Together they traveled around the west, including time spent in Alaska during the gold rush where they became friends with author Jack London and a young mining engineer named Herbert Hoover.
Wyatt Earp soon moved to San Francisco where he joined up with Josephine Marcus who would be his companion and common-law wife for the next 47 years. Sheriff Behan issued a warrant for Earp’s arrest and extradition in the murder of his former deputy Stilwell but received little support from either the governor of Arizona or Colorado, where Wyatt and his men had fled to. The events were covered by regional papers like the Tombstone Epitaph and the Daily Nugget, all which helped increase Earp’s notoriety. What came to be known as Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride played out over the ensuing weeks in the hills of Arizona with Earp and his posse searching for and eliminating those suspected of being involved in his brother’s murder. Within days Stilwell was found dead, his body riddled with bullet holes. While at the train station in Tucson, Wyatt encountered Frank Stilwell, a former deputy of Tombstone Sheriff John Behan and a prime suspect in his brother’s murder. Wyatt had managed to secure Virgil’s badge for himself and now had the authority of a U.S. Wyatt Earp formed a posse of trusted lieutenants, including his loyal friend Doc Holliday, and set out for Tucson where he planned to ship his dead brother’s body back to relatives in California. Morgan died in his younger brother’s arms with Wyatt vowing to avenge his death. Then, in March of the next year, Wyatt’s other brother Morgan was shot in the back while playing a game of billiards. Less than two months later, in December of 1881, Wyatt’s brother Virgil was ambushed and sustained injuries from a shotgun blast that cost him the use of his left arm. Unfortunately the gunfight did little to settle any disputes between the Earps and “the Cowboys”, the criminal element they were determined to eradicate, and only served to heighten tensions between the two factions. On the opposing side Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers had been shot dead. Corral gunfight left Wyatt’s brothers, Morgan and Virgil, along with Doc Holliday, wounded. The American Southwest was a wide-open area at that time in history, a truly wild place with the Earp brothers being the only real law enforcement in all of southeast Arizona.
All three brothers had experience in law enforcement which is what they ended up becoming involved with upon their arrival in Tombstone.
Wyatt had worked at many jobs prior to arriving in the remote, western town, including gambling, real estate, and mine speculation. In 1879, at the age of 31, he went to Tombstone, Arizona, along with his brothers Virgil and Morgan. Wyatt Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois in 1848. Wyatt Earp is remembered mostly for his part in that fabled gunfight but his life afterwards, which has received little attention from historians, is worth recounting. Among those figures who would become part of the nation’s folklore was Wyatt Earp who survived the showdown unscathed. Corral as the legend surrounding its participants quickly took hold and became part of the fabric of the wild west frontier. The smoke had hardly cleared on October 26, 1881, in the O.K.
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