Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The O.K. Corral

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Listen in as we detail, in short, the legendary shootout at the O.K. Corral. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry, let's get to it, giddy up.

Draw. Draw, indeed. Pew, pew, pew. That's pretty good. Laser. It's a little pea shooter, a laser. That's right. So we're talking about the gunfight at the OK Corral.

I've been there, you ever been there? No. You've been there? Sure. What's it like? Dusty. I'll bet, I was gonna say dusty. Hot?

Were there tumbleweeds? Sure, everywhere. Varmints? Oh, you wouldn't believe the varmints. Rapscallions, sasperilla, all that good stuff. Nice. Have you ever tasted sasperilla? Sure, it didn't kind of like root beer.

That's what I've always thought, but I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure. I think I had one back then, but I don't remember that. That's when I was a child. Okay. But we are talking about the gunfight at the OK Corral, the very, excuse me, famous gunfight between the Earps and Doc Holliday and the Cowboys.

A very simplistic way to look at this, which was in the otherwise pretty good How Stuff Works short article is, you know, the Earps were the good guys, the bad guys were the other guys. Wrong. But there's some nuance there, because the Earps, and I think like most lawmen

of the time out west, you know, they were criminals too. Sometimes. The thing that differentiated them was the badge and the fact that they were able to enforce the law. Yeah, and not to say that they were all awful people and they were horse thieves and, you know, no good cusses, as this article says for the bad guys.

But there was definitely, I think it was kind of few and far between where you had a truly just and righteous lawman. Well, so Wyatt Earp, he had been run out of California for horse thieving. So he was an actual horse thief. He moved to Wichita and he was a marshal there for three years before he was run out of Wichita

for corruption. And then he ended up in Tombstone where his brother Virgil was the marshal there. That's right. And then Wyatt and his brother Morgan became basically deputy marshals under their brother. And they kind of selectively enforced the law. But when it came to those Cowboys,

the Clanton gang is another way to put it. They enforce the law extra judiciously very frequently. Yeah, they also had a buddy named John Henry Holliday. He's from Griffin. Went by the name of Doc, was he? Yeah, his dental office is still in Griffin. I think it's like your museum now. So he was good with a gun and not shy with a trigger finger.

And we should mention the bad guys. He said the Clanton gang was a man named Billy Claiborne and then Ike and Billy Clanton and then Frank and Tom McLaury. And they weren't just like, you know, low life Cowboys. They were actually from wealthy ranching families from what I understand. Yeah, but you know, it was sort of a thing back in the day.

Which I guess you could still be a rich low life. Really? Yeah. Don't kid me, they're everywhere. These two groups of men did not like each other though. For a full year in Tombstone, they really went through a population explosion when someone found, not gold in them Darhills, but silver.

Good enough. Good enough at the time. And they said, we need some law enforcement. And it was literally the Wild West out there at the time. I know that that word is used a lot. Like it's the Wild West and podcasting with all these shootouts. Sure.

Environments. You know who's quick on the draw is that Roman Mars. Sure. Man, that guy's good. But they went to the town leaders and they had a lot of the town leaders on their side. They went to Virgil and Wyatt Earp. It's like, you guys are, you know, good enough, I guess.

Yeah. You've done it before and you're not afraid to shoot someone in the face. Right. Go shoot them in the face, Earp boys. So you've got like this history of run-ins between the Earps and the Cowboys. There was bad blood between them.

I read elsewhere that Wyatt Earp had designs on becoming sheriff of a neighboring town or a neighboring county. And so he wanted to make his name by bringing the Clanton gang down. So he actually went to Ike Clanton and said, hey, why don't you turn on your brother and the rest of the gang members and I'll make sure that you get off, you know, scot-free.

And apparently, What did you say? Apparently Ike was thinking about it. That was a great cattle wrestler, I think. But Ike was thinking about it, but he ended up not doing it. So Wyatt realized that he was in a bit of a pickle here because it would harm his reputation if it was found out that he was making

under the table deals with bandits. Yeah. And so he decided that Ike needed to go. The evidence against him, Ike, needed to be rubbed out. So that's basically from what I saw that actually led to this gunfight at the OK Corral that the Earp boys were spoiling for a fight. They were actually stalking the Clanton gang that day.

The Earped Earps? Yeah. Wow. All right, well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about what happened, not high noon, but about three o'clock. I guess it was high noon somewhere. Yeah. On October 26th, 1881. MUSIC

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So here's the deal in Tombstone. It was against the law to carry weapons in Tombstone in 1881. That's silly. Which is shocking.

Yeah. Don't they know about the Second Amendment? I don't know. So Virgil Earp, and Virgil was the, he was the Marshal at the time, he said, Cowboys, you know, you're not supposed to have your guns. And there was some other run-ins that day. There were a couple of violent pistol whippings.

