American Gun

3 THE COLT SINGLE-ACTION ARMY REVOLVER

On the morning of June 8, 1844, a Texas Ranger spotted a beehive up in a tree near a creek in the Hill Country of central Texas. With the scent of honey tempting his taste buds, the young lawman climbed the branches halfway up to inspect the bounty. Then he froze.

“Captain,” shouted the Ranger to his commander on the ground, the legendary Texas Ranger Captain John Coffee Hays, “yonder comes a thousand Indians!”

The hour-long firefight that followed became known as the Battle of Walker Creek, or “Hays’ Big Fight.” The tussle marked a new era of American history and westward expansion, one where the balance of power shifted decisively to the white settlers moving into the western expanse. It was also part product and part symbol of a vast awakening of American industry, which would eventually see factories producing millions of guns. This boom would continue through the Civil War and beyond, reaching its peak in 1873 with a masterpiece of design and performance, the Colt Single Action Army revolver, aka Model P, M1873, Single-Action Army, SAA, Colt .45, and my favorite tag of all, Peacemaker. Just the fact that it has this many nicknames tells you it’s a hell of a gun.

But the Colt 1873 did not spring up from dust, whole-formed as a sidearm so perfectly suited to its needs and surroundings that you can’t picture the West without it. In a way, it all began back in the summer of 1844 with those sixteen Texas Rangers, each armed with two copies of a fragile-but-revolutionary .36-caliber pistol called the Colt Paterson revolver, the grandfather of the Peacemaker.

To that date, most successful handguns were one-shot models. Horse pistols, meant to be used by cavalry and others on horseback, were single-shot pistols too long and awkward to hang from your hip or properly strap to your leg. Often sold as a pair, a man would holster them on either side of his saddle, giving himself two shots before having to reload. When Meriwether Lewis went exploring the continent on President Jefferson’s dime, he most likely chose the military standard Model 1799 North & Cheneys. Like the muskets and rifles of the time, these guns used a flintlock mechanism and were loaded from the front of the barrel. The North & Cheneys fired the same-sized ball as the Army’s musket, which made for convenience all the way around.

Compare that to the Colt Paterson the Rangers were carrying. These early Colts featured a nine-inch barrel and a revolving cylinder that enabled the shooter to let loose with five rounds before reloading. The design seemed to hold promise, and the weapons had done well in testing. The only problem was, they had yet to see action.

The Indians were about to correct that. With an exclamation mark and a good bit of underlining. Some eighty warriors rode toward Hays’ Rangers. Most of the Indians were Comanche, with a few Waco Indian and Mexican allies sprinkled in. Eighty is a lot less than a thousand, but we can forgive the young lawman’s exaggeration given the reputation of the Comanche—each brave may have fought like ten ordinary men. Armed with lances, war clubs, spare horses, and bows and arrows, the Comanches were the most highly skilled light cavalry troops in the world. In 1844, the nomadic Comanche were the undisputed rulers of a vast swath of the country’s interior named the “Comancheria,” almost a quarter-billion square miles that centered on the southern Great Plains.

Each of the sixteen Texas Rangers was armed with two copies of the Colt.

A typical Comanche tactic was to send scouts ahead to taunt their enemy, then fall back and lure their opponents into a trap where they would be showered by arrows. Another was simply to provoke an initial volley of fire and then rush their opponents before they had time to reload. Before this day, when the Texas Rangers were mainly stuck with single-shot, slow-reloading pistols and rifles, those tactics were deadly effective. In the time it took to reload, a Comanche could serve up a half-dozen arrows, launch a spear, or pick a prime spot of flesh to test the weight and edge of his tomahawk.

When Captain Hays saw the Comanches trying their usual tactics, he knew exactly what was going on. Rather than taking the bait, he took his fifteen mounted men and circled around the Indians’ position, galloping up a hill behind them.

“They are fixin’ to charge us, boys,” Hays yelled, “and we must charge them!”

The Rangers readied their long guns. Hays told them to hold off firing until their foes were close—damn close.

