The Earp-Clanton feud has passed into the melting pot of tradition in which so much frontier history has been changed into myth. The Southwest has a nebulous idea that in some way or other it grew out of the attempted robbery of the Benson stage, but it may be ventured that not a half-dozen persons in Tombstone or in all Arizona have any definite knowledge of its origin.

But the bloodstained facts of the old story are still memories strangely surcharged with bitterness. The opinions of the fathers have become the convictions of the children, and the hatreds that were quick with flaming life nearly a half century ago stalk grimly today as the ghosts of hatreds. The Earps are gone, the Clantons are dust these many years, but a new generation that knew neither is ready to do sentimental battle for the causes championed by its forbears. The cold ashes of the dead feud, under chemical analysis, would still show traces of venom.

The Earp-Clanton feud was an evolution rather than a sudden flare of lethal violence. Its origin was complicated. Contributory causes linked in involved sequence, were: The attempted robbery of the Benson stage and the murder of Bud Philpot; the robbery of the Bisbee stage; a proposition whatever it was⁠—and there were two conflicting stories concerning it⁠—made by Wyatt Earp to Ike Clanton; a tipsy remark made by Marshall Williams; Doc Holliday’s flaming resentment; Ike Clanton’s drunken spree.

Bad blood grew between the Earps and the Clantons and the Clantons’ close friends and partners in outlawry, the McLowerys, in the very early days of Tombstone’s history. Only a few days after Wyatt Earp arrived in Tombstone, a horse was stolen from him. For a long time, he lost all trace of the animal. Then he heard it was in the possession of the Clantons. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday went to Charleston to investigate. Sheriff Behan was in Charleston on that occasion to serve Ike Clanton with a subpoena in some court case.

“I was told by a friend of mine,” testified Wyatt Earp later, “that the man who carried Sheriff Behan’s subpoena from Charleston to the Clanton ranch rode my horse.”

Wyatt Earp was over in the Huachuca Mountains later, looking after some water rights, and on his way back to Tombstone, Scar-Face McMasters met him on the road and told him, if he rode fast enough, he would find his horse in Charleston.

“As soon as I reached Charleston,” said Wyatt Earp, “I saw Billy Clanton ride my horse through the street and put him up in a corral. It struck me as pretty brazen for Billy Clanton to ride my stolen horse about in this public fashion within nine miles of Tombstone. But Charleston was a Clanton-McLowery stamping ground and was filled with friends of these desperadoes. I was alone, but I determined to get possession of my horse legally and take him back home. As Justice Jim Burnett was away in Sonora, I telegraphed to Tombstone to my brother James to have papers for the recovery of the animal made out before Justice Wallace and sent over to me at once. Billy Clanton learned of this telegram and went to the corral to ride the horse out of town. I followed him and, with my hand on my gun, told him he could not take the horse, as it was mine and I proposed to have it with or without process of law. Warren Earp, my youngest brother, brought the legal papers to Charleston a little later, and Billy Clanton gave up the horse without service.

“ ‘Have you got any more good horses to lose, Earp?’ Billy Clanton bantered me.

“ ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘but I’ll keep them locked in the stable after this so you can’t steal them.’ ”

A few months after this incident, Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, and Marshall Williams joined Captain Hurst and four soldiers in a search for six government mules that had been stolen from Camp Rucker. At Charleston, Dave Estes, a Curly Bill man, told Wyatt Earp he would find the mules at the McLowery ranch near Soldier Holes. Estes had seen the mules there the day before, he said, and the McLowerys were then changing the government brand of U S into D S. The posse rode to the McLowery ranch and found the D S branding iron and the six mules bearing the blotted brands.

“Frank Patterson, a member of the McLowery outfit,” said Wyatt Earp, “made some sort of compromise with Captain Hurst and agreed to give up the mules if my brothers, Williams, and I went back to Tombstone. I argued with Captain Hurst not to listen to this proposition and cautioned him that it was only a trick to get us out of the way. But he insisted, and we returned to Tombstone. When I met Captain Hurst in Tombstone three weeks later, he told me that, after we left the ranch, the McLowerys refused to give up the mules and threatened to fight it out with the soldiers. Captain Hurst left the mules in possession of the McLowerys and never recovered them. Captain Hurst warned me to look out for those outlaws, saying that, while he was at the ranch, they had made their threats that they would kill me and my brothers at the first opportunity. When I met Frank and Tom McLowery in Charleston a short time afterward, they tried to pick a quarrel with me, but I refused to fall into the trap. They told me that, if I ever followed them again, my friends would find me lying dead in the mesquite some fine morning.”

