Gunfight at the O.K. Corral central figure in the gunfight. It was only discovered much later that "Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal", based on eight interviews with Earp, was largely fictional. The book and later Hollywood portrayals embellished Wyatt's reputation and magnified his mystique as a western lawman. Morgan Earp had no known experience with gunfighting prior to their arrival in Tombstone. While Wyatt was Pima County Deputy Sheriff on July 27, 1881, Morgan Earp took over his job as shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo. Morgan also occasionally assisted Virgil and at the time of the gunfight was wearing a deputy city marshal's badge and drawing
O.K. Corral (building) now maintained as part of the O.K. Corral Historic Complex. Life-sized figures of the gunfighters are positioned using a map drawn by Wyatt Earp. As the gunfight proceeded, some of the participants fled onto Fremont Street (Arizona State Route 80). Reenactments take place four times daily. In 2004, the town's focus on tourism led the National Park Service (NPS) to threaten to remove its designation as a National Historic Landmark District, a status it earned in 1961 as "one of the best preserved specimens of the rugged frontier town of the 1870s and '80s." The community has since worked closely