“Crowd them!” he ordered, “Powder-burn them!”

The Rangers set off. The Comanches, confident in their superior numbers, met the charge. All hell broke loose as the rifles cracked. Then, instead of pulling off to reload, the Rangers drew their pistols and commenced to give the Comanches a whoopin’.

In the running, three-mile battle, the highly disciplined Rangers thinned the Indian ranks with a vengeance. Fighting on horseback and hand to hand, the Texans whipped the much larger force from one end of the scrub to the other. The Colt Paterson was a cap and ball pistol, which meant that the powder, ball, and cap were loaded separately. To get this done, you had to take a fair amount of the gun apart. If you’ve ever been to a black powder meet, you know this can be a daunting task to perform under pressure, let alone on a horse. But the Rangers likely had come prepared with preloaded cylinders, and worked themselves in relays, with one group firing away while the other swapped out their empties. Even this would have been a trial in combat, but however they managed it, they kept firing away at those Comanches.

Finally, a stunned Chief Yellow Wolf tried to rally the remaining warriors for a counterattack. With his Rangers running down on ammo, Hays called out to his troops, “Any man who has a load, kill that chief!” A Ranger named Robert Gillespie came forward, took aim, and struck the Comanche leader in the head. The Indians fled.

The Comanches had suffered twenty-three fatalities; the Rangers lost only one man. It was a triumph for both the Colts and the Rangers. One Indian who survived the battle said later it seemed like the Rangers “had a shot for every finger on the hand.” Hays, who would head out to California and a political career a couple years after the battle, credited the pistols with the victory. “Had it not been for them,” he wrote later, “I doubt what the consequences would have been. I cannot recommend these arms too highly.”

The legend of the Colt revolvers quickly spread. From that day forward, the Texas Rangers had a proven “equalizing” force for mounted and close-quarter combat with the once-invincible Plains Indians. The frontier was a far sight from tamed, but Walker’s Creek was a crucial turning point in the American settlement of the West. Hearty ranchers and homesteaders began establishing (in some cases, reestablishing) claims not only in the western half of Texas, but also across the great southern Plains. You could say the year 1844 marked the dawn of the Wild West, an era in which generations of Colt revolvers would play a starring role in the hands of legendary lawmen and outlaws who roamed America’s rugged, half-settled landscape.

Now, you’d figure the company that made Colt revolvers would take off in a blaze because of all the good publicity.

There was, however, one small problem—the manufacturer had gone bankrupt a few years earlier.

Sam Colt, the firm’s owner and namesake, got a patent on his revolver design from the British government in 1835; two from the U.S. followed the next year. The idea of a revolving magazine wasn’t new, but Colt’s improvements and the availability of ammunition based on percussion cap technology made his gun a technological leap. And you could build a good argument that the gun’s success was due not just to its design but the ability to manufacture it using the most advanced techniques of the day. The Colt-Paterson was a mass-produced marvel.

Or it would have been if Colt had been able to work out all the early problems. The pistols that came from Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, N.J., were a mixed bag. Some were excellent; some not. Standardizing production so parts could be used interchangeably was still more art than science. Hampered by the Panic of 1837, Colt had trouble both selling weapons and raising money to continue doing so. Adding to the problems, a promising debut of the company’s prototype revolving rifles in the Seminole War in Florida in 1838 didn’t pan out. The rifles were just not rugged and reliable enough for combat, let alone curious soldiers who took them apart to examine their workings. Sometimes they jammed, sometimes they blew up from “chain-fire” malfunctions. The factory closed in 1843, and its assets sold.

Samuel Colt had a restless mind. Busy on other inventions, including a naval mine, he kept thinking of ways to improve his revolver and resurrect his manufacturing company.