The attack on the Benson stage added in a peculiarly incidental but intricate way to the growing hatred between the Earps and the Clantons and McLowerys. The attempted stage robbery, it will be recalled, occurred in March, 1881, and the trail of Leonard, Head, and Crane had been lost in New Mexico. Efforts to trace the three highwaymen having failed, Wyatt Earp, according to his story, opened negotiations in the early part of June for the betrayal of the bandits.

“I knew that Leonard, Head, and Crane were friends and associates of the Clantons and McLowerys,” said Wyatt Earp. “It was well known among all officers of the law in Tombstone that Ike Clanton was a sort of chief among the outlaws, and that the Clantons and McLowerys were cattle thieves and in the secrets of the stage robbers, and that the Clanton and McLowery ranches were meeting places and places of shelter for the robber gangs. There was no doubt in my mind that Ike Clanton knew where Leonard, Head, and Crane were hiding.

“I met Ike Clanton, Frank McLowery, and Joe Hill in Tombstone one day, and told them I had a business proposition to lay before them. They went with me into the back yard of the Oriental saloon, and there we sat for an hour or more and held our conference.

“ ‘There is a reward of $1,200 each for the capture of Leonard, Head, and Crane,’ I told them. ‘I have an ambition to be sheriff of Cochise County. The murder of Bud Philpot and Peter Roerig in the stage holdup has incensed the public, and if I can capture the highwaymen, I believe it will mean my election as sheriff. Moreover, Johnny Behan’s crowd has been trying to give Doc Holliday the worst of it and make it appear that he was mixed up in the attack on the stage and in Philpot’s murder. Holliday had nothing to do with it, and you know that as well as I do. If I can catch the three road agents, I can prove out of their own mouths that Holliday is innocent. If you three boys will help me capture Leonard, Head, and Crane, I will give you the entire reward of $3,600 to be split among yourselves as you see fit. All I want is the glory of capturing them.’

“ ‘I would like to see them captured,’ said Ike Clanton. ‘Leonard claims a ranch that I also claim, and if I could get him out of the way, I’d have no further trouble over the land.’

“ ‘I’d like that money,’ said Frank McLowery, ‘but if it ever came out that we had turned up these fellows, our lives wouldn’t be worth a nickel.’

“ ‘I’ll give you my word that I will never reveal my source of information,’ I answered. ‘I’ll organize a posse and go out and get the men and you boys need never be known in the matter at all.’

“ ‘You’ll have a fight on your hands if you ever run on them,’ said Clanton.

“ ‘I’ll take care of all the fighting that has to be done,’ I replied.

“ ‘They’ll never be taken alive.’

“ ‘Then I’ll take them dead,’ I told him.

“ ‘But in case you have to kill them, does the reward still go? Does the reward for them say “dead or alive”?’

“I wasn’t sure on this point. So I told him I’d see Marshall Williams of the Wells-Fargo Company and learn definitely.

“I told Marshall Williams that same day to telegraph to the Wells-Fargo offices in San Francisco and settle this matter officially. He received an immediate answer by wire that the reward would be paid for the bandits dead or alive. Next day, I met Ike Clanton and Joe Hill on Allen Street in front of the little cigar store next door to the Alhambra and told them the telegram had come and they would get the reward even if Leonard, Head, and Crane were killed. They didn’t take my word for it, but demanded to see the telegram. I got the message from Williams and showed it to them, and later showed it to Frank McLowery.

“I held another conference with the three outlaws in the back yard of the Oriental and it was arranged that Joe Hill should go to Eureka, New Mexico, near which they said Leonard, Head, and Crane were hiding, and lure them to the McLowery ranch at Soldier Holes where I would be on hand with a posse and capture them.

