There Should be Blood

All the Tombstone luminaries were dwarfed by the presence of the Earp family. Less than two years after their arrival to the town referred to as “too tough to die,” Virgil Earp was ambushed by the cowboys and was left crippled for life. The same cowardly group that shot Virgil then shot Morgan. At 10:50 p.m. on March 18, 1882, Morgan was playing pool at Bob Hatch’s Billiard Parlor. Wyatt watched as his bother chalked his cue. Suddenly, from a crowd of men standing behind a back door, two rifle shots blasted into the room. The first barely missed Wyatt, but it crushed Morgan’s spine. He died before midnight. Three men were seen running from the pool hall – an unidentified Indian, a lawman named Frank Stillwell, and Pete Spence. Wyatt wanted blood. If they were my brother’s I would have wanted the same. On the morning of March 22, a portion of the Earp posse including Wyatt, his brother Warren, Doc Holliday, Sherman McMaster and Turkey Creek Johnson rode into Spence’s woodcutting camp in the South Pass in the Dragoon Mountains, looking for Spence. Unknown to the Earp posse, Pete Spence was in jail, but at the wood camp, the Earp posse found Florentino “Indian Charlie” Cruz. The Arizona Weekly Star had previously identified “Florentino Saiz as “the 1878 murderer of two U.S. Marshals”, and Earp strongly suspected he was one of those involved in the shooting death of his brother Morgan. According to witnesses in the wood camp, as the Earp posse arrived, Cruz ran and the Earp posse chased him, firing several shots, then a final shot. Earp told his biographer Stuart Lake that he got Cruz to confess to being the lookout, and that he identified Stilwell, Hank Swilling, Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo as