Partisan mythology as intangible heritage: The ‘O.K. Corral’ narrative

This article examines the formation and persistence of the ‘O.K. Corral’ mythology as a case study in the long-term construction of historical narrative. Using newspaper accounts and court records, it argues that early retellings of the events in Tombstone, Arizona, were produced through the language of contemporary party politics. Republican and Democratic retellings both framed the conflict through a moral opposition between law and outlawry, while reversing its moral axis. These initial framings established a durable narrative structure that has persisted across subsequent retellings, from early twentieth-century accounts to recent popular media. The article highlights the role of political context in structuring the narrative models through which those events are subsequently understood. This case thereby illuminates a mechanism in the formation of a mythology: a single narrative structure, reproduced across opposing traditions through inversion of its moral axis. Consequently, this analysis disrupts the common assumption that ‘revisionist’ interpretations are produced as a reaction to a ‘traditional’ heroic myth; rather, it demonstrates that both perspectives were contemporaneous, born from the immediate partisan vocabulary of the event’s fallout.