“ ‘But how are you going to get them to the McLowery ranch?’ I asked.

“ ‘We have already talked that over and agreed on a plan,’ replied Ike Clanton. ‘Hill is to tell them there will be a paymaster going from Tombstone to Bisbee soon with a big swag of payroll money for the Copper Queen mine and we plan to stick up the paymaster and want them to come in and help us. We are leaving it to Hill to play this robbery up as an easy game that will make us all rich and, in view of the fact that Leonard, Head, and Crane missed $80,000 in the Benson stage holdup and didn’t get a cent, we figure it’s a cinch they will jump at the chance to come in and help pull off a big robbery on the Bisbee road.’

“ ‘How long,’ I asked, ‘will it take Hill to make the trip?’

“ ‘I know right where to find the three boys,’ Hill replied, ‘and I believe I can ride over there, put over the deal, and get back in about ten days.’

“So far,” Wyatt Earp continued, “my plan was working fine. Joe Hill set out for New Mexico on horseback next day, and before starting, as an evidence of good faith, he gave me his watch and chain and about three hundred dollars in money to hold for him until he got back. I said nothing to anyone about my plan. I didn’t tell even Doc Holliday, who is about as close a friend as I had. I wanted to hear from Hill as to when Leonard, Crane and Head would be at the McLowery ranch before I organized my posse and laid my trap to capture them. Finally Hill returned with news that was bitterly disappointing.

“ ‘I saw Bill Leonard and Harry Head in Owl City, New Mexico,’ he said, ‘but they were corpses in pine-board boxes and all ready to be buried. I arrived one day too late. They had been killed the day before by Ike and Bill Haslett.’

“This, I supposed, ended the matter but, as it turned out, it was only the beginning. As bad luck would have it, Marshall Williams got drunk. I had not told Williams of my negotiations with Clanton, McLowery, and Hill, but he had got wind of the back yard conferences I had been having with them at the Oriental, and in view of the telegram I had instructed him to send to San Francisco about the reward, he drew his own conclusions. While he was drunk, he met Ike Clanton and assumed a wise air, as a drunken man will, and pretended to know all about my plans.

“ ‘I want you to know, Clanton,’ he said, ‘that Wyatt Earp is my friend, and anything you fix up with him will be all right with me, and you can count on me for any help you need.’

“Clanton flared up at this foolish remark.

“ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘I have had no dealings of any kind with Wyatt Earp. You are drunk or you and I would have trouble right now. Wyatt Earp is no friend of mine, and if I ever hear of your connecting my name with him in any way, I’ll kill you. Remember that and learn to keep your mouth shut.’

“Ike Clanton, mad as a hornet, hunted me up and told me I had blabbed the whole matter to Williams. I denied it, but my denial was useless, and he went away convinced that I had told Williams all about our transaction. A week or two later, Clanton came to me again and accused me of having told Doc Holliday. Again I denied it.

“ ‘Doc Holliday himself told me so,’ Clanton said flatly.

“ ‘I know Doc Holliday told you nothing of the kind,’ I retorted. ‘He could have told you nothing because he knows nothing. Doc Holliday is in Tucson now, but as soon as he comes back, I’ll prove to you by him that I never have said a word to him about it.’

“When Doc Holliday returned from Tucson, I asked him about Ike Clanton’s statement.

“ ‘Ike Clanton is a liar,’ declared Doc hotly, ‘and I’ll tell him so the first time I see him.’

“Ike Clanton filled Frank McLowery and Joe Hill up with the idea that I had told Williams and Holliday about our negotiations, and after that the three men shunned me like poison every time they came to town. This misunderstanding, which grew out of a drunken falsehood babbled by Marshall Williams, finally led to the battle in which three men were killed. The bitterness of these three outlaws was easy to understand. If, as they wrongly assumed, I had told of their plans to betray their old friends, it meant that they would be marked for death by all the desperate cutthroats of the Curly Bill confederacy. Unless they found some way to square themselves, they were doomed. The situation was serious for me. I was the one man who had full knowledge of their treacherous plot against their comrades, and I had it in my power to betray the plotters to the vengeance of their associates. As long as I remained alive, this danger of my betraying them would hang over their heads. Their safety depended on my death. From this time on, they and their outlaw friends were plotting and scheming to kill me. I heard every little while of their threats to put me out of the way.”

