Corralling the Truth
One of the most famous stories of the American West is that of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. The West, however, was not some unregulated land of guns and booze as Hollywood often suggests; the Backstory hosts talk with scholar Adam Winkler about how the O.K. Corral was the exception, not the rule of the Wild West.
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PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the University of Virginia.
ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.
BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.
ED: 19th Century Guy.
BRIAN: And Peter Onuf, the one and only–
PETER: 18th Century Guy.
BRIAN: Today’s show is about the history of guns in America. And frankly, when it comes to guns, I don’t know how you start anywhere else in American history besides the Wild West.
ADAM WINKLER: Out in the untamed wilderness of the Wild West, everyone had guns.
ED: This is Adam Winkler, a Law Professor at UCLA, and author of Gunfight: the Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.
ADAM WINKLER: If you were going from place to place where there was no law out in the frontier, you needed guns to protect yourself. There were hostile Indians, outlaws, there were wild animals. You were out there alone. There was no law. And so much so that stagecoach drivers that went from town to town took to great expense to hire someone to ride sitting next to them with a shotgun in their hand, right there in the front of the stagecoach.
BRIAN: And for all you listeners currently sitting in the passenger seat of the car, this is, in fact, where we get the phrase riding shotgun.
ADAM WINKLER: So everyone out in the Wild West had guns. And you needed to them out in the Wild West. But, when you came into a town, like a Tombstone, Arizona, or a Dodge City, Kansas, where the business people and the civilized people lived, your guns weren’t welcome there.
These towns had the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. When you walked into a Wild West town you had to check your guns, the way you might check your overcoat in a restaurant in the winter. And you’d get a little token that you can use to get back your guns when you’re leaving the town.
PETER: So this probably doesn’t square with your image of the Wild West. Gun toting, drunkards stumbling through the streets of Deadwood ready to blow away the next guy who crosses their path. I mean, what about gunfights? What about the OK Corral?
ADAM WINKLER: Well the shootout at the OK Corral is the most famous, or infamous gunfight in American history. On one side of the street were lined up Ike Clanton and a group of outlaw cowboys. And on the other side of the street we had the famous Wyatt Earp and the Earp brothers, the law man of the town.
DOC HOLLIDAY: Wait a minute Wyatt, Kate told me about the killing of your brother.
ED: This is a clip from the 1957 film, Gunfight at the OK Corral.
DOC HOLLIDAY: It was the Clantons, all right. And you were in on it.
COTTON WILSON: I had nothing to do with it.
WYATT EARP: Get back where you belong.
COTTON WILSON: Beilieve me, Wyatt, if–
WYATT EARP: Get back with your friends.
DOC HOLLIDAY: Hit the dirt!
[GUNFIRE]
ADAM WINKLER: And shots rang out and three people died, and several others were injured.
TOM MCLOWERY: Oh, no! They killed my brother!
JOHNNY RINGO: Tom, stay back you fool!
TOM MCLOWERY: They killed my brother!
ADAM WINKLER: The reason why the dispute between the Clantons and the Earps turned deadly, was because the Clanton gang refused to turn over their weapons, as required by Tombstone law. So some people think that the shootout at the OK Corral was typical of the Wild West. That’s how we view these Wild West towns, cowboys running roughshod, guns ablaze night and day.
But in truth, gun violence was very rare in the quote, unquote “gun havens of the Wild West.” Places like Tombstone, Arizona or Dodge City, Kansas, or Deadwood, South Dakota. Over the period of the Wild West, roughly 1870 to the 1890s, towns like Tombstone or Dodge City, they averaged less than two murders a year.
And in most years during those periods, they had zero murders. So the reason why we’re still talking about the shootout at the OK Corral 130 years later, is because it was an extraordinary event. It was an unusual event that made headlines coast to coast, that three people were shot in a shootout.
Whereas, today, on in Los Angeles, if three people are shot, it might not even make the front page of the local newspaper. So the shootout at the OK Corral, while often taken to be emblematic of America’s gun culture, I think, also is a story of America’s gun control culture, about the ways in which gun control has shaped America, as much as the six-shooter or the Second Amendment.