the testimony of Ike Clanton, the Earps and Doc Holliday were the antagonists.

He claimed: “I stepped out and met Wyatt Earp; he stuck his six shooter at me and said, ‘Throw up your hands!’

The marshal also told the other boys to throw up their hands; Frank McLowry [sic] and Billy Clanton threw up; Tom McLowry [sic] threw open his coat and said he had nothing.

“They said, ‘you’s s---- of b------ came here to make a fight’; at the same instant Doc Holliday and Morgan Earp shot.”

Barely 30 seconds later, Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers lay dead. The inquest took place later that same day, on October 30, 1881. Earp and Holliday were cleared of wrongdoing by a judge but their reputations never recovered.

The transcript, discovered stuffed inside a modern manila envelope marked “keep”, has been turned over to state archivists, who have begun the painstaking process of restoring the faded pages, said to be “as brittle as potato crisps”. To GladysAnn Wells, Arizona State Librarian, the pages are a priceless piece of history. “They were handled by the people of that moment,” she said.