This was the Earp side of the story of the origin of the Earp-Clanton feud as told by Wyatt Earp on the witness stand. Ike Clanton told the Clanton side in the same court.

“I met Leonard, Head, and Crane near Hereford on the San Pedro River five days after the attack on the Benson stage,” said Ike Clanton. “Bill Leonard then told me that Holliday had taken part in the attempted stage robbery but was drunk at the time. Leonard said Holliday killed Bud Philpot, and if it had not been for this drunken blunder, the stage robbery might have been successful. I met Holliday next day in Jim Vogan’s saloon in Tombstone and told him I had seen Leonard, Head, and Crane, and they were heading for the San José Mountains in Mexico. He asked me if Leonard had told me how Philpot happened to be killed. I told him no.

“ ‘Bob Paul had the lines, and Philpot had the shotgun and tried to make a fight and got left,’ Holliday said to me. ‘I shot Philpot through the heart and saw him tumble off the cart.’

“Several times after that conversation, Holliday told me, if I ever saw Leonard, Head, and Crane again, to tell them he was all right and would not give them away.

“Ten or twelve days before the Benson stage holdup, I had a talk with Morgan Earp in the Alhambra saloon. He told me he and Wyatt Earp had passed the tip to Bill Leonard and Doc Holliday that a large sum of money⁠—I think he said $29,000⁠—was going out on the stage.

“After Sheriff Behan’s posse had abandoned the pursuit, I met Virgil Earp in one of the Allen Street saloons. He asked me to let Leonard know that the three Earp brothers had led the posse off the trail to give Leonard, Head, and Crane a chance to escape.

“ ‘Tell Leonard,’ said Virgil Earp, ‘we were not trying to catch them. When the posse got to Helm’s ranch at the foot of the Dragoons, Wyatt, Morgan, and myself saw that the trail led south toward the San Pedro Valley and the Mexican line, but we steered the posse on a false scent east across the Dragoons and on into New Mexico. Tell Leonard we did all we could for him and his pals and advise him to get Head and Crane out of the country, as we are afraid they may be captured and get us all into trouble. I want to get this word to Leonard to let him know we have not gone back on him.’

“Early in June,” Ike Clanton continued, “I met Wyatt Earp in the Oriental saloon. He asked me to have a drink, and while our drinks were being mixed, he said he wanted to have a long private talk with me. After we had had our drinks, we stepped out on the sidewalk, and he said he could put it in my way to make $3,600. I asked him how and he said he would not tell me unless I promised either to do what he said or never to mention our conversation to anyone. I asked him if it was a legitimate transaction, and when he said it was, I promised never to tell. Then he told me he was afraid Leonard, Head, and Crane might be captured and confess to the connection of the Earps and Holliday with the stage holdup, and he wanted them put out of the way as, he said, ‘dead men tell no tales.’ He said, if I would lure the boys into a trap where he and his brothers and Holliday could kill them, he would collect the $3,600 reward and turn it over to me. I told him I would have nothing to do with such a scheme, and turned on my heel and left him.

“All I ever knew about the connection of the Earps and Holliday with the Benson stage holdup was what they themselves and Bill Leonard told me. Later, Leonard, Head, and Crane were all killed, and since their deaths I have been afraid the Earps would murder me because of my knowledge of their secrets.”

Whether true or false, Ike Clanton’s statement contained a number of discrepancies which, in the light of the evidence, were difficult to explain. Holliday’s alleged confession of how he killed Philpot was contrary to the facts indubitably established by Bob Paul and other eye witnesses among the stage passengers. Philpot did not have the shotgun and try to make a fight, as Holliday was alleged to have said. Paul had the shotgun, as well as the reins, and he discharged both barrels of the weapon. If Holliday had taken part in the attack on the stage, it seemed improbable that, in his account of the affair, he would have made any such mistake.

