Morgan Earp and the Vendetta Ride
Near Tombstone, Arizona
The gunfight beside Fly's studio did not end the war between the Earps and the Cowboys. It only started the killing. On the night of March eighteenth, eighteen eighty two, Morgan Earp was playing billiards at Campbell and Hatch's parlor here on Allen Street when a gunman fired through a rear glass door.
The bullet struck Morgan in the back, shattered his spine, and he died within the hour in his brother's arms. Months earlier, on the twenty eighth of December, an ambush had already crippled Virgil Earp's arm. Wyatt Earp decided the courts had failed him.
As he escorted his family to a train in Tucson, he found one of the suspected assassins, Frank Stilwell, waiting near the tracks, and killed him there. Then Wyatt gathered a small posse and rode out on what history calls the Earp Vendetta Ride. Over the following weeks he hunted the men he blamed for his brothers.
He killed a man known as Indian Charlie, and at a place called Iron Springs he said he shot and killed the feared Cowboy leader Curly Bill Brocius, though historians still argue over whether that death happened as Wyatt described. Never convicted, Wyatt Earp finally left the Arizona Territory for good, his brother avenged and his legend sealed.
