On the morning of Sunday, March 26, 1882, a week after his brother Morgan had been murdered, Wyatt Earp gazed at the outskirts of Tombstone. He wondered if this was the day he would be saying good-bye to it forever. If so, good riddance. Years later, he would reflect on events during his two-plus years in Tombstone and say, “This was where a lifetime of troubles began.”
There was no nostalgia for this already aging boomtown and now no hope for the future of making a life there. It was over, this Tombstone venture, the only time in his thirty-four years that he and Virgil and Morgan and James and their wives, and at times Warren, had all lived in the same town together. Well, that was done—Virgil crippled and in California, Morgan dead. Now, it was all about unfinished business.
The members of Wyatt’s posse were saddled up and ready to go that morning when Harelip Charlie Smith rode out of Tombstone and joined them. The other members of Wyatt’s posse were his younger brother Warren, Texas Jack Vermillion, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, Sherman McMasters, and of course Doc Holliday. He did not know about the others, but Wyatt was sure that if more killing was to be done, Doc would be in on it. Until a few days ago, Doc had had a lot more experience at it.
There were plenty of people in and around Tombstone who were calling this posse illegal, that it was no more than a gang of vigilantes bent on executing instead of arresting. In recent years, Wyatt would have taken that as an insult to his honor. He had done his best at lawing. In fact, on that morning and since the day in December when Virgil had been ambushed, he was a deputy U.S. marshal, so appointed by U.S. Marshal Crawley Dake, who had the federal and legal authority to do so.
But there was another, overriding fact: he no longer cared about the technicalities. As Casey Tefertiller would state in his classic biography, “Wyatt Earp was making his own law.”
The seven men rode northeast into the Dragoon Mountains. Somewhere out there, or behind them, or wherever they were, was Johnny Behan with his posse. The sheriff of Cochise County was looking not for the men who shot Morgan Earp but for the Earp posse, the ones who truly were going after the cowards who killed Morgan. Not that it mattered, because “wherever” was probably more like it. Most everybody knew that Sheriff Behan did not really want to catch up to Wyatt and his bunch because then he might actually have to try to arrest them. Possibly take a bullet for his trouble to boot. Behan would become just one more casualty of the so-called vendetta ride, joining Frank Stilwell, Indian Charlie Cruz, and Curly Bill Brocius in Hell, where they belonged.
Behan wore the badge, though. It didn’t fit him too well, but he’d schemed and finagled and back-slapped and betrayed hard enough for it. If he sat safe in his office and didn’t go after Earp’s crew, even the few friends Johnny had left would turn against him. Irony was, if it had been cowboys Behan was after, he’d have quit looking by now and be facing a lot less grief. But there was that other motive: Wyatt had stolen his woman. When this was all over, the beautiful Josephine Marcus would be waiting for Wyatt, not that peacock of a sheriff. Johnny could be past tense in more ways than one, but maybe almost by accident he could wind up doing something about it.
In the Dragoons, Wyatt and Doc flagged down a westbound passenger train. The engineer at first might have feared a robbery, but the seven men were not wearing masks and as the train drew closer he recognized at least Wyatt and Doc. The engineer and the crew waited patiently as the two grit-covered men looked through the cars, probably making the passengers nervous—anywhere Doc was, people got nervous—but they had nothing to fear. It was true that they were searching for a man with money, but this was money friends in Tombstone wanted Wyatt to have. No such man existed on this train, however. Time to get back on the trail before it grew any colder.
Later in the day, the posse reached the ranch owned by Jim and Hugh Percy. It was customary in the more remote parts of the territory that when riders showed up, you fed them and their horses and gave them a place to sleep. Even adversaries put hostilities aside so as not to break the unwritten rule of frontier hospitality. But the Percy brothers were too frightened for that, what with all the killing lately.
As he spoke quietly to the ranch owners, Wyatt was unaware that Barney Riggs and Frank Hereford had secreted themselves in the barn. It was possible they contemplated an ambush, perhaps waiting to see if the posse would bed down for the night. However, it was unlikely the two men, one of whom had been deputized by Behan, would have been brave or foolish enough to take on the seven guests, especially with two of them being Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.
