The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

What the boy saw, the man remembers.

Momma done told me time and time again to stay the hell away from the window when there was trouble brewing. Which, when you’re a twelve-year-old country boy with time on your hands, meant you sat at that window most of the day, unless you had chores. Today momma had gone down to the river with some of the other ladies to do the washing. She told me I’d get the switch if I disobeyed her again. Under no circumstances should I be leaning out, shouting down to passers-by’s, and by no means should I be getting involved in whatever trouble people were whispering about. Now momma didn’t need to explain mush more than that. I knew when she spoke, it didn’t matter if she actually said it. Everything was off limits. But today something felt different, so much that I was willing to risk the stinging crack of that long stick. Tombstone had a way of carrying its rumors in plain sight, and by midday it was clear something was building.

From the second floor you could see more than people realized. The angle gave you a look past the main street and into the open stretch near the rear of the O.K. Corral, where wagons sometimes cut through and men gathered when they didn’t want to be seen standing directly out front. That was where most of the attention had settled that day. Not a crowd exactly, but enough lingering movement to tell you that folks were watching without wanting to be caught doing it. It kept my attention.

Two dusty cowboys stood below my window for a while, shifting their weight and talking in low voices, the kind of low voices that carry just enough to be overheard if you stay quiet. One of them kept kicking the wooden support post that held up the second-floor walkway and glancing toward the open lot, like he expected something to happen any minute. The other man didn’t look at all. He was like a statue, stiff and nervous, listening but slow to respond. Finally, he said, “If it was going to cool off, it would have done so by now.” The first man heard his words, almost as if they were a punch in gut. He didn’t answer right away, and when he did, it was softer, like he didn’t want to hear himself say it. “That’s it then, it ain’t cooling off.”

Those words stayed with me, even though I didn’t fully understand them at the time.

I kept my spot at the window, pushing my luck in the hope that momma would linger at the river. Usually, three out of four times, one of the other townie women would bring a brown jug down to the place for sharing. Momma wasn’t the type to nurse the bottle, but when she thought she was out sight, and out of the rumor mill, she had a few swigs. Well, maybe more than a few swigs. But that was her prerogative she would say; she was the momma and she made the decisions round here.

Morning passed to early afternoon. That’s when the Earps came into view. My twelve-year old attention was as high as it could get. The Earps in Tombstone. They weren’t rushing, which is something I’ve thought about more than anything else since that day passed. There was no urgency in the way they moved, no wild energy, nothing like what you see in the stories people tell now. They just walked together with purpose, no hesitation, walking with the kind of purpose that comes after a decision has been made, and it was time to execute it. Virgil Earp was slightly ahead of the others. He was a sight to see, his posture straight, his attention fixed forward. Wyatt followed just behind him, watching everything without turning his head much. Morgan stayed close enough that you could tell they were moving as a group, like a small army unit on a mission. Doc Holliday trailed just off to the side, his coat hanging loose, his step a little uneven but steady enough to keep moving forward rather than falling down.

Someone down below muttered matter-of-factly, “Well, that’s them, there,” and another tired sounding voice answered, “About time it got settled.”

Across the lot, the sun was hanging mercilessly in the sky. From my window I could see the other group was already there waiting. Back then I didn’t know all their names, only that they were the kind of men people lowered voices when they spoke about. They stood in a loose line, not quite together, not quite apart, each one keeping his own space. None had anything special about their look, but all of them had that kind of look that kept weaker men at a safe distance. One of them shifted his coat back just enough that I could see the shining pistol at his side, and to a small boy, that small movement seemed louder than anything else happening in that moment.

What struck me as strange was how ordinary it all looked. Here, one group of armed men were closing on the other group, and no one seemed to be excited. There was no announcement, no dramatic pause where everyone suddenly understood what was about to happen. The town didn’t stop. A wagon passed at the far end of the street. Someone laughed from inside a saloon. The world kept moving, and in the middle of it, these men kept closing on one another. The distance between them shrinking by the minute.

Virgil spoke first. I couldn’t make out every word, but I heard enough to understand. He told them boys gathered in the lot to give up their weapons. It wasn’t a recommendation, not drama, just a cold fact. It came from a man doing a job he’d already decided he wasn’t going to walk away from.

There was a response, quick and sharp, and then everything happened at once.

The first shot came so fast it didn’t feel like it had a beginning. I pushed back hard on the windowsill and landed on my behind. Gunfire has a tendency to shock or even scare you if you’re not used to it. I’d heard shots before, but this was the first time I’d seen a man draw on another. In the blink of an eye, I scurried back to the window and peered out at the yard. My eyes focused on the two groups of men.

One moment there were men standing, and in the next there was a flurry of shots, noise and movement. Smoke was rising in short bursts from the lines where they faced each other. I remember gripping the window frame without realizing it, no longer peering, but leaning forward even though every instinct said to pull back. I just needed to see the outcome. The sound echoed off the buildings in a way that made it hard to tell where one shot ended and the next began.