Meanwhile, the Colt Paterson revolver did so well for the Texas Rangers that one of the veterans of the fracas at Walker Creek, a young captain named Samuel Walker, set out from Texas to New York to personally suggest some improvements to Sam Colt. Together in 1847 they cooked up a design for a new, nearly five-pound behemoth trail gun called the Walker Colt, a weapon that soon became the most powerful handgun on the market. In fact, it stayed so until the introduction of the .357 Magnum in 1935. The Walker Colt fired .44-caliber rounds in a gun not with five chambers, but six. The “six-shooter” was born. It was so big and heavy you could use it as a club if you had to. And many did.

Sam Colt struck a deal with industrial wizard Eli Whitney in Connecticut to crank out the new model. The U.S. Army soon picked up the Walker Colt with an initial order of 1,000 guns. It performed well in the Mexican War (1846–48). But in shades of things to come, the real boost came from publicity following a wild shootout that came to be known as the Jonathan Davis Incident.

As the story goes, Davis, a skilled marksman and combat veteran of the Mexican War, was prospecting for gold along the river near present-day Sacramento, California, with two friends. A gang of between eleven and fourteen cutthroat killers shot down Davis’s companions and then moved in to finish him off. Armed with a pair of Colt percussion revolvers, Davis took out the thieves one by one, finishing off seven before he ran out of ammo.

Four surviving outlaws then tried to rush him with knives and a short sword or cutlass. Unfortunately for them, Davis was an artist with a Bowie knife. He carved up all four, quite fatally. Captain Davis survived with flesh wounds and a shredded set of clothes. The early accounts of the episode were so unbelievable that Davis had to produce witness affidavits to verify his tale. That apparently satisfied the journalists of the time, and the story gained wide circulation.

The U.S. Army ordered thousands of the Colt Model 1860 revolvers as its basic sidearm during the Civil War. Explorers John Frémont and Kit Carson carried Colt revolvers during their epic surveys of the West. Riders and guards of the Pony Express relied on them to guard the dangerous mail run from Santa Fe to Missouri. The Colt revolver, in all its many forms, helped make Samuel one of the richest men in America before dying at age forty-seven in 1862.

But it wasn’t until a decade later that his company perfected its greatest product, the Single Action Army Revolver.

It’s hard to find the right words to describe the Peacemaker. Somehow, there’s no way to set down on paper why this gun had such an impact without sounding a little soft in the head. You really have to hold the weapon, load it, fire it, and load it again if you want to understand it.

Fire, load. Fire. Half-cock, then eject your spent cartridges one at a time with the ejection rod. Load one bullet, skip a chamber, go four bullets, drop the hammer on an empty chamber. Set it in the holster and draw. Single-action means the gun is not going to fire until you cock the hammer back. Pull on the trigger all you want until then, and it’s not going off.

You will, however, be dang impressed at the gun’s balance and smooth action. The recoil is sweet, the weapon moving up easy in your hand. If you’re using black powder, you’ll be surrounded by a thick wreath of smoke after shooting your load. But that’s part of the fun.

The Colt is one of the most powerful guns I’ve ever fired. It is quite literally a man-stopper. They used to say you can knock down a grizzly bear with one, though I’ve never tried.

Probably just as important on the frontier and range, the weapon could take a beatin’ and still kick ass. “Sometimes a bad horse would blow up and send my Colt doing fart-knockers across the prairie,” said one old-time cowboy from Montana. “I’d just blow the dust off of it and shove it back in the holster. It was the only handgun you could trust that way.”

Push away all the legend attached to the gun, the tales of shootouts and ne’er-do-wells, sheriffs, and bandits—get all of that romantic stuff out of your head. When you pick up the gun and handle it on its own terms, you can’t help but admire it and know that the hype was well deserved. The Colts were as accurate as your hands made them; effective range depended a lot on the operator, but a decent shooter with a steady hand could expect to hit his target at twenty-five yards. A practiced, steady gunman could do it at fifty and more.

