Wyatt Earp’s Guns: The O.K. Corral Revolver and the Buntline Myth

By the most-cited account, Wyatt Earp carried a Smith & Wesson Model 3 revolver in .44 caliber at the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a top-break six-shooter with an 8-inch barrel that, by some accounts, Tombstone mayor John Clum had given him. He carried it in a leather-lined overcoat pocket, not a holster. The gun almost everyone pictures, the foot-long Colt “Buntline Special,” almost certainly never existed: it first appeared in a 1931 biography, and nobody has ever found a Colt record of it. His deadliest moment with a gun came five months after the O.K. Corral, when he killed Curly Bill Brocius with a borrowed 10-gauge shotgun.

Here’s what Earp really carried, where the Buntline legend came from, what the guns attributed to him have sold for, and what the same guns cost today.

Table of Contents

Wyatt Earp Guns at a Glance

Gun	Where it fits	How solid is the story?
Smith & Wesson Model 3, .44 American	Carried at the O.K. Corral, October 26, 1881	Strongest account; some say a gift from John Clum
10-gauge double-barrel shotgun	Killed Curly Bill Brocius at Iron Springs, March 1882	Well documented; borrowed from Wells Fargo agent Fred Dodge
Colt Single Action Army, .45	Sold as his O.K. Corral gun for $225,000 in 2014	Disputed provenance
Winchester lever-action shotgun	Sold as his for $50,000 in 2014	Same disputed source
Colt “Buntline Special,” 12-inch barrel	The legend	No evidence it existed

The Gun at the O.K. Corral: a Smith & Wesson

On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, Marshal Virgil Earp set out to disarm the Clanton and McLaury brothers in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, with his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday. As usual, the Earps carried their revolvers in their coat pockets or waistbands, and Wyatt’s was a .44 caliber Smith & Wesson American, the Model 3. Wyatt had a coat pocket lined with leather to make the draw smoother. He said later that as they walked down Fremont Street, “I took my pistol, which I had in my hand, under my coat, and put it in my overcoat pocket.”

The Model 3 was a very different gun from the Colt Single Action Army most cowboys carried. It was a top-break design: you tipped the barrel down and all six empties flew out at once, which made it much faster to reload than a Colt, where you punched out each case one at a time. The same basic gun was bought in large numbers by the Russian army and, in a modified form called the Schofield, by the U.S. Cavalry. According to some sources, including the history of the Colt Buntline, Earp’s had an 8-inch barrel and was a gift from John Clum, Tombstone’s mayor and the editor of the Tombstone Epitaph.

The gunfight itself lasted only moments. Virgil carried Holliday’s walking stick after handing Doc Holliday a Wells Fargo shotgun to hide under his long coat. Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton had Colt Frontier Six-Shooters, and Frank tried to pull a Winchester from his horse’s scabbard. When the shooting stopped, Frank, Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton were dead, and Virgil, Morgan and Holliday were wounded. Wyatt was untouched. Read more about Doc Holliday’s guns, including that shotgun. Our guns of Tombstone breaks down how the 1993 film armed each character, and the most famous gunfights roundup puts the O.K. Corral next to the rest.

Who fired first at the O.K. Corral is still argued over. Sheriff Johnny Behan testified that Doc Holliday fired first, with a nickel-plated revolver. Wyatt testified that “the first two shots were fired by Billy Clanton and myself, he shooting at me, and I shooting at Frank McLaury,” and historian Jeff Morey agreed that Billy Clanton and Wyatt Earp fired first. Either way, Wyatt’s first shot came from that Smith & Wesson.

Can You Buy a Smith & Wesson Model 3 Today?

Originals are collector’s pieces, but Uberti builds a close copy, the 1875 No. 3 Top Break, mostly in .45 Colt, with the same fast-loading tip-down action. It’s a favorite of cowboy action shooters who want something different from a Colt:

The Buntline Special: the Gun That Never Was

In 1931, two years after Earp died, Stuart Lake published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. In it he wrote that in 1876 the dime novelist Ned Buntline had Colt make five Single Action Army revolvers with 12-inch barrels and presented them to five Dodge City lawmen: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Charlie Bassett and Neal Brown. Tilghman and Brown weren’t lawmen in 1876. Earp’s became the “Buntline Special,” and it has been in his hand in movies and on television ever since.

The trouble is that no Colt record backs it up. Colt has no record of any such order, or of any correspondence with Ned Buntline. Buntline traveled west of the Mississippi only once in his life, in 1869. At the time of the supposed presentation, Wyatt and his brother were mining for gold in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. None of Buntline’s two dozen or so Western dime novels even mentions Wyatt Earp. Lake himself later admitted he had “put words into Wyatt’s mouth.” According to descendants of Earp’s cousins, the guns he actually owned were a Colt .45 and a Winchester lever-action shotgun. The only point in the legend’s favor comes from gun writer Massad Ayoob, who cited notes by Earp’s widow Josie that mention an extra-long revolver as one of Wyatt’s favorites.

