Click here to download the catalog as a PDF file. To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. Massad Ayoob The KiLLing Of iKe CLAnTOn Situation: You’re facing a man with a killer’s reputation, believed to have shot one or two of the famed Earp Brothers and gotten away with it … and now, he reaches for the Winchester in his rifle scabbard. Grateful that the notorious outlaw was dead, Western authorities accepted the accounts of his death that they were given. However, for serious researchers, and for Clanton descendents, questions linger. Lessons: In the October, 2008 issue of Wild West magazine, writer Johnny D. Boggs said, “Since 1939 eight theatrical movies have depicted (Wyatt) Earp and the so-called gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” Few of them cared much what happened to the key instigator of that famous fight, Joseph Isaac “Ike” Clanton. The most popular such film was 1993’s Tombstone with Kurt Russell. At the end of it, Ike Clanton is racing in terror ahead of the horses of the pursuing Earp posse, desperately throwing his “gang colors,” a red sash, behind him as a humiliating peace offering. As the movie comes to a close, the mellifluous voice of narrator Robert Mitchum tells us that Ike was killed “two years later,” while committing a robbery. Well, as with so many things in a movie that provided more entertainment than history … not quite. The Road To Clanton’s Death Ike, born in 1847, was the second of four sons of Newman Haynes “Old Man” Clanton. The latter was the patriarch of what we’d call today an organized crime family, who settled in Arizona circa 1873. Old Man Clanton owned a ranch some 30 miles north of the Mexican border, where he established a pattern of raiding ranches in Mexico and stealing cattle in large volume. Some of these rustling episodes reportedly involved mass murder, in which some historians believe Ike took part. The Old Man surrounded himself with a loose group of between one and two hundred full- and part-time criminals who called themselves The Cow-Boys (the spelling of the day), and who sometimes wore red sashes to flaunt their identity. Among them were such notorious criminals as Johnny Ringo and Curly Bill Brocius. Their turf encompassed the boomtown of Tombstone in Cochise County, at a time when Virgil Earp was chief of police there. The Clantons had established a close working relationship with the county sheriff, Johnny Behan. Ike, by all accounts, had trouble holding both his liquor and his tongue. After a stagecoach robbery-murder was committed by Cow-Boy hangers-on, Ike agreed to inform on them to Wyatt Earp, with Clanton being paid as an informant and Earp seeking the glory of the arrests. Having second thoughts about the betrayal, and fearing that Wyatt Earp would “out” him as a traitor, Ike Clanton began conspicuously threatening Earp and his brothers and their colleague, Dr. John Holliday. A series of escalating incidents culminated on a chilly October afternoon in 1881 near Tombstone’s O.K. Corral. That famous gunfight has been detailed in these pages before. Ike Clanton, the main instigator, grabbed Wyatt Earp, Continued on page 76 crying out that he was unarmed and begging Wyatt not to shoot him. 72 WWW.AMERICANHANDGUNNER.COM • MAY/JUNE 2009