The Colt Single-Action Army Revolver was the first Colt pistol to accept center-fire cartridges. To this point, most Colt revolvers used percussion caps; powder and ball would be loaded down the front of the cylinder, with the percussion cap set on the other end. But the Smith & Wesson Model 3 started a revolution when it was introduced in 1869. The S & W revolver fired .44-caliber metal cartridges, greatly simplifying loading. All three parts of the ammunition—bullet, powder, primer—were married together in a container that could be easily carried and inserted into the weapon under even the worst conditions. Smith & Wesson wasn’t the first to use metal cartridges, and paper cartridges had been around since the beginning of time, or at least the early days of guns. But their system was reliable and efficient. It worked better than many of their predecessors. Just as important, it came at a time when people needed weapons that could fire multiple shots and be quickly reloaded. The U.S. Army put in an order, and the future of handguns was set.

The Russians had actually gotten their hands on the S & W Model 1 first, and in fact the Russian Imperial Government made several suggestions that improved the weapon. Their involvement almost ended up being a financial disaster for Smith & Wesson when disputes rose over payments due. The company persevered, and its handguns remained the chief American alternative to Colts for going on one hundred years. Times have changed, but in a lot of ways they’re still the Ford and Chevy of handheld armament.

There’s nothing like a little competition to spur the creative juices. Colt’s weapon was a definite improvement on its own earlier designs, and the new ammo made it easier to use. The pistol was an immediate best-seller. As you can tell from the name, the weapon was designed for the Army, which was holding trials for a new sidearm contract. The government put in a large order, and the gun continued to be a military standard for two decades. Civilian models and a host of variations quickly followed. While the Army’s Colts were chambered for .45 caliber, the Colt Frontier used .44–40.

Lawmen loved the Single-Action Army. Cowboys and ranchers did, too. But it was the heroes and desperadoes who made the gun not just a legend, but part of the American identity. Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, the Dalton Boys… you can’t hardly mention one of those names and not see a Colt in their hand.

And I don’t suppose you can talk about the Peacemaker without throwing at least one story of ne’er-do-wells and bank robbers into the mix.

I’ve always been partial to the tales surrounding Butch and Sundance myself. The outlaws Butch Cassidy (legal name: Robert LeRoy Parker) and the Sundance Kid (legal name: Harry Longbaugh) were big fans of the Colt Single-Action Army. Though they were both highly skilled shooters, they claimed to take great pains not to kill people during their legendary bank and train heists in the 1890s with their Wild Bunch Gang, also known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

According to one account, during their final exile in Bolivia, they put on an exhibition of fast drawing and fast shooting for a friend visiting from the States.

“Let’s show him, Kid,” said Butch.

“Let’s go, Butch,” said the Sundance Kid, who spun the cylinder of his six-shooter and jumped up.

The pair grabbed some empty bottles, went outside, and started throwing them high in the air, firing from a crouch.

“I never saw anything like it,” said their friend. “I never saw two guns drawn faster and I was with men skilled in firearms all my life. Before I knew it the Colts were in their hands and they were shooting. The four bottles crashed in splinters. They repeated this trick several times. Sometimes Butch missed but the Kid always hit the falling targets.”

Another time, Butch explained his preference for the Colt Single-Action Army: “It has a long and heavy barrel and can be used as a weapon. I’d rather crack a messenger across the nose than kill him. All the messenger has is a bump on the head. Hell, it isn’t his money anyway.”

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Western frontier began filling up with a motley cast of characters: miners, trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle rustlers, gamblers, outlaws, opportunists. In the midst of such company—and with the law still an irregular presence—you were well served to know your way around a gun. Clint Eastwood–style, one-on-one, fast-draw gun duels weren’t that common in the Old West, though you wouldn’t know it from Hollywood movies and TV shows. There were plenty of drunken shoot-outs, lots of which occurred in saloons, plus many ambush killings and cowardly shots in the back, but the number of classic “High Noon” gun showdowns was surprisingly few.

The exceptions to this rule are what we’re after. One of the best-known was the “Hickok-Tutt Gunfight,” which took place on the town square of Springfield, Missouri, on July 21, 1865, between Wild Bill Hickok and Davis Tutt. They’re still talking about it in Springfield, and quite a few other places as well.

