The now legendary town of Tombstone was named by prospector Ed Schieffelin, who discovered silver there in 1877 after being warned by friends that all he would ever find there would be his own tombstone. During the 1880s, about 7,000 people lived in and around the boom town, but it was virtually deserted a few years later when the bottom fell out of its mining industry due to labor unrest, floods in the mines, and a drop in silver prices. The Tombstone Historic District was granted National Landmark status in 1961. Now the seat of Cochise County, the town's population was 1,569 in 2006. The historic cemetery, Boot Hill, contains the graves of Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury, and Tom McLaury, the three men killed during the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It is also the final resting place of Newman Haynes "Old Man" Clanton, who died prior to the gunfight (unlike in the movie); he was "killed by Mexicans while driving a herd of stolen cattle," according to his tombstone. He was originally buried in New Mexico but later re-interred at Boot Hill.

Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine settled in Los Angeles when he was in his 60s, and he spent a lot of time hanging around movie sets, trying to convince someone to film his then nearly forgotten story. John Ford said Earp would come to town and get drunk with cowboy actors whenever his wife went away to religious conventions. Western stars Tom Mix and William S. Hart were friends of his and served as pallbearers at his funeral in 1929.

Doc Holliday was not killed at the O.K. Corral. He died of his tuberculosis in 1887 in a Colorado sanitarium. His purported last words were "I'll be damned."

"Oh, My Darling, Clementine" is a folk ballad of the American West most often credited to Percy Montrose in 1884, and occasionally to Barker Bradford. It is believed to have derived from another song called "Down by the River Liv'd a Maiden" by H.S. Thompson (1863). It tells the story of the death by accidental drowning of the daughter of a miner in the 1849 California Gold Rush. It's usually believed to be from the point of view of a lover, although some theorize it's the miner-father who's supposed to be singing it. This theory, however, has less credence in light of final lyrics that indicate the singer has turned his affections to Clementine's little sister, a stanza that is left out of most children's song books, presumably because it's seen as morally questionable.

The folk song became a signature for the cartoon character Huckleberry Hound, who sang it often and always horribly out of tune.

Henry Fonda did the same slightly awkward high-stepping dance in his earlier appearance for Ford, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). According to My Darling Clementine screenwriter Winston Miller, Ford deliberately included the dance number again because "he thought it would make a good shot."

Although the scene at James Earp's graveyard was added without Ford's approval, it bears connection and comparison with similar scenes Fonda played in the earlier Ford movies Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

The story of My Darling Clementine was retold in John Sturges' Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), with Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc.

Wyatt Earp and the legend of the O.K. Corral have figured in many other films over the years. The first movie based on Stuart N. Lake's book of the same name about Earp was Frontier Marshall (1934), which set many of the details of his legend and restored Earp to prominence after being largely forgotten for many years. George O'Brien played the character whose name was changed to Michael Wyatt in this version because the lawman's widow threatened to sue.

Lake's book was adapted again under the same title in 1939, directed by Allan Dwan and starring Randolph Scott as Earp and Cesar Romero as Doc. Earp's widow threatened to sue again but producer Darryl F. Zanuck allegedly secured her silence with a $5,000 check.

The 1939 Frontier Marshal was the first film to feature Wyatt Earp by name. Director Allan Dwan knew the real Earp, who as an old man lived in Los Angeles and used to visit the sets of Dwan's silent Westerns. Dwan remembered Earp as "crooked as a three-dollar bill" and says he and his brothers "were racketeers, all of them." Nevertheless, Randolph Scott as Earp in Dwan's film is a paragon of virtue and justice, associated with Western low-life only through his friendship with Doc Holliday, whom he tries to reform.

Lake's version of Earp's life also served loosely as the basis for Powder River (1953), starring Rory Calhoun as a character named Chino Bullock based on Earp.

The character of Wyatt Earp has appeared in nearly 50 movies and television shows, played by actors as varied as Richard Dix, Will Geer, Joel McCrea, Buster Crabbe, James Stewart, and most recently by Kurt Russell in Tombstone (1993) and Kevin Costner in Wyatt Earp (1994). Hugh O'Brian played the marshal in a long-running (1955-1961) television series.

James Garner played Earp twice: in Hour of the Gun (1967), a sequel by John Sturges to his Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that begins with the O.K. corral fight and details its aftermath, and as the aged marshal, now living in Los Angeles and getting involved in a comical fiction adventure with Western movie star Tom Mix (Bruce Willis), in Blake Edwards' Sunset (1988).

Doc Holliday has appeared on screens big and small nearly as many times as his friend Wyatt Earp, played by such actors as Walter Huston, Martin Landau, Jason Robards, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Dennis Quaid, and Randy Quaid. Stacy Keach played him in a movie more specifically about the character himself, Doc (1971), with Harris Yulin as Wyatt and Faye Dunaway as another Western legend, Katie Elder.

The legend underwent revision in Doc, expanding Earp's shadier side into more villainous proportions. Screenwriter Pete Hamill acknowledged his story's links to the political and cultural upheaval of the time: "We were continuing to fight [in Vietnam] because of some peculiar notions of national macho pride. Indochina was Dodge City, and the Americans were some collective version of Wyatt Earp."

Late in 2009, Paramount Pictures acquired a script for a large-scale western by Chad St. John, "The Further Adventures of Doc Holliday." At the time of the announcement, Paramount indicated it planned to make a "history-based action adventure tale in the vein of" the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise.

The sci-fi comedy Back to the Future Part III (1990), which follows its time-traveling hero back to the Old West, pays tribute to My Darling Clementine with a scene of people dancing on a building foundation to the tune of the old folk song.

John Ford himself revisited the legend with a different take, depicting Earp as lazy and decadent versus Fonda's righteousness in this version, in one segment of Ford's late film Cheyenne Autumn (1964). James Stewart plays Earp and Arthur Kennedy is Doc Holliday.

The 2004 DVD release of My Darling Clementine includes a near-complete version of the film before Darryl Zanuck's changes to it.

Fonda and Downs starred in a live radio version of the film on the April 28, 1947 broadcast of the Lux Radio Theatre with Richard Conte as Doc.

In the popular TV comedy series M*A*S*H*, Colonel Potter's favorite film is My Darling Clementine, and clips from it are shown in one episode.

After the real Wyatt Earp's death, his widow, Josephine Marcus Earp (1861-1944) wrote her own rather sanitized version of the Earp legend, I Married Wyatt Earp. It was made into a 1983 TV movie starring Marie Osmond as Josephine, the first time Wyatt's longtime wife appeared as a character in a movie. Earp was played by Bruce Boxleitner in that version. Josephine was later played on film by Dana Delany (Tombstone) and Joanna Going (Wyatt Earp).

"I have this theory that certain [director-studio boss] combinations––Ford and Zanuck, Capra and Cohn, Wyler and Goldwyn––abrased each other in a very creative manner, like Michelangelo and Pope Julius. They were constantly criticizing each other, and there was conflict, but the end results were astonishing."
– actor, photographer, film preservationist Roddy McDowall

by Rob Nixon