It was not clean, not clean at all. That’s the part people don’t say often enough. There was no gentlemen’s agreement, no fair exchange, nothing like that. It was a mix of dedicated confusion, survival instinct and men trying to strategically fire while staying on their feet. One of the cowboys stumbled backward almost immediately, more from surprise than anything else, his hat falling to the ground as he tried to regain his balance. Doc Holliday stepped forward with a roaring shotgun, the recoil pushing him backwards a bit. For a second, I thought he might fall on his behind. Wyatt Earp, now he seemed to have something the others didn’t. The way he moved, steady and controlled, as if he had already practiced this fight again and again, and didn’t need to think about it. The instinct of a true gunfighter.

The entire thing lasted less than a minute. Me, I could have sworn it went on for much longer. When the shooting finally stopped, there was no moment of victory, no dust settling. It just stopped. The aftermath however, well that had some dramatics woven into it. It was suddenly quiet. A spooky kind-of quiet that leaves everyone guessing as to what will happen next. A quiet that seemed out of place in such a noisy town. For a few tense seconds, not one moved. It was surreal.

Then someone let out a slow wailing groan, something guttural, low and thick with pain. In that moment, time seemed to catch up to the townspeople, and everything went back to the kind to normal. Well, some kind of normal. An older man, I think the fella that ran the General Store, ran forward from the edge of the lot, with several others hot on his heels. Voices rose, not loud at first, but enough to fill the space where the gunfire had been. The men who were still standing were on edge, their gazes moving hard in every direction, making sure there wasn’t going to be an ambush, after the fact. I could see something that has stayed with me ever since. It didn’t look like victory in their eyes.

I remember expecting something else. I don’t know what exactly, maybe cheering, slapping one another on the back, anything that would suffice as an ending, but there was none of that. It felt unfinished, cold, still wanting. It was unsettling.

By the time momma came home, I had moved away from the window, sitting down deep in thought about what I’d just seen. I replayed the violent minute over and over, putting each movement and shot to memory. To this day, I don’t know why I did that. Momma looked at me for a moment, her expression searching for something. She seemed to know, but still asked me anyway, if I had stayed inside, away from that window, like she told me to. I whispered yes in response, because it was easier than explaining what I had seen.

She nodded and went about her work, and that was the end of it as far as she was concerned.

But it wasn’t the end for me. In the years that followed, I heard about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, story more times than I could count. Not a single version was right, mostly because those doing the telling were not there. Folks argued about who fired first, who stood where, who fell, and so on. Funny thing was that as the years passed, the story changed, heck even the name of the story changed.

The vacant lot on Freeman Street; that’s where it happened. The O.K. Corral was down the street. It sure sounded better to say the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral rather than the Gunfight at Freeman’s Lot. There were about 30 shots fired in less than a minute. No one running around, taking cover behind anything. It was two lines of hardened men standing across from one another and pulling their triggers just as fast as they could, hoping they wouldn’t die.

Heck, no one even remembers the reason why the gunfight even started in the first place. Virgil and his men were there to enforce the city gun ordinance and them cowboys weren’t interested in obliging. The minute he spoke, they shot at him and the others. There had been bad words and bad blood between the cowboys and the lawmen for months prior to the fight. Ike Clanton, the big mouth of the group, ran away like a scared girl, as soon as the shooting started leaving Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers to die. I could go on, but it would be meaningless. The truth has been buried.

Even so, from where I watched out of that window, it looked like something that could have gone either way, until it ended. It looked uncertain, uneven, and over far too quickly to carry the weight the story somehow gathered over the years.

What I remember most is not the shooting itself, but that strange feeling afterward, followed by that strange return of ordinary life. It was as if the town had decided to keep going without pausing to make sense of what had just taken place. The storekeeper was back behind his counter just minutes after seeing the dead men on the ground. Others just went back to whatever they were doing. The only one with anything new to do was the undertaker. By evening, the street looked like it always had.

If I hadn’t seen it from above, if I had only heard about it later, I might have believed the stories too. But I was there, at the window I wasn’t supposed to be at, and what I saw was not the legend. It was a handful of men, a short burst of violence, and a town that went right back to its business as if that was the only way it knew how to survive.

Additional Reading

R.J. (Ralph) Schwartz is an American poet, author, website owner, and online publisher. His writing spans several poetry collections—ranging from spiritual and romantic to fear-driven explorations—and even extends into science fiction. Notable works include:

• Normal Was the First Casualty – A Collection of Dystopian Poetry

• Hope – Inspirational and Spiritual Poetry

• Things That Go Bump in the Night – Poetry of Fear and Fright

• The Lover’s Thread – Poetry for Couples

• Poetry of the Human Condition – The Ups and Downs of Modern Living

• The Secrets of the Moon (a sci-fi novel co-authored with his son Sebastian J. Schwartz)

Schwartz’s work is described as purposefully wordy, richly descriptive, and thematically grounded in nature, romance, antiquity, and forgotten histories. He writes regularly on platforms he manages, including The Creative Exiles, a collaborative venue for writers, and The Gypsy Thread, which delves into offbeat histories, pagan lore, and poetry.