This was the Super Bowl of shoot-outs, featuring a man who would become the dominant “gun celebrity” of his era, and an angry contender who’d once been his friend and business partner. The cause was a highly personal dispute over money and women. It featured a long buildup, hot emotions, and a crowd of spectators on the town square. All that was missing were hot dog vendors, sponsorship deals, and a halftime show.

The star of the showdown was Wild Bill. Not yet famous as the most skilled gunman of his time, Hickok had been a frontier scout and courier during the Indian and Civil Wars, a town marshal, U.S. deputy marshal, and a county sheriff. George Armstrong Custer said Hickok was a “strange character, just the one which a novelist might gloat over.”

And he looked the part. “He was a broad-shouldered, deep-chested, narrow-waisted fellow, over 6 feet tall, with broad features, high cheekbones and forehead, firm chin and aquiline nose,” wrote author Joseph G. Rosa, a Western historian and modern-day authority on Hickok. “His sensuous-looking mouth was surmounted by a straw-colored moustache, and his auburn hair was worn shoulder length, Plains style. But it was his blue-gray eyes that dominated his features. Normally friendly and expressive, his eyes, old-timers recalled, became hypnotically cold and bored into one when he was angry.”

The tussle was still a few years before the Peacemaker was invented, and Hickok wore an ivory-handled version of Colt’s 1851 Navy revolver, a cap and ball weapon that fired five .36-caliber rounds. It’s called Navy because of the size of the bullets, but don’t let that fool you. While the caliber was specified by the Navy and there was a Navy contract to make the original purchase, the primary customers were landlubbers, civilian and military. The smaller caliber made the gun a bit lighter and easier to carry and work in a fight.

Hickok’s prowess with handguns became legendary on the American Plains after a Harper’s magazine article published in 1867 made him a national celebrity. While a great deal of mythology surrounds Will Bill, he was a hell of a shot, no doubt about it.

What were Wild Bill’s secrets? Another famous cowboy who knew him well and carefully studied his gun-handling technique was Buffalo Bill Cody. Cody employed Hickok, briefly, in his traveling show. To Cody, Hickok’s main assets were decisiveness and a thorough understanding of the science of shooting and the weapon he carried. Not to mention the ability to conjure a calm in the heat of the moment.

“Bill beat them to it,” declared Cody, summing up the gunman’s method. “He made up his mind to kill the other man before the other man had finished thinking, and so Bill would just quietly pull his gun and give it to him. That was all there was to it. It is easy enough to beat the other man if you start first. Bill always shot as he raised the gun. That is, he was never in a hurry about it; he just pulled the gun from his hip and let it go as he was raising it; shoot on the up-raise, you might call it. Most men lifted the gun higher, then threw it down to cock it before firing. Bill cocked it with his thumb, I guess, as it was coming into line with his man…. But he was not the quickest man by any means. He was just cool and quiet, and started first. Bill was not a bad man, as is often pictured. But he was a bad man to tackle. Always cool, kind, and cheerful, almost, about it. And he never killed a man unless that man was trying to kill him.”

Hickok was often armed with two pistols, and according to eyewitness accounts, he used both simultaneously when the situation called for it. Years after the Hickok-Tutt shoot-out, the August 25, 1876, edition of the Chicago Tribune carried the account of an unnamed observer who believed, “The secret of Bill’s success was his ability to draw and discharge his pistols, with a rapidity that was truly wonderful, and a peculiarity of his was that the two were presented and discharged simultaneously, being ‘out and off’ before the average man had time to think about it. He never seemed to take any aim, yet he never missed. Bill never did things by halves. When he drew his pistols it was always to shoot, and it was a theory of his that every man did the same.”

Hickok himself explained that he wouldn’t shoot an innocent man, but he was willing to kill men in the line of duty or in self-defense. He offered helpful tips on how to properly shoot someone, like “Whenever you get into a row, be sure and not shoot too quick. Take time. I’ve known many a feller to slip up for shooting in a hurry.” Another time, he told a friend, “Charlie, I hope you never have to shoot any man, but if you do, shoot him in the guts, near the navel. You may not make a fatal shot, but he will get a shock that will paralyze his brain and arm so much that the fight is all over.” Good advice, in my experience.

