Among the most legendary gunfights to have ever taken place in the American Old West (or Wild West) is the fierce encounter between the Earp brothers joined by Doc Holiday and a group of armed Cowboys, a band of local outlaws, that took shape in Tombstone, Cochise County in southern Arizona, on 26 October 1881.

The incident was brief and lasted probably less than a minute, about 3pm in the afternoon, following growing tensions between the two sides and saw three of the Cowboys, brothers Tom and Frank McLaury along with Billy Clanton, fall dead at a narrow lot outside C.S. Fly’s photography studio a little further down O.K. Corral actually.

Virgil Earp, Deputy US and Town Marshall at the time, and his brother Morgan along with Holiday were all wounded, on the other side, but legendary Wyatt Earp came unscathed out the fight in an attempt to enforce an ordinance in place that disallowed the carrying of guns within the town.

The prelude to the whole affair was a heated argument between Holiday and an armed Ike Clanton, brother of fallen Billy, the previous night at the Alhambra Saloon before he was arrested by Virgil Earp in the morning and was dismissed on a fine by a judge.

Enraged, the latter sought out and incited the other five Cowboys, the above mentioned included, to move all together over to Fremont Street, spreading the word that they were armed and intended to remain so.

Sheriff John Behan, who largely favoured the Cowboys, arrested the Earps and Holiday on accounts of murder following allegations of Ike Clanton that they fired against unarmed men, yet a month-long hearing showed that at least two of the latter’s side were armed during the fight.

The feud between sides didn’t blow over, nevertheless, and Virgil Earp was shot in the back in an ambush two months later, three days after Christmas, where his brother Morgan was killed three months further on by a shot that was fired by a Cowboy from a dark alley close to Campbell & Hatch’s saloon.

Appointed as a new Deputy US Marshall, Wyatt Earp deputised Doc Holiday and a group of men that hunted down and killed several Cowboys by means of revenge in the wake of these events.

The whole affair grew into a legend out on the frontier but remained widely unknown until Stuart Lake’s best-seller biography titled “Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal” in 1931, two years after the latter’s death, that included a dramatic account of the shootout at the OK Corral in 1881.

Furthermore, the story further became a favourite theme in the genre of Western films lining up the likes of “My Darling Clementine” starring Henry Fonda (1946), “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas (1957) as well as “Tombstone” starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer (1993, picture) down the years.