Ike and Tom, Ike, Clanton, and Tom McLary were kind of beat down by the Earps earlier in the day. Yeah, I didn't see anything about that elsewhere. Well, it basically came to a head at about 3 o'clock on October 26. And this is crazy to think about, but the gun fight at the O.K. Corral lasted about 30 seconds. There were about 30 to 40 shots fired between,

how many guys was it, six? No, I think it was more like eight or nine. But estimates say that they were about six feet apart from one another. Can you imagine? They were just in a little circle, basically. They'd just be like, stop, stop, quit, stop. I'm surprised they all didn't end up dead.

A couple of them did. I know that both of, I think both of the Clanton brothers ended up dead, right? Billy Clanton died, and then both McLary brothers. Oh, OK. So three of the Cowboys died. None of the Herbs died, but Wyatt got off scot-free. He had no scratches on him.

Virgil almost died. He got shot through the back and just narrowly missed his spine. No, that was Morgan. Virgil got hit in the leg. But yeah, Morgan, it just was like a through shot. But I mean, I know. I'm sure that felt great. Dot got a little scrape, and I think he said Wyatt.

This is Kevin Costner. But yeah, that's some pretty terrible shooting right there. From six feet away? Six feet, right? So yeah, that's basically like closing your eyes and just firing in a direction, that level of contact. Yeah, you would have seen my boot spurs running in the other direction in a zigzaggy pattern.

So the shootout at the OK Corral lasted 30 seconds. It was not at high noon. And another little known fact is that it wasn't even at the OK Corral. It was in a vacant lot behind the Corral between a boarding house and a photo studio. Oh, really? Yeah.

I don't think I knew that. It's true. It was in an Olin Mills? Afterward, Doc Holiday went and got a picture where it's like face on, and then up in the corner, he's like looking off into the moon. So here's how it apparently went down. And it's like I said, those brothers, or McClary and Clinton

had been pistol whipped early in the day. The Cowboys came into town, pretty ticked off about this, and kind of looking for a fight supposedly, but also supposedly the Earps were just like waiting to start a fight with these guys. Yeah, actually the Earps were almost charged with murder for a second there. I think Ike, you said Ike survived, right?

Yes. Ike, Clinton, a couple days later, formally accused the Earps of murder, basically saying that they had ambushed the Cowboys. That's right. There were a lot of eyewitnesses, there was one kind of apparently really important eyewitness named Addie Borland, and she said, quote,

I didn't see anyone holding up their hands. They all seemed to be firing in general on both sides. They were firing on both sides at each other. Right, so what historians think actually happened is that the Earps came upon the Clans who were caught by surprise, and the Earps said, drop your weapons or we'll start firing. They actually said it out loud,

but then started firing before they even had a chance to drop their weapons. The Clanton gang starts firing back, but again, they were ambushed, they were caught by surprise, and they weren't given a chance to actually surrender. And so there were kind of some things in the favor of a case of murder against the Earps, but the thing that got them off is that earlier witnesses

had overheard the Clanton saying that they were going to kill the Earps. So the Earps were like, see, this is all just self-defense. Yeah, and there was an actual hearing because of that call for murder. Old-timey name, please. Justice of the Peace, Well Spicer. Beautiful.

Had a hearing and he basically said, no, you know what? It seems to me like they were well within their rights as marshals and what they called special policemen to do their duty. And because of Addie Boerlin's testimony, and you know, I Clanton came out and he had his own testimony, but it looks like they just was frontier justice. They sided on the quote unquote law.

Yeah, I think I Clanton said that he and his brother and gang members had their hands up and were still fired upon. And supposedly, at least one of them might not have had a weapon, depending on who you asked, on the cowboy side. Yeah, so that's how it went down. The gun fight at the O.K. Corral

in a vacant lot at 3 p.m. That's right, and later on, there was an assassination attempt on Virgil Earp in December of that same year. Morgan Earp was murdered in a billiard club in early 1882, and everyone is like, well, this is clearly the work of I Clanton, although who knows, because it's frontier justice. It could have been anything.

He could have snored too loud. I'm sure the Earp brothers had more enemies than just I Clanton, but people still suspect that it was him. And as for Clanton, he was killed in 1887 in the Arizona Territory by a detective, and Wyatt Earp lived until 1929 to the ripe old age of 80, where he died. Where else?

Los Angeles. Where he was a DJ and a sometime music producer. That's funny. So that's it for short stuff, everybody. If you want to get in touch with us and send us an email, you have to go listen to the regular episodes to find out where to send it to. Short stuff is out.

Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.