Hickok’s opponent that hot summer day in Springfield was a man who until recently had been his friend and gambling partner, Davis K. Tutt. Legend has it that women caused them to fall out, though which women exactly is a matter of speculation. Hickok was rumored to be the daddy of Tutt’s sister’s child. Tutt reportedly had the hots for Hickok’s girlfriend.

Whatever the reason, Hickok decided to stop playing cards with Tutt, who retaliated by staking other card players in a public effort to embarrass and bankrupt Hickok. Either Tutt backed the wrong players or they ran into a cold streak wider than Alaska, because Hickok raked in the winnings. Tutt became infuriated, to use a fancy word for pissed off. On an impulse, he grabbed Wild Bill’s gold Waltham pocket watch as collateral for a separate, disputed debt. It was a public insult that branded Hickok as a mooch and a welsher. These were labels that would have ruined Hickok as a professional gambler, and were more than enough to provoke a fight. But Hickok, outnumbered in the saloon, kept his cool. Tutt grinned and made off with the watch.

Tutt’s supporters mocked Hickok relentlessly about the confiscation, trying to goad him into a situation where they could, as a group, safely gun him down. Their antics strained Wild Bill’s patience to the breaking point. When they told him that Tutt was planning to parade across the town square the next day wearing the watch for all to see, Hickok decided enough was enough. “He shouldn’t come across that square unless dead men can walk,” he growled, and went home to polish up his pistol.

The next day, the two former friends sat down over a drink and discussed the terms of a truce, but negotiations broke down. At 6 p.m., Tutt began his march across the town square, wearing the watch. Hickok coolly strode onto the square holding his Colt Navy. He cocked it and placed it in his hip holster. The crowd scattered.

“Dave, here I am,” called out Hickok from a distance of seventy-five yards away as a rush-hour crowd of spectators gathered around the square. “Don’t you come across here with that watch.”

Tutt, who was standing sideways in the style of a formal duelist, pulled his gun to fire. Hickok drew his revolver and braced it on his other arm. Two shots rang out almost simultaneously. Tutt missed. Hickok didn’t. His bullet traveled right through Tutt’s chest.

Tutt’s last words were “Boys, I’m killed.” Hickok, meanwhile, had pivoted to wave his gun at Tutt’s flabbergasted cronies. He let his pistol do the talking. “Do you want some of this?” the weapon asked. They didn’t.

A jury cleared Wild Bill of manslaughter, deciding he’d acted in self-defense. He had many more adventures before being fatally shot in the back by a coward named Jack McCall in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota, in August 1876.

We can’t leave the Wild West or Colt pistols without mentioning what has to be the most famous shoot-out in American history. It happened on the cold afternoon of October 26, 1881, when four lawmen faced off against four cowboys in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona. Of course I’m talking about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

On the one side were two sets of brothers, Tom and Frank McLaury and Ike and Billy Clanton. These cowboys were not what you might call model citizens. All four were regularly suspected of rustling cattle, but the crime that seems to have really stirred things up was their alleged connection to a string of stagecoach robberies outside the town.

The law, in the person of Marshal and Chief of Police Virgil Earp and Deputy Marshals Wyatt and Morgan Earp, pursued the robbery investigations with a zeal unusual at the time, especially considering that a good number of lawmen had night jobs as thieves themselves. Ike Clanton complained that the Earps were picking on the cowboys unfairly. Then he supposedly ratted out some of the robbers to the Earps. Ike got angered when the confidential information started leaking out, identifying him as the source. One of the Earps’ friends, a sometime dentist, gambler, and occasional hothead known as Doc Holliday, figured into the argument when friends of the cowboys tried to frame him for the robberies. It was all a twisted, vicious mess.

Tempers escalated, liquor flowed, and reason fled. Threats and harsh words were exchanged on October 25. By the next afternoon, both Ike and Tom were sporting fresh head wounds from where the Earps had pistol-whipped them with their mammoth Colts in separate encounters.

There was a gun-confiscation law on the books that made carrying a firearm illegal inside the crime-infested silver-mining boomtown. If you ventured into Tombstone you had to check your weapon behind the counter of a designated retail location like a saloon. But on October 26, at least two of the cowboys, Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury, appeared to be defying the gun ban by wearing holstered Colt .44 revolver pistols in plain view.

Virgil, Wyatt, Morgan, and Doc headed to the O.K. Corral to arrest the Clantons before they could leave. Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt all had six-shooters. Wyatt had on either a Colt Single Action Army or a .44-caliber Smith & Wesson. (Nobody’s quite sure, and Wyatt never clarified the point.) In an expert gunfighter’s touch, Wyatt lined the inside of his coat with wax to facilitate a smooth gun draw. Morgan was probably packing a Colt .45, and Virgil Earp was carrying either a Colt or a Smith & Wesson, caliber unknown. Doc Holliday had a short-barreled 10-gauge shotgun under his coat, as well as a nickel-plated Colt Single-Action Army or a smaller Colt model.

“You sons of bitches,” yelled one of the lawmen at the cowboys as the two groups met. “You’ve been looking for a fight, and you can have it!”

They were a few yards away from each other. They were all good shots, but at least one of the cowboys was drunk. The Clantons were also tired from all their drinking, and seemed to have left some of their orneriness in the dust of the nearby streets.

“Don’t shoot me,” declared Billy Clanton. “I don’t want to fight!”

Tom McLaury opened his coat to show he was unarmed and announced, “I have got nothing.”

But then both Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury, maybe sensing that the Earps and Holliday were in no mood for negotiation, reached for their Colt Single-Action Army six-shooters. Tom McLaury moved toward his horse and a Winchester lever-action rifle in a scabbard in the saddle.

“Hold, I don’t mean that!” shouted Virgil Earp. “I have come to disarm you!”

In the next thirty seconds, somewhere between seventeen and thirty shots were fired, one of the cowboys ran away, and an episode of American history was written that would fascinate and confuse people for generations to come. As the prominent gun historian Massad Ayoob wrote, “Seven men shoot at each other. Six get shot. Three die. And a century and a quarter later, people are still trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

Black smoke from the gunfire lingered in the cramped lot, and it obscured details of the shoot-\out. “The gunfight came in bursts, snippets and spurts so rapid that witnesses and participants never agreed on an order of events,” wrote author Casey Tefertiller. “Gunfire exploded in the cold afternoon air; cowboys struggled to control their twisting, bounding horses. It was a scene of disarray, where impressions were left frozen in time.” What follows is an approximation of what happened, based on legal testimony and press accounts.

Doc Holliday drew his pistol, shoved it into Frank McLaury’s belly, and moved a few steps back.

Wyatt Earp later testified that he didn’t draw his pistol until after he saw cowboys Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury draw their pistols. But an analysis done in the 1930s by trick-shooting expert Ed McGivern demonstrated that to “beat the drop” on someone who has already started to draw on you would require a nearly impossible degree of speed. So it’s likely Wyatt had the gun out before them, though he hadn’t fired.

Ike Clanton, who was unarmed, lunged at Wyatt to plead for mercy. Wyatt, according to Clanton, stuck his gun in his belly and said, “You son of a bitch, you can have a fight!” Ike tried to grab Wyatt’s gun hand, but Wyatt shoved him away. “The fight has commenced,” Wyatt reported telling Ike. “Go to fighting or get away.” Ike ran to safety at high speed.

Gunfire erupted from several guns almost simultaneously, probably first from Doc Holliday and Morgan Earp.

Holliday switched from his revolver to his double-barreled shotgun. He swung around Tom McLaury’s horse, and shot McLaury in the chest at close range as he was trying to grab his Winchester rifle out of the saddle scabbard. Tom staggered out of the alley into Fremont Street, then fell down permanently, the twenty-eight-year-old victim of a tight-patterned, 12-pellet buckshot blast through the rib cage.

