OK Corral court records discovered

The notorious 30-second OK Corral shootout in aptly named Tombstone, Arizona, which left the McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton - all 'Cowboys' - dead on 26 October 1881 caused quite a sensation in the press at the time. Court staff have now discovered records of the inquest following the gunfight while clearing out a storeroom (BBC).

 Newspaper cutting about the gunfight. Image source

The Cowboys' killers - Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp, Virgil Earp, and Doc Holliday - were exonerated, but Virgil Earp, the town marshall, was discharged: the locals suspected that what was presented as crime fighting was, in fact, common murder, the bloody result of a feud between the Earps and the Clantons.  

In the equally famous 1957 film version of OK Corral (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), Wyatt Earp, who is described as a 'legendary frontiersman of the American West, [...] an itinerant saloonkeeper, gambler, lawman, gunslinger, and confidence man', is played by Burt Lancaster, while Kirk Douglas plays Earp's buddy, the consumptive drifter Doc Holliday, described as a 'gambler, gunman, and sometime dentist' (Britannica).

Image source

While, almost inevitably, the otherwise unremarkable town of Tombstone does its best to cash in on its now glorified Wild West notoriety by attracting tourists with tacky re-enactments of the gun battle (to which children are taken, if you listen carefully while watching the video below), the local governor's business sense is, to say the least, mercenary: as the BBC reports, 'Earlier this month Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, signed into law a measure allowing Arizonans to carry concealed firearms without a permit.'