Slain from famous shootout getting new epitaphs

Past Boothill Graveyard and around the bend where Arizona 80 becomes Fremont Street, a larger-than-life statue of a man rises from a low sandstone pedestal. Clad in a duster and broad-brimmed hat, a sawed-off shotgun over one shoulder, Wyatt Earp stands guard at the entrance to this dusty town that calls itself "too tough to die." Since the Oct. 26, 1881, "gunfight at the O.K. Corral," the famed frontier lawman has loomed large over this former boomtown. The silver deposits that gave birth to the city have long since been played out, but Tombstone has survived largely by mining the legend of the West's most infamous shootout. And in popular culture, the Earps have always been the good guys; the McLaurys and Clantons, the bad guys. But something peculiar has happened at the O.K. Corral: The white hats and the black hats have all gotten a bit grayer. Hanging on the stucco wall surrounding the little amphitheater where the fusillade is re-enacted daily is a tiny bronze plaque. Unpretentious and easy to miss, it is dedicated, not to the badge-wearing Earps or their tubercular friend, John Henry "Doc" Holliday, but to the memory of brothers Frank and Tom McLaury — two of the three men who died that day...more