Holliday chucked away the shotgun and switched back to his revolver, no doubt to save critical reloading time in such a close-quarter, rapid-fire environment. He fired his revolver at Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton, both of whom were hit. Despite their wounds, Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury kept on shooting.

Morgan Earp caught a round across his shoulder blades and vertebrae, fell down, then managed to get up. Virgil was flattened by a bullet in his calf muscle, but he, too, popped up shooting.

Hit in the gut, Frank McLaury pulled his horse by the reins into Fremont Street, where the horse wisely decided to run off, taking Frank’s protective cover away with him, not to mention his Winchester rifle. Doc Holliday ran up, and the wounded McLaury took aim and growled at him. “I’ve got you now!”

“Blaze away!” snapped Holliday.

This is not always the smartest thing to say during a gunfight, as it might serve to focus your opponent’s intentions. In this case, Frank obliged by firing a round at Holliday, clipping the dentist’s pistol pocket and grazing his skin.

“The son of a bitch has shot me,” yapped Holliday, “and I mean to kill him!”

A bullet found its way into Frank’s head moments later, though it was probably fired by Morgan Earp. In any event, the thirty-three-year-old Frank hit the ground. For good.

“They have murdered me,” gasped Billy Clanton nearby. “I have been murdered. Chase the crowd away and from the door and give me air.” Shot in both the chest and belly, he asked for a doctor and some morphine, and some more cartridges for his pistol. His last request wasn’t honored, as he quickly died on the spot. He was nineteen years old.

Three cowboys dead, three lawmen wounded. Ike Clanton fled unharmed. Wyatt had come through without a scratch.

Ike filed murder charges against the lawmen, claiming that his brother and friends had been killed in cold blood. In Tombstone, the event was initially praised by much of the local populace, who were grateful that the Earps and Holliday had cleared the town of four dangerous cowboys. But opinion started shifting when word spread that Tom McLaury appeared to have been unarmed, and that he and Billy Clanton made peace gestures at the start of the gunfight. Worse still, a credible court witness quoted Virgil Earp saying before the fight, “Those men have made their threats; I will not arrest them but will kill them on sight.”

It started looking like premeditated murder might well be a viable charge. But evidence was missing and many questions stayed unanswered, details unknown or in conflict. The lawmen were eventually cleared by both a local judge and a grand jury.

Vendetta killings of friends on both sides ensued. Morgan Earp was slain by a bullet in his back while he was playing pool, less than five months after the fracas in the corral. He was thirty years old. Billy Claiborne was killed in a gunfight in Tombstone, and Ike Clanton was shot to death by a lawman who caught him stealing cattle.

Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis at age thirty-six. Virgil Earp survived an assassination attempt in Tombstone and became a lawman in California, where he died at age sixty-two in 1905, still on the job as a peace officer.

Wyatt Earp took a lady friend and wandered around the American West with her for decades, squeaking out a living as a professional gambler. He died in Los Angeles at the ripe age of eighty, the last survivor of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

None of the guns used in the shoot-out has ever been found.

The gunfight triggered press coverage across the United States, and inspired movies, articles, and reenactments all the way into the twenty-first century. As the Tombstone Nugget wrote of the triple killing: “The 26th of October, 1881, will always be marked as one of the crimson days in the annals of Tombstone, a day when blood flowed as water, and human life was held as a shuttle cock, a day to be remembered as witnessing the bloodiest and deadliest street fight that has ever occurred in this place, or probably in the Territory.”

The era of the gunfighter soon died off, but their weapons, most especially the Colt Single-Action Army, endures to this day. Prized by historians and collectors for its simplicity, power, and beautiful design, it is truly an American classic.

Colt revolvers had been instrumental in opening up the American West. Still, the region remained dangerous, largely unconquered land through much of the late nineteenth century.

To finally “win” the West, the United States needed an even bigger gun. As it happened, that weapon made its debut the same year the Colt Single-Action Army did.