The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on This Day in History

 

This day in history: On this day in 1881, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday participated in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral was a thirty-second gunfight between lawmen, actually led by Virgil (not Wyatt) Earp and members of a loosely organized group of outlaws called the Cowboys that occurred at about 3:00 p.m. It is generally regarded as the most famous gunfight in the history of the American Old West.

The shootout has come to represent a period of the Old West when the frontier was virtually an open range for outlaws, largely unopposed by lawmen who were spread thin over vast territories. 

However, despite this, the old American West was actually quite tame. In his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, W. Eugene Hollon stated that he believed “that the Western frontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful, and safer place than American society is today.” The legend of the “wild, wild West” lives on despite Robert Dykstra’s finding that in five of the major cattle towns (Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell) for the years from 1870 to 1885, only 45 homicides were reported — an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season.

In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, “nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.” [The Trampling Herd] Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had 5 killings in any one year. [Frontier Violence] Frank Prassel states in his book subtitled A Legacy of Law and Order, that “if any conclusion can be drawn from recent crime statistics, it must be that this last frontier left no significant heritage of offenses against the person, relative to other sections of the country." Mises.org

Many studies have produced the conclusion that the Wild West was much tamer than legend has it, and it only got more violent when Government "Peacemakers" were introduced.

"In their book The Not So Wild, Wild West, economists Terry Anderson and Peter Hill masterfully demonstrate that the West was not at all like the common view. Not only was violence not particularly prevalent, but stable socioeconomic relationships arose spontaneously before there was much governmental presence. In fact, Anderson and Hill repeatedly show, the arrival of government usually made matters worse, as politicians and interest groups were able to upset the arrangements that people had worked out to maximize the benefits they could derive from the land and its resources and to minimize conflict." ~George C. Leef

Buffalo Bill & the American West, 200 Books to Download