Whether the killing of Philpot was a blunder, drunken or otherwise, was a question. It will be recalled that the first shot was fired at Bob Paul by one of the robbers afterward believed to have been Leonard himself. At this highwayman Paul emptied his shotgun and, as proved at the time of Leonard’s death, struck Leonard in the groin. Paul was in the act of discharging his shotgun when Philpot was killed by a shot from a second robber at the opposite side of the road. This second robber, according to Ike Clanton, was Holliday. The first shot evidently was a more serious blunder in foiling the robbers’ plans than the second. In view of the desperate fight Bob Paul made, this second shot seemed less a blunder than a logical detail of a murderous battle the first shot had precipitated.

Virgil Earp’s alleged confession to Ike Clanton of having misled Sheriff Behan’s posse seemed manifestly absurd. Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp were not the only experienced trailers in the posse. Buckskin Frank Leslie was a veteran army scout who had trailed Indians in a number of campaigns; Sheriff Behan himself had had experience in Indian wars; and Bob Paul and Deputy Sheriff Breakenridge were no novices on a man hunt. All these men were equally convinced with the Earps that the trail of the three robbers led east over the mountains and not south toward Mexico. Moreover, Sheriff Behan was in command, and it was reasonable to assume that he would not have followed the trail into New Mexico unless he had believed it to be the right one.

It seemed unbelievable also, if Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp were accomplices in the stage holdup, that they would have taken part in the relentless pursuit of Leonard, Head, and Crane. There was no doubt whatever that, at least in the early days of the chase, when the trail led down the San Pedro River, west around the Santa Catalina Mountains and back again to the Dragoons, a distance of more than three hundred miles, the posse was close on the heels of the highwaymen, so close that, on one occasion, a camp fire of the robbers was found still smouldering. No one charged that, in this part of the pursuit, the Earps attempted to lead the posse off on any false scent. In these first days, capture of the robbers seemed imminent at any time, and if they had been captured, it is obvious that the Earps would have been doomed to exposure and ruin.

Why Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, and Morgan Earp should each one separately have confessed guilt to Ike Clanton seemed past understanding. Who was Ike Clanton that these four deeply sophisticated men should have made him their father confessor? If the Earps and Holliday were the criminals Ike Clanton declared they were, for what reason would they have imparted to a notorious outlaw secrets that might have sent them to prison or the gallows? There is no evidence that they ever were concerned with Ike Clanton in any criminal enterprise but every evidence, on the other hand, that they were his enemies almost from the time of their arrival in Tombstone. In consequence, there was no logical reason apparent why they should have taken him, of all men, into their confidence.

Ike Clanton’s story was utterly at variance with that of Wyatt Earp regarding Wyatt Earp’s proposition relating to Leonard, Head, and Crane. Ike Clanton said there was but one conference, and it was between Wyatt Earp and himself alone. His statement was a tacit denial that Frank McLowery and Joe Hill had anything to do with the proposition, that Joe Hill made a trip to New Mexico to interview the three outlaws, or that any telegram was sent to San Francisco concerning the reward. These details gave a colour of truth to Wyatt Earp’s statement and it was difficult to believe them the fanciful coinage of a liar.

From the day that Wyatt Earp and Ike Clanton told these two stories in court, the Southwest has argued as to which was true and which false. Whether true or false, Wyatt Earp’s story was plausible, coherent, and logical. Ike Clanton’s was filled with errors which it required no subtle lawyer’s probe to lay bare. It may be added that Judge Wells Spicer, who heard both stories, believed Wyatt Earp’s and based his decision on the assumption of its truthfulness. It may be added also that, at the time Ike Clanton told his story, he was in the shadow of a tragic defeat and tragic personal loss and was doing frankly everything in his power to discredit the Earps and Holliday and blacken their reputations.

As long as the Earps remained in Tombstone the statement by Ike Clanton was the only charge ever made openly that they at any time engaged in robbing stages. It was only after the Earps had shaken the dust of Tombstone from their feet that a thousand wild tales were set going about them. Then it was said they had had part in almost all the stage robberies in the Tombstone country, and it became a part of the absurd legend that they had joined frequently with great gusto and exuberance in chasing themselves hither and yon over the landscape. These scandalous old tales have come down to today and are still given wide credence. But careful research has failed to bring to light any evidence except Ike Clanton’s accusations that the Earps were ever involved directly or indirectly in any stage robberies. In the light of investigation, these old charges seem a farrago of suspicion and mendacities born of bitter personal and political hatreds.

The robbery of the Bisbee stage was one more milepost on the trail of hatred that led to tragedy. The stage pulled out of Tombstone at dusk on September 8, 1881. Levi McDaniels was driving, unaccompanied by a shotgun messenger and with four passengers aboard, three inside and one sitting on the box with the driver. The stage road between Tombstone and Bisbee in those days circled the Mule Mountains to the westward, kept to the level stretches of the San Pedro Valley through Charleston and Hereford, and came into Bisbee from the south. McDaniels’ four-horse team was climbing a grade three miles beyond Hereford at eleven o’clock at night. A red moon was sinking behind the Huachucas. The Mule summits towered darkly close by on the east. Old Mexico lay in a luminous haze across the line four miles to the south. The lead horses shied off the road as two highwaymen masked with handkerchiefs stepped out of the mesquite. One of the robbers had a shotgun; the other a six-shooter.

“Hold on!” commanded the bandit with the shotgun.

As McDaniels brought his team to a halt, the man with the six-shooter walked alongside the coach.

“Don’t get excited, boys,” he said. “Nobody’s going to get hurt. It’ll all be over in a minute.”

He spoke in the manner of a doctor about to administer a dose of disagreeable medicine and encouraging his patients to be brave and keep cool. If the Benson stage robbers had been amateurs, these had the air of veterans.

“Throw out the Wells-Fargo box and the mail sack, driver,” ordered the bandit with the six-shooter.

McDaniels obeyed.

“Now throw out everything in the boot.”

McDaniels threw out everything except a roll of blankets.

“Never mind the blankets,” said the robber. “We don’t need them.”

He peered in the window of the coach at the passengers.

“How are you all this evening, boys?” he said genially. “I’ll have to ask you to climb out. On the other side of the road, if you please. And line up with your hands in the air. My partner will keep you covered till I join you.”

S. W. Rae, Owen Gibney, and E. T. Hardy climbed out, and the robber walked around the coach and searched their pockets. He took $600 from Rae, a small sum of money and a gold watch from Hardy, and a diamond pin from Gibney.

“This stone,” he said as he slipped the pin out of Gibney’s necktie, “will look good on my gal in Tombstone. She likes diamonds.”

Then the bandit told the passengers to get back in their seats and ordered McDaniels to drive on.

“Hold on a minute,” called the robber with the shotgun as McDaniels started up the team. “You’ve overlooked that fellow sitting beside the driver.”

“Sure enough, I have,” said the polite robber with the six-shooter, and he climbed up on the front wheel.

“Excuse me, but I forgot you,” he said to Matt Delehan, the fourth passenger. “You may have a little sugar.”

Having extracted $50 from Delehan’s pockets, he climbed down.

“I guess that’s all,” he said. “Now you can go ahead, driver. Good night, boys.”

The robbers obtained $2,500 from the Wells-Fargo box, according to express company officials. The mail sack, slashed open, was found at the scene. A Tombstone posse that took the trail next morning comprised Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Deputy Sheriffs Breakenridge and Nagle, Marshall Williams, Wells-Fargo agent, and Fred Dodge, Wells-Fargo detective. The tracks of the robbers led across the Mule Mountains into Bisbee.

Within a week, Frank Stilwell and Pete Spence were captured. Stilwell had been indiscreet enough after the robbery to take a pair of boots, almost new, to Shoemaker Dever of Bisbee with orders to take off a narrow pair of heels and put on a broad pair. The suspicious cobbler reported this to the authorities. The narrow heels removed from Stilwell’s boots fitted the tracks left at the scene of the robbery by the polite bandit who had ransacked the pockets of the stage passengers. Stilwell was arrested by the posse in Bisbee. Wyatt and Morgan Earp caught Spence in Charleston. Both prisoners were taken to Tombstone, where they were released on bond.

Stilwell and Spence, intimate friends of the Clantons and McLowerys, had been suspected of many stage robberies, though until now they had escaped arrest. Spence was ostensibly a gambler; Stilwell owned a livery business in Charleston. Stilwell was a handsome fellow, twenty-seven years old, of engaging politeness and with many friends. Though apparently retiring and rather silent, he was given to gay amusements. He drank moderately, played a dashing game of faro, and cut a swath in Tombstone dance halls, where he achieved distinction as a squire of dames, spending his money recklessly, keeping champagne corks popping, and bestowing upon his favourites among red-light beauties the diamonds, rings, necklaces, and watches he obtained in his secret adventures on the highways. He was an expert with a six-shooter and was regarded as a killer among the desperadoes and outlaws who preferred his friendship to his enmity. It was not definitely known, however, that he had killed anyone, though he was suspected on logical grounds of having murdered one of the many successive owners of the Brunckow mine, he himself having been one of the numerous men who had jumped that worthless old hole in the ground. He was a native of Texas and had been in Arizona four years. After working in the mines at Signal, he had lived for a time in Tombstone and then moved to Charleston to become a liveryman. He had been appointed a deputy sheriff, and recently had been stationed in this official capacity in Bisbee. His brother, Jack Stilwell, was a famous army scout.

Pete Spence was a different type. He was about forty years old, tall, gaunt, and taciturn. His real name was said to be Lark Ferguson and he was a native of the Big Bend country of Texas, on the Rio Grande, where he was reputed to have killed in many robber adventures fifteen or twenty Mexicans. He was, it was said, a peripatetic lead mine, carrying in his body many bullets which he had acquired during his outlaw career. Spence was nearly killed with a load of buckshot while robbing a store in Corpus Christi, and was shot in the head in another bandit exploit in New Mexico. After robbing a bank at Goliad, he joined the Sixth Cavalry under the name of Spence and took part in several Apache campaigns in Arizona, being finally discharged at Fort Grant. He had dealt monte and faro in many tough towns in Arizona and New Mexico, including Lordsburg, Silver City, Shakespeare, Galeyville, and Charleston, and at the time of the Bisbee stage robbery was married to a Mexican woman and living in Tombstone.

The arrest of Spence and Stilwell arrayed them with the Clantons and McLowerys against the Earps, and the vengeance of these two outlaws became a part of the romance of feud that stained Tombstone with blood.

“After we had arrested Stilwell and Spence,” said Wyatt Earp, “Ike Clanton and Frank McLowery came to Tombstone evidently looking for trouble. With John Ringo, Joe Hill, and Milt Hicks, they met Morgan Earp on Allen Street in front of the Alhambra.

“ ‘I’ll never speak to Pete Spence or Frank Stilwell again,’ Frank McLowery said, ‘for allowing themselves to be arrested by the Earps. If ever you come after me, I’ll promise you’ll never take me.’

“Ike Clanton, Ringo, Hill, and Hicks stood by threateningly with their hands on their six-shooters. Morgan was alone.

“ ‘If I ever have any occasion to come after you,’ Morgan replied, ‘I’ll arrest you.’

“ ‘I once threatened to kill you and your brothers,’ said McLowery. ‘Then, when I saw you were letting us boys alone, I decided not to do it and took back my threat. But now, since you are getting so busy in this part of the country, my threat still goes. You Earps and Doc Holliday are not as big as you think you are. You’d better look out, or we’ll get you yet.’

“Morgan made no reply but walked away. During the next few days, Marshall Williams, Farmer Daly, Big Ed Byrnes, Old Man Winter, Charlie Smith, and three or four others came to me and told me to be on guard, as they had heard Ike Clanton, Frank and Tom McLowery, John Ringo, and Joe Hill all threaten to kill my brothers, myself, and Doc Holliday. I took their advice and kept my eyes open. I did not intend that any of these outlaws should get the drop on me if I could help it.”

The situation as far as the Earps and Doc Holliday were concerned had grown suddenly desperate. War to the death had been declared against them. They were four men standing alone, hemmed in by deadly foes. Weaker men would have fled from Tombstone and sought safety over the horizon. Only men of iron courage would have stayed to take a chance and fight it out. Ike Clanton and Frank McLowery were only mouthpieces of outlaw hatred. Back of them was a murderous criminal organization, the boldest and most powerful in the history of the Southwest.