Gunfight at O.K. Corral Still Echoes

Everyone knows the legend: Wyatt Earp and his posse take on the Clanton gang at the O.K. Corral. The Earp side wins, Wyatt becomes a hero, goes on to glory in several movies and ultimately is immortalized by Henry Fonda and other leading men as daring and toughness incarnate.

It’s a story to boil the blood of the Clantons, who sorely resent the depiction of their kin as unwashed cattle rustlers who couldn’t shoot fast enough to be the last ones standing. And for the record, there are surviving Clantons, thousands of them.

Now, two Clanton cousins--a Lake Forest accountant and a flamboyant Norco actor who loves to dress up in badman garb--are seeking to restore the family honor.

Between the two, Robert and Terry Clanton are putting the branches back on the family tree, redeeming the Clanton name and telling their side of the O.K. Corral story: The shootout 119 years ago Thursday, they contend, was nothing but an early case of police brutality.

Businessman Robert’s interest is in rebuilding kinship connections; he has hired a Costa Mesa genealogist to do a complete family history, back to John Clanton of England in 1610.

Terry, 42, loves the romance of it all. He also does occasional acting stints portraying ancestor Ike Clanton. Once a month, he holds Old West meetings in Norco, dressing in the black costumes of 19th century gunslingers, holding liars’ contests and reliving the time when his ancestors were known as some of the baddest men in the West.

Yet, through Terry’s Web page, Clantongang.com, hundreds of people from across the nation have found their way onto Robert’s genealogy lists. From Terry they have learned about the wrong he says was done to the family, first by the Earps, then by history.

It’s a prideful turning point for a family that has kept a low profile for more than a century. Many Clantons wouldn’t admit earlier, even among themselves, that they had any family connection to the infamous shootout in Tombstone, Ariz.

“I didn’t know I was related to the O.K. Corral Clantons until I was 38,” said Robert Clanton, now 48.

Saying you were a Clanton was, well, staking a claim to infamy--sort of like claiming Jesse James as kin. Of course, nowadays people are claiming James as kin, even demanding that DNA from his exhumed body be tested to prove they have bank robber blood flowing in their veins.

So why shouldn’t the Clantons stand up and take their rightful place in the annals of boomtown outlawry? Especially, they figure, if they can help people learn more than just the Hollywood version of the story.

That version goes like this:

Virgil Earp, a deputy U.S. marshal, deputizes his brother Wyatt, a bar owner who also works as a Wells Fargo guard. Along with their brother Morgan and crony John Henry “Doc” Holliday, they head down to a vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral.

Their plan: to disarm the unruly Clantons, reputed cattle rustlers, and their cowboy friends, the McLaury boys, Tom and Frank. In an Old West take on gun control, only lawmen could legally carry guns into town and the cowboys routinely violated that law.

Wearing long, black coats and each standing 6 feet tall, the Earp contingent asks for the cowboys’ guns. But someone cocks a pistol and the shooting begins.

When the shooting is over, the two McLaury boys and 19-year-old Billy Clanton are dead and the nation is transfixed by the story of heroic lawmen.

All of the Earps survive the shooting: Virgil is shot in the leg, Morgan in the back and Doc Holliday is grazed in the thigh. Only Wyatt is untouched.

In fact, Wyatt Earp never took a bullet. Earp’s coat, his hat and even his saddle would be bullet-ridden, but not a shot ever touched him, and this bulletproof quality would contribute to his legend.

So much for the movies. There’s more to the story the Clantons want you to know:

Doc Holliday had threatened Ike Clanton’s life the night before, warning Ike that he’d better have a gun the next time they met. So Ike goes to town with a gun the next day but is disarmed and pistol-whipped by Virgil and Morgan Earp for breaking the law.

And you never hear that Ike Clanton tried to stop the carnage, but that Wyatt refused, telling Ike he’d better shoot or run. Ike, who did not have a gun, ran and thus gained a posthumous reputation for cowardice.

The feuding did not end with the shootout, however. Ike unsuccessfully sought to have the Earps and Holliday prosecuted on murder charges. Virgil was later maimed in an ambush by members of the Clanton gang, who also shot Morgan dead while he was playing pool with Wyatt. Wyatt then went on a vendetta, killing the men he believed had murdered Morgan. A warrant on murder charges was issued for Wyatt’s arrest; instead of turning himself in, the noted lawman left the state.

Such details fascinate more than the Clantons. Historians study the dramatic tale, write papers about it, and debate at conferences whether the Earps are heroes or killers.

“It goes back to our understanding of frontier justice and frontier violence and when was there a necessity for it,” said Paula Mitchell Marks, author of the 1989 book “And Die in the West: The Shootout at the O.K. Corral.” Marks is an assistant professor of history at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas.

Some might see Wyatt Earp as an early Rambo or Dirty Harry--characters with a complete disregard for the rules but whose fundamental sense of right transcends bureaucracy and detail.

That’s not Marks’ view.

“I wouldn’t say the Earps were as unsavory as the Clantons,” she said, “but they were definitely out for any advantage they could get.”

The fight at the O.K. Corral echoes on and on among Old West scholars, “and it’s not at all collegial; there’s a lot of name-calling,” Marks said. “Three years after I wrote the book, people were still calling me, wanting to argue about whether Tom McLaury [who was killed in the gunfight] had a gun.”

The one truth agreed on by all sides is that in Tombstone, a silver mining boomtown with a population of about 18,000, justice was a hit-or-miss proposition.

A famous headstone from the local cemetery illustrates the point:

“George Johnson, Hanged by Mistake 1882:

He was right

We was wrong

But we strung him up

And now he’s gone.”

In this case, the Clantons contend, justice definitely missed. In fact, they claim, the shootout was a result of animosity that had been building for a year. But fundamentally, they were different kinds of men who stood for different ways of life.

The Clantons were cowboys and ranchers, landowners who held Confederate sympathies during the Civil War. The Earps were townsfolk who had Union loyalties. In the bitter years after the war, they were rival factions fighting to control the expansive Western states.

“When you learn more about what happened, you learn that a lot of it was political,” said Robert Clanton. “Basically, the Confederates still hated the Yankees.”

Re-Creating the Old West

Terry Clanton is standing behind the bar in the replica of an 1880s saloon he spent a year building on the property outside his Norco house. He serves up shots of Old Overholt whiskey--the exact brand drunk by the Clantons, Earps and other gamblers in Tombstone.

It’s one of Terry’s Old West nights, where 15 or so people are gathered for steak dinners and drinks. While he eats, historian Earl Chafin, editor of a book about Wyatt Earp, takes a whack at telling The Story. He relates how, family feud or not, Ike Clanton and Virgil Earp gambled together the night before the shootout.

“Aww, he’s leaving out that Virgil went home to sleep while Ike stayed up all night!” huffs Terry Clanton (who asks people to call him “Terry Ike,” the latter name in honor of the scorned cowboy who ran).

“Now, the Clantons were cattle rustlers,” Chafin says.

“They were never convicted!” Terry interjects.

“OK, we’ll call them importers,” Chafin laughs.

Some of the attendees are members of the Single Action Shooting Society (a type of handgun used in the 1880s, including the Colt Peacemaker) and themselves are lightning-fast on the draw. Many have made the pilgrimage to Tombstone, and some go every year, finding endless fascination in revisiting those 30 seconds.

To Jim Peterson, 53, of Gardena, it was an event of mythic masculinity.

“You’ve got to remember that that shootout took place in a space that was just 16 feet square--think of how much nerve it took,” Peterson said. “They stood eyeball to eyeball and shot it out.”

Robert Clanton of Lake Forest became hooked on the story after attending one of Terry’s family reunions in Tombstone five years ago. He returned to Lake Forest and set out to document his family, hiring genealogist Lloyd McDaniel of Costa Mesa.

McDaniel hears from five or six Clantons a week, each of whom has a passel of other Clanton relatives to add to the puzzle of 15,000 names he has amassed.

The Rev. Lindsey “Buddy” Moore, who contacted McDaniel through Terry’s Web page, found out only five months ago that he’s one of those Clantons.

“My great-grandmother, Rhoda Jane Clanton, never mentioned it to any of her children or grandchildren because it was a dark spot in the family history,” he said.

The 66-year-old Georgia resident is thrilled to be related to outlaws--sorry, alleged outlaws. Rev. Buddy, as he calls himself, is already espousing the Clanton history of Tombstone.

A New Orleans homicide detective before he became a minister, Rev. Buddy is convinced that modern forensics would exonerate his kin.

But what about all that cattle rustling?

“There was the suspicion of rustling and of holdups,” Rev. Buddy corrects. “But no convictions!”

Wyatt Earp knows all about the Clanton view of history. He just sighs.

What’s a legend to do? Or rather, what is he--a man named for his legendary great-uncle--to do?

Today’s Wyatt Earp, a 55-year-old actor living in Arizona, is a sensitive guy.

“I can give them all the empathy in the world,” Earp said. “I’m a humanist and a people person, and I have a great amount of compassion for them; it is wrong for people to have to bear the guilt for previous generations.”

For Earp, his namesake has been an inspiration.

“He was a regular stand-up man of his times and if law enforcement was necessary, he would not walk away from any situation,” he said.

His ancestor never meant to be famous. “He was really more of an entrepreneur,” Earp said, referring to his great-uncle’s many business endeavors.

So is the modern Earp. Like Terry Clanton’s stints playing Ike, Earp’s most famous acting role has been in a one-man show portraying, yes, Wyatt Earp. He and Terry are friendly, and no one better understands what it’s like to be captivated by the Tombstone legacy.

“It came and tapped me on the shoulder and wouldn’t let go of me,” Earp said.

Terry “Ike” Clanton and Wyatt Earp were brought together in June of last year for a showdown of their own.

The American Bar Assn. asked them to participate in a mock trial, a fictional wrongful death suit brought against Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday by the mother of Tom and Frank McLaury.

Wyatt played Wyatt as if he’d be hanged if he lost. And Terry, as Ike Clanton, pleaded for murder charges against Earp to avenge his dead kin.

The outcome?

“Well, history speaks for itself,” Earp said. “Wyatt was right, so he won.”

Again.