The Cochise County Cowboys

When people in eighteen eighty one Tombstone said the Cowboys, they did not mean honest ranch hands. They meant a loose and dangerous brotherhood of outlaws who ran cattle rustling, stagecoach robbery, and smuggling across the nearby Mexican border, and who stood on the other side of the law from the Earps. At the rough center were Newman Clanton, known as Old Man Clanton, and his sons Ike and Billy, along with their neighbors Tom and Frank McLaury.

Old Man Clanton was tied to the robbery and killing of Mexican smugglers, and he himself was ambushed and shot dead by Mexican forces in Guadalupe Canyon in August of eighteen eighty one. Two names loom largest in Cowboy legend. Curly Bill Brocius, named for his dark curly hair, was a gunman and rustler feared across the territory.

And Johnny Ringo, unusually well read and famously moody, drifted through the Cowboy world until July of eighteen eighty two, when he was found dead beneath an oak tree with a bullet in his head. Whether Ringo took his own life or was murdered has never been settled, and it remains one of the enduring mysteries of the Old West. After the Earp Vendetta Ride broke their ranks, the Cowboys faded, but their feud made Tombstone immortal.