Gunfight at the O.K. Corral Cowboys and were not indicted. Wyatt Earp, newly appointed as Deputy U.S. Marshal in Cochise County, then took matters into his own hands in a personal vendetta. He was pursued by county sheriff Johnny Behan, who had received a warrant from Tucson for Wyatt's shooting of Frank Stilwell. Tombstone, near the Mexican border, was founded in March 1879. After silver was discovered in the area, Tombstone grew rapidly into a frontier mining boomtown. At its founding, it had a population of just 100, and only two years later, in late 1881, the population was more than 7,000 (excluding Chinese, Mexicans,
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