Slow Justice

Pope Paul VI once said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” I want peace and I’ve been working for more than six years for justice. It inches closer everyday…and just like the murderers Earp went after, the outlaws don’t have any idea it’s coming. Some rides to justice are longer than others, but it does come around. The Earp Vendetta Ride, or simply the Earp Vendetta, was a three-week clash from March 20 to April 15, 1882 between personal enemies and federal and local law enforcement agencies in the Arizona Territory. It became romanticized in history as “The Last Charge of Wyatt Earp and His Immortals,” as the men involved earned a reputation that they could not be killed. The vendetta ride was variously known in newspapers of that time as the Earp Vendetta or Arizona War. The vendetta was a result of the tensions leading up to the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, the attempted murder of Tombstone Marshal Virgil Earp on December 28, and the assassination of United States Deputy Marshal Morgan Earp on March 18, 1882. U.S. Deputy Marshal Wyatt Earp led a federal posse with a warrant for the arrest of “Curly Bill” Brocius. In October 1880, Wyatt had saved Curly Bill from a probable lynching and then testified that his shooting of Marshall Fred White was accidental, saving him from a murder indictment. Now, in March 1881, he was pursuing Curly Bill with the intention to kill him. The Earp posse took no prisoners but killed at least four men between March 20–24, beginning with the shooting of Frank Stilwell and ending with the killing of Curly Bill. During their ride, the Earp federal posse was pursued by a local County Sheriff’s posse consisting of Sheriff Johnny Behan and deputies Phineas Cochise Clanton, Johnny Ringo, and about twenty other Arizona ranchers and outlaws. Johnny Behan deliberately failed to include Pima County Sheriff Bob Paul who had jurisdiction over the Tucson killing of Frank Stillwell for which the sheriff’s posse sought Wyatt Earp and his fellow riders. The Behan posse never engaged the much smaller Earp posse, although it charged Cochise County USD$2593.65 for its expenses (about $58,831 in today’s dollars. The vendetta ride is an example of a jurisdictional dispute and failure of the law enforcement system in the Old West on the frontier. The ride ended April 15 when the Earps and their associates rode out of the Arizona Territory and headed for Colorado. That failure of the law enforcement system didn’t end on the Old West’s frontier. The fight for truth and justice didn’t end there either.