Today being October 26, 2024, it is the 143rd anniversary of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the most famous gunfight from the mythical Wild West.
The gunfight at the O.K. Corral happened in Tombstone, Arizona, and involved the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on one side, and a group of cattle rustlers known as the Cowboys on the other.
There’s a ton of legend surrounding this one-minute slice of history, the buildup to it, and the events that followed.
Movies have been made, books have been written. The Wikipedia page about the fight at the O.K. Corral runs to 21,542 words. I spent 3+ hours of my life a couple months ago, napping through Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp at a local movie theater that plays old films.
Today, I had a different idea.
I went on newspapers.com, and I searched.
There was nothing on the day of the fight, but several newspapers reported the event a day later (“A sanguinary shooting affray occurred on Fremont street”).
I also found dozens of articles in the coming weeks and months, reporting how Virgil Earp had called in the military to defend the town of Tombstone against the violence… how Morgan Earp had been shot and killed while playing billiards… how the editor of the Arizona Morning Star wrote that the time is past for courts of justice, and that “hemp is the best code” to deal with the Cowboys.
I gotta tell ya:
I felt a real rush reading these old articles, like I could be there, see history in the making. It felt somehow real — without the layers of interpretation and retelling that soon followed.
Because by next summer, the legend was already forming. Virgil Earp was giving interviews in train cars to news reporters. His description of Doc Holliday will sound familiar to anybody who’s seen one of a dozen movies featuring the man:
“There was something very peculiar about Doc. He was gentlemanly, a good dentist, a friendly man, and yet, outside of us boys, I don’t think he had a friend in the Territory. Tales were told that he had murdered men in different parts of the country, that he had robbed and stolen and committed all manner of crimes, and yet, when persons were asked how they knew it, they could only admit that it was hearsay, and nothing of the kind had in reality been traced up to Doc’s account.”
I bet you’re wondering where all this is going. Let me get to it.
My point for you is simply to go to sources that others don’t go to.
Everybody is talking these days, and most of it is rehashed — the same newsletters, the same “gotta read ’em” books, the same Twitter memes.
Maybe you were truly blessed to have a unique perspective among the 8 billion people on this planet, and maybe, even by looking at the same stuff as everyone else, you have something new to say about it all. “No one I think is in my tree,” John Lennon said once, “I mean it must be high or low.”
But if you’re not John Lennon, there’s a cheat code:
Different inputs, different outputs.
This is not just about creating content, but about business strategies, and about success in life in general. Go where other people don’t go, and you’ll see things that other people don’t see.
So much for inspiration.
But what to promote?
I actually meant to promote newspapers.com as an affiliate because I love the service so well.
I will do so in future and offer a bonus if you give ’em a free try through my link.
But I don’t have any of that set up today.
So let me go back to the world of marketing, and tie into today’s theme of sources nobody else goes to.
If you want to see how A-list copywriters turn boring and dry texts into sexy sales copy that gets strangers to send money… and better yet, if you want to go through this same process yourself, and get a real rush of genuine experience and insight by doing, instead of just hearing other people’s interpretation and retelling, then you might like the following: