Badges That Won The West - Tombstone Marshal
The Tombstone, Arizona U.S. Marshal's Badge recalls the mining town of Tombstone, with its storied Boot Hill Cemetery and Gunfight at the OK Corral. Even though history records several gunfights with more combatants and a much higher body count, the OK Corral shoot-out is acknowledged by historians to be the most famous gunfight in the history of the American West. Though Tombstone was a pretty metropolitan city for its day and time, the lack of railroad access combined with its remote location made it an isolated place, surrounded by unpopulated desert. By the 1880s, Tombstone was known as one of the deadliest places in the west--thanks to a bitter feud between a criminal gang calling themselves the "Cow-Boys" and the businessmen, investors and immigrant miners who ran the city and the nearby silver mines.
On October 26, 1881, at about three in the afternoon, this simmering powder keg exploded in a hail of gunfire that would come to be known as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Wyatt Earp, his two brothers Morgan and Virgil, and the notorious gunslinger, Doc Holliday, shot it out with a quartet of the Cow-Boys that included Ike Clanton and his younger brother, Billy, along with the McLaury brothers, Frank and Tom.
According to the news clipping from an Arizona newspaper of the day pictured above, the trouble began when Ike Clanton was arrested that morning for violating a city ordinance against carrying firearms within Tombstone city limits. Virgil Earp was Tombstone's City Marshal, and also a Deputy Federal Marshal for Arizona Territory. He would have been answerable to Crawley Dake, the only U.S. Marshal in Arizona at the time, headquartered in Prescott. Virgil, expecting trouble from the Cow-Boys, had temporarily deputized both his brother, Wyatt, and Doc Holliday. By all accounts, had he not deputized the two men, he and active deputy, Morgan Earp, would likely not have survived the armed confrontation with the Clantons and McLaurys. Regardless, both Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were charged with murder in the incident by Sheriff John Behan, on the grounds that neither were lawmen at the time of the shootout. The charges didn't stick. A grand jury would twice decline to indict either man, and they were eventually dropped.
The charge against Clanton that morning was disorderly conduct. He put up a fight when Virgil asked him to surrender his pistol, and was pistol-whipped, disarmed and fined twenty-five dollars. He paid the fine, was released and left town, after swearing to return and take vengence upon the Earp brothers. True to his word, Clanton returned that afternoon with his brother and the McLaury brothers in tow. The famous confrontation--in which thirty shots were fired in the space of about thirty seconds--began around the OK Corral, but played out in and around the streets of Tombstone. Miraculously, considering their proximity to each other, only three men were killed--Billy Clanton and the two McLaurys. Ike Clanton, protesting that he was unarmed, had run from the fight and emerged unscathed. He would be caught rustling cattle and fatally shot by lawmen while resisting arrest in 1887. Virgil Earp was later shot from ambush and lost the use of one arm as a result of his wounds. Morgan Earp was shot and killed a short time later and Wyatt Earp embarked on his famous "vendetta ride", vowing to wipe out the Cow-Boys once and for all. Doc Holliday died of turburculosis at the age of 36 in a Glenwood Springs, Colorado sanitorium.
JoAnn Graham is an internet marketer and author, with 28 years experience in publishing, advertising and marketing. She has a special interest in vintage firearms and the places, wars and people connected with their history.
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