CHECK IT OUT:Hunting down O.K. Corral history

It happened in Tombstone, Ariz., 125 years ago this month.

Three brothers and their dentist friend opened fire on two sets of brothers and their friends, killing three of them. All in a matter of three minutes.

This wasn’t the only gunfight in the old West, or the most lethal, but it certainly was the most famous. Or infamous, depending on how deeply one examines the events surrounding that day.

The accounts of the eyewitnesses are sometimes sketchy and often at odds with each other. That threats were made earlier that day by some drunken outlaws is certain, as well as the fact that members of the “gang” were in Tombstone armed.

The law at the time was very strict about checking weapons at the first corral or saloon encountered on entering the town.

On the other side, Virgil Earp was city marshall, and his brother, Morgan, was a deputy. However, neither brother Wyatt nor Doc Holliday were officially men of the law at that time.

The Clantons and the McLaurys were, indeed, part-time rustlers and thieves, but they weren’t really a gang. Tombstonians referred to them as “The Cowboys,” but they were generally well-liked in town and certainly spent a lot of their money in Tombstone’s various businesses, which made a lot of their sins forgivable.

The immediate upshot was an inquiry that lasted for 30 days worth of testimony. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were eventually exonerated.

That was the formal justice ruling. Justice of another kind took the form of revenge. A few weeks after the grand jury refused to indict, Virgil Earp was shot by a hidden assailant and permanently lost the use of his left arm. Three months later, gunmen in a dark alley shot and killed Morgan Earp.

After the death of Morgan Earp, Wyatt and Doc Holliday set out on what was called “the Earp vendetta ride.” They hunted down and killed the people they thought had attacked the other Earp brothers.

Since this was clearly indefensible, even by Wild West standards, Wyatt and Holliday left the Arizona territory. Wyatt and Doc remained friends until Holliday died in Colorado of the tuberculosis that had been slowly killing him for years.

Wyatt traveled all across the West, earning his living mostly as a gambler. He finally settled in California, where he could be seen betting at the race tracks with his Hollywood friends — among them cowboy stars Tom Mix and William S. Hart.

He also met a very young actor, who claimed in later years that he modeled his cowboy persona on the famous man he had met. It is interesting that we may glimpse something of Earp in the performances of John Wayne.

Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles on Jan. 13, 1929. He was 80 years old and had outlived all of his brothers. Shortly before this death, he wrote to his biographer, Stuart Lake.

“For my handling of the situation in Tombstone, I have no regrets. Were it to be done over again, I would do exactly as I did at that time. If the outlaws and their friends and allies imagined that they could intimidate or exterminate the Earps by a process of assassination, and then hide behind … the technicalities of the law, they simply missed their guess.”

That the Earps so captured the American imagination is a tribute to the yellow journalism of the time, but the story still resonates with people today.

Boomers grew up in the ‘50s with the sanitized image of Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp on the TV show.

In 1946, Lake’s biography was turned into a John Ford film, “My Darling Clementine” starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt. The mythology was somewhat corrected by Leon Uris’ script for “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” in 1957, with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt.

The ‘90s saw a rebirth of interest, with Kurt Russell playing Wyatt in “Tombstone” and Kevin Costner undertaking another revisionist version in “Wyatt Earp.” (Actually, this might make a fun home “film festival” some weekend!)

And for anyone wanting to dig any deeper, there are also numerous books about the Earps and about the gunfight itself. They even include Wyatt’s own book “Wyatt Earp Speaks: My Side of the O.K. Corral Shootout,” which incorporates interviews with Doc Holiday.