The legend was too good to die. After the 1950s TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, customers asked for the gun, so Colt started making long-barreled “Buntline” versions of the Single Action Army, the revolver cowboys called the Peacemaker. Today Cimarron sells a “Wyatt Earp Buntline” with a 10-inch barrel and a silver badge set into the grip, modeled on Kurt Russell’s gun in Tombstone (1993):

Iron Springs: The Shotgun That Killed Curly Bill

After the O.K. Corral, the feud got worse. In December 1881 Virgil was ambushed and crippled, and in March 1882 Morgan was shot dead through the window of a pool hall. Wyatt led a federal posse on what became known as the Earp Vendetta Ride. On March 24, 1882, at a spring in the Whetstone Mountains, the posse rode into a group of Cowboys that included Curly Bill Brocius, the man Wyatt blamed for Morgan’s death.

The Wyatt Earp shotgun that mattered most wasn’t his own. He was carrying a 10-gauge double-barrel coach gun borrowed from Wells Fargo undercover agent Fred Dodge. Curly Bill fired his own shotgun at Wyatt and missed. Wyatt fired back and hit him in the chest, and Curly Bill fell dead at the edge of the spring. Accounts of the fight describe Wyatt’s saddle horn being shot off and his loose cartridge belt slipping down around his legs as he fought. Doc Holliday later credited Wyatt with killing Curly Bill.

The short double-barrel coach gun is still made, and it’s still a practical home-defense and cowboy action gun. Stoeger’s Coach Gun is the classic, and our best double-barrel shotguns guide compares the alternatives:

The $225,000 “Wyatt Earp Colt”

In April 2014 a Colt .45 said to have been carried by Earp at the O.K. Corral sold for $225,000 at J. Levine Auction & Appraisal in Scottsdale, Arizona, well above its $100,000 to $150,000 estimate, to a telephone bidder from New Mexico. USA Today reported that the gun was controversial because “its serial number was rubbed off and the gun’s barrel, cylinder and grips had been replaced.” A Winchester lever-action shotgun said to be Earp’s sold at the same sale for $50,000.

Both came from the estate of Glenn Boyer, an author of several Earp books, with a 1994 sworn affidavit from Boyer and a Colt letter confirming the revolver was made in Earp’s lifetime. That’s where the doubts start. Boyer’s own Earp research has been heavily criticized, and in one case a person he cited as a key source turned out to be a complete fabrication. A Colt letter can prove when a gun was made, but not who carried it. And if the Smith & Wesson account is right, a Colt was not the gun Wyatt had at the O.K. Corral anyway.

The Earp item with the cleanest history may be a piece of paper. A sketch of the gunfight that John Flood drew with Earp’s help on September 15, 1921, sold at auction in October 2010 for $380,000, more than the disputed Colt. For the Old West guns with airtight provenance, see our list of the most expensive guns ever sold, led by the Colt that killed Billy the Kid.

If you want a Colt like the one Earp’s cousins said he owned, Colt still builds the Single Action Army, and our Uberti Cattleman review covers the affordable Italian copy:

Winchester’s only lever-action shotguns were the Model 1887 and its successor, the Model 1901, both John Browning designs. Chiappa makes a modern 1887, the same gun Arnold Schwarzenegger spun in Terminator 2:

After Tombstone: Wyatt Earp’s Later Life

Wyatt Earp outlived nearly everyone from Tombstone. Before the gunfight he had ridden as a shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo, guarding silver shipments on the stagecoaches, and after Tombstone he kept moving. He reunited with Josephine Marcus in San Francisco, and the two chased gold rushes for the rest of his life. In Nome, Alaska, he and Charlie Hoxie opened the Dexter Saloon during the 1899 gold rush. His strangest gun moment came in San Francisco on December 2, 1896, when he stepped into the ring to referee the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight and a police captain disarmed him of a large pistol before the bout began. He then called a foul that handed Sharkey the win, and many believed he’d fixed the fight. He died in Los Angeles on January 13, 1929, at 80, never having been wounded in a gunfight. The Buntline legend was published two years later. For more of the men around him, read Wild Bill Hickok’s guns and the wider Wild West outlaw guns roundup. For a modern single action, start with our best revolvers guide. Earp’s career ran from Kansas cow towns to Arizona Territory, and our Kansas and Arizona gun law guides explain the rules there today. Older revolvers and shotguns turn up on our used gun listings all the time.

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Featured image: AI-assisted restoration of a public-domain portrait of Wyatt Earp from the 1880s, from Wikimedia Commons, with added text. No features were added.