American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms (11 page)

“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.