The following excerpt is from an article in the Wednesday, April 21, 2010 edition of the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson).
A missing handwritten transcript from a coroner’s inquest done after the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral has resurfaced in a
dusty box more than 125 years after the most famous shootout in Wild West history.
The document had been missing for decades – last seen when it was photocopied in the 1960s.
It was found when court clerks stumbled on the box while reorganizing files in an old jail storage room in Bisbee, about 20 miles south of Tombstone, the Arizona frontier town where the gunbattle took place.
Stuffed inside the box was a modern manila envelope marked “keep” with the date 1881.
The inquest was done after lawmen Wyatt Earp, his two brothers and Doc Holliday confronted a gang of drunken outlaws, sparking a 30-second gunbattle in the streets of Tombstone that killed Frank and Tom McLaury and Bill Clanton.
It made folk heroes of Earp and Holliday and inspired numerous movies about the untamed Old West.
Officials showed off just one page of the transcript on Wednesday _ a thick sheet of paper with blue lines and sloppy cursive writing in dark ink. It appeared to contain the beginning of testimony by William Claiborn, identified by a historian as a friend of the three dead outlaws.
Also see: Rediscovered notes give insight on O.K. Corral inquest of 1881 – from the Thursday, April 22 Edition of the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson).
