Kate Elder Recalls The Gunfight at the OK Corral

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According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday

“Doc and Ike Clanton had some words in a restaurant,” Kate recalled about the events of the first night she returned to Tombstone in late October 1881. “In the morning Ike Clanton came to Fly’s photograph gallery with a Winchester rifle. Mrs. Fly told him that Doc was not there. Doc was not up yet. I went to our room and told Doc that Ike Clanton was outside looking for him and that he was armed. Doc said, ‘If God lets me live long enough to get my clothes on, he shall see me.’ “With that he got up and dressed.

“On going out he said, ‘I won’t be here to take you to breakfast, so you had better go alone.’ I didn’t go to breakfast. I don’t remember whether I ate anything or not that day. In a little more than a half an hour the shooting began. This lady friend and I went to the side window, which faced the vacant lot. There was Ike Clanton, young Bill Clanton, Frank McLowry [sic], and his brother Tom on one side, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday on the other.

“Before the first shot was fired Ike Clanton ran and lost his hat and left his young brother and the McLowry boys to fight it out.* I was at the side window looking on and saw the fight. Doc had a sawed-off shotgun. He fired one barrel, but after the first shot something went wrong. He threw the gun on the ground and finished the fight with his revolver. I saw him fall once. His hip had been grazed by a bullet. But he was on his feet again in an instant and continued to fire.

“Bill Clanton and the McLowry boys were killed. Morgan and Wyatt [she meant Virgil Earp] were wounded. It’s foolish to think a cow ‘rustler’ gunman can come up to a city gunman in a gunfight. After the fight was over, Doc came to our room and sat on the side of the bed and cried and said, ‘Oh, this is just awful—awful.’ I asked, ‘Are you hurt?’ He said, ‘No, I am not.’ He pulled up his shirt. There was just a pale red streak about two inches long across his hip where the bullet had grazed him. After attending to the wound, he went out to see how Virgil and Wyatt [she meant Morgan this time] were getting along.”

To find out all that Kate recalled about the most famous gunfight in the West read

According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday