But
for Wyatt Earp's arrival in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in December,
1879, the ultimate fate of the "The Town Too Tough to Die"
made famous in so many books and motion pictures, may have been
different: while Tombstone exists because of prospector Ed Schieffelin,
the town persists because of Wyatt Earp and his singular exploits
on the Arizona frontier of the early 1880's. Although known in
certain circles as an efficient if undistinguished peace officer
in the Kansas cow towns of Wichita and Dodge City, and a part-time
gambler or "sporting man," the Wyatt Earp who landed
in Tombstone near the beginning of the silver boom was a man of
no national reputation; even so, he commanded a certain cheerful
dread among his associates. Onetime Tombstone mayor, and publisher
of the Epitaph newspaper, John P. Clum, remembered Earp as possessing
"strong, positive and pleasing" features, though adding
that he "smiled only when the occasion warranted it... Quite
my ideal of the strong, manly, serious and capable peace office-equally
unperturbed whether...meeting with a friend or a foe." Sporting
man Fred Dodge put it rather more bluntly: "...As a man he
[Earp] was Ace high, and as a peace officer he WAS the peace..."
The Earp brothers (James,
Virgil, and Wyatt at this point; Morgan and Warren Earp would
arrive in mid-1880) attempted to organize an opposition stage
line for the silver camp, but this folded within two or three
months. James soon found employment in the Allen Street saloon
of "Colonel" James Vogan, while Wyatt was engaged as
a faro dealer in a succession of gambling houses: the Golden Eagle
Brewery, Danner & Owens' tent saloon, and the Oriental Saloon,
all at the deadly intersection of Fifth and Allen streets. During
his time "bucking the tiger" at the Oriental, Earp resumed
his acquaintance with a Dodge City sporting man named John Henry
"Doc" Holliday, soon to become one of the most outspoken
(and least predictable) members of the Earp crowd in town. In
the spring and summer of 1880, Earp did well for himself and invested
a portion of his gambling income in various mining and water-rights
proposals; thus far he and his brothers had done little to distinguish
themselves from any of the hundreds of other adventurers arriving
each week.
All that changed in the summer
of 1880. After repeated clashes with suspected rustlers Ike Clanton
and Frank and Tom McLaury, Earp accepted the appointment of deputy
in the administration of Pima County Sheriff Charles A. Shibell.
From late July to early November of that year, Earp kept busy
with the usual roster of drunks and pickpockets, and started a
nasty vendetta involving the Earps and their backers on one side,
and the Clanton-McLaury stock thieves, known generally as "cowboys",
on the other. The antagonism reached an all-time high after the
October shooting of town marshal Frederick G. White by cowboy
chief Curly Bill Brocius, and the latter's summary pistol-whipping
and arrest by Wyatt Earp. Although Brocius was cleared of criminal
intent in a subsequent hearing in Tucson, he and his friends would
not soon forget Earp's involvement.
Time passed, but memories
remained vivid. By the spring of 1881 it was apparent that the
Earps and the cowboys were on a collision course: in March, the
Earps went after the Brocius-connected cowboys wanted for the
attempted robbery of the Benson stage and the murders of two of
the men aboard, and in early June Virgil Earp succeeded Benjamin
Sippy (who abdicated in the face of pressure from the Citizens'
Safety Committee), as Tombstone's chief of police. Threats were
made by members of each of the factions in town, and it was considered
unsafe to be too pronounced on the topic, unless well-armed or
fleet of foot. As Fred Dodge recalled, "Everything seemed
to trend towards an open collision..."
The last straw came on September
12, 1881, when Wyatt Earp and two other lawmen arrested cowboy
worthies Peter Spencer and Frank Stilwell, charged with the robbery
of the Bisbee stage the week before. The jailing of the well-known
outlaws from Texas enraged the Clantons, Brocius, and others in
the cowboy fraternity, whom James Earp recalled "stirring
up bad blood in Tombstone...[by] making threats against the Earp
boys." Wyatt, for his part, was unsurprised by this turn
of events. "I naturally kept my eyes open," he later
said, "for I did not intend that any of the gang should get
the drop on me if I could help it..." While Stilwell and
Spencer beat the rap in the stage-robbery case, they unwittingly
managed to light the fuse that would lead to one of the most celebrated
and most argued-over gunfights in the long and bloody history
of the Old West.
Six weeks after the arrest
of the men from Texas, Tombstone Marshal Virgil Earp, brothers
Wyatt and Morgan, and the ubiquitous Doc Holliday, confronted
Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne,
all members of the cowboy gang, in a small lot near the intersection
of Third and Fremont streets in Tombstone. The O.K. Corral was
nowhere in sight, but would soon come to be associated, if only
in legend, with the thirty-second shooting scrape about to take
place there. The best evidence in the case-and there is no shortage
of witness testimony, secondary literature, and idle conjecture
in connection with the gunfight-suggests that two members of the
cowboy party, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton, answered Virgil
Earp's call for their surrender by drawing their six-shooters;
Wyatt Earp, by his own testimony, responded in kind, drawing his
pistol and shooting Frank McLaury in the gut. The parties kept
up a vigorous fire for about half a minute, when the principal
belligerents in the cowboy party-Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy
Clanton-were found to be dead or dying. Virgil and Morgan Earp
sustained serious gunshot wounds, while Doc Holliday was grazed
by the last shot from Frank McLaury's pistol. Wyatt Earp was untouched
by any of the flying lead; he had a habit of going unscathed through
episodes of gunplay, and, indeed, in a half-century of life in
the Wild West he was never so much as nicked by a bullet.
The end of the gunfight was
only the beginning of trouble for the Earp boys: although cleared
of any wrongdoing in a protracted hearing, lasting fully one month
and attracting lurid press coverage as far off as New York City,
the Earps remained highly visible targets. Dismissed as marshal
by an apprehensive city council in mid-November, Virgil Earp was
the target of cowboy-connected assassins on the night of December
28, 1881, and sustained crippling injuries in the shotgun ambush.
Morgan Earp was less fortunate, being murdered by an unknown assassin
(both Virgil and Wyatt Earp would insist that Frank Stilwell was
the killer), while playing a game of pool in Campbell & Hatch's
Saloon, on March 18, 1882. This killing, and Wyatt Earp's subsequent
course of action, would effectively end the so-called "Earp
era" in Tombstone.
On March 20, while escorting
the maimed Virgil Earp to the Tucson depot of the Southern Pacific
Railroad on his way out of the Territory, Wyatt Earp encountered
Frank Stilwell and meted out justice in the by-now-expected form:
the cowboy's buckshot-riddled corpse was discovered the next morning,
one observer describing Stilwell as having been "the worst
shot-up man that I ever saw...Stilwell shot Morg Earp and they
were bound to get him..." When Wyatt Earp returned to Tombstone
following the Stilwell killing, he was threatened with arrest
by the sheriff of Cochise County, John H. Behan, long a personal
and political adversary of the Earp boys, from whom Earp expected
little in the way of a fair hearing. Earp brushed past the sheriff
and laughed at the murder warrants he held. The brothers' Tombstone
experiment was all over, and had ended at such a terrific cost
to the family; Behan's warrants held little terror for Earp or
his followers. As they rode out of Tombstone late on the afternoon
of March 21, 1882, Earp and his men knew it was the last time
any of them would set foot in the scene of their greatest accomplishments,
and most bitter personal tragedies. Nothing in Earp's long and
varied career would ever come close to the potential, for good
or for ruin, that Tombstone had represented, and he would spend
another quarter-century trying to find another Tombstone, without
success.
The Tombstone record of the
Earp brothers, and especially Wyatt, has been a controversial
one; then as now, their admirers in southeastern Arizona are no
less vocal than their detractors. Some agreed with the assessment
of George W. Parson, a mining speculator and contemporary of the
Earps: Wyatt Earp, he said, "was not an angel, but his faults
were minor ones and he never killed a man who did not richly deserve
it." A later Tombstone resident, Ethel R. Macia, born there
in 1881 and dimly recalling meeting Wyatt Earp in Colorado later
in the decade, spoke for another generation of Arizona natives
when she observed in 1957 that Earp "was a fine man, and
a lot of wonderful people believed in him...then and now. Earp
was a gentleman. He was not coarse, but he had to be strong to
keep Tombstone from being over-run."
Wyatt Earp was many things
to many people. But whatever he was, and whatever his accomplishments
in a life spent wandering the great frontier, this much is certain:
without Tombstone, Wyatt Earp likely would have remained a peripheral
Old West character; and without Wyatt Earp, Tombstone never would
have become a part of the mythic American experience of the old
southwest.
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