OK ARCHEOLOGY

Our good friends Mother and Doctor at the Bangalore Film Society – knowing that at Doc40 we have something of a Tombstone fixation – forwarded the following. (And this time we resisted using a picture of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday.)

“A missing handwritten transcript from a coroner's inquest held after the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral has resurfaced in a dusty box more than 125 years after the most famous shootout in the history of the Wild West. The document, which had been missing since it was photocopied in the 1960s, was found when court clerks stumbled on the box while reorganising files in an old jail storage room in Bisbee, 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 carried out 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. "I was present on the afternoon of Oct. 26th '81 when the shooting commenced between outlaw parties," the testimony reads. Court officials have turned the document over to state archivists. Experts will immediately begin peeling away tape, restoring the paper and ink, and digitising the pages.” Click here for more