A few hours later, the posse rode on. Wyatt was disappointed but not angry with the Percys. Legitimate ranchers had a hard enough time with the cowboys, with all their cattle rustling and other stealing, and that wouldn’t change even with Curly Bill taken off the map. Being seen as giving aid and comfort to the Earp posse would make things even warmer for the Percy boys. It might be different at the next destination, because the owner of the Sierra Bonita Ranch, Henry Clay Hooker, was of another stripe.
Hooker greeted Wyatt and the others with handshakes. His 250,000-acre ranch had been victimized repeatedly by the cattle-rustling cowboys, so any enemy of theirs was a friend of Hooker’s, and he welcomed them into his spacious ranch house. Doc, especially, was surprised when Wyatt accepted the offer of a drink. Except for the very occasional small beer, his close friend’s drink of choice since their Dodge City days had been coffee. Now, as Wyatt sat at Hooker’s dinner table, he nursed a whiskey. To Doc and Warren, this was a clear indication of the stress Wyatt had been under since the week before when he had watched his younger brother die in a Tombstone billiards parlor. The visitors were given a good meal and beds for the night.
But Wyatt had underestimated Johnny Behan. While he and his companions slept, the sheriff and his own posse were on their way.
Behan had not suddenly gotten any braver. It was more that the election the following November had gotten another day closer. Being sheriff of the new Cochise County had brought with it many more headaches than he had anticipated, especially in the aftermath of the October 26 gunfight, but Behan wanted to keep the job. Letting Wyatt Earp and his party get clean away would not play well among voters—especially those who disliked the Earps, and they were the sheriff’s core supporters.
So, on that same day that the federal posse had ridden northeast into the Dragoons, the county posse traveled the same route. With Johnny Behan were a collection of cowboys, including Johnny Ringo, who could very well shoot Wyatt Earp on sight; Phin and Ike Clanton, who had their own dead brother to avenge; and the undersheriff Harry Woods, whose newspaper, the Tombstone Daily Nugget, had been gleefully anti-Earp. They would eventually find their way to the Hooker ranch, whose name translated to “Beautiful Mountain.” Before closing in on it, though, they bedded down and tried to sleep, planning on arriving at the ranch at first light.
Wyatt figured the smart way to think was not if Behan and his force would show up, but when. In the bright morning, the lanky deputy U.S. marshal sat with Henry Hooker to discuss courses of action. Sometimes the easiest was best, and that would be for Wyatt and Doc and whoever wanted to go along to ride east into New Mexico or south into Mexico. Either place, Behan had no jurisdiction. Everyone would live at least another day.
No surprise, however, that the easiest way was not Wyatt’s way. He could not stomach the thought of the sheriff returning to Tombstone boasting he had booted Wyatt and Warren Earp and Doc Holliday and their equally well-armed friends out of Arizona. That would be too much of a victory for Johnny, and he did next to nothing to achieve it.
No more running. Wyatt told his host that he was not about to be chased off. Hooker offered to back him up, and the posse could make its stand right there at the easily defended ranch-house compound. Again, Wyatt shook his head. Any bloodshed on Hooker’s property put the older man in serious legal jeopardy because he was aiding fugitives. Anyway, this wasn’t Hooker’s fight. Wyatt went outside and he and his men, their bags containing fresh supplies, mounted up and rode away from the compound.
Sheriff Behan just missed them. When his posse arrived, Hooker barely tolerated their presence and refused to answer questions about Wyatt’s whereabouts. The Cochise County posse was left to its own devices to track their prey.
Wyatt and his men came to a halt about three miles away. He considered a bluff and the vantage point it offered. This was a better place than most to stand and fight. It would cost Behan dearly to get close. When he turned in the direction of the ranch compound to view it from atop the bluff, Wyatt could see the other posse leaving. He had to assume the sheriff was on his way to him.
The two Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the four other men took up good firing positions. Their rifles and their pistols were fully loaded. When Behan and his boys got close enough, bullets would fly. Wyatt had never been a man-killer, and it may have sickened him a bit that in the last few days he had begun to get the hang of it. He expected on this day to send more men to Hell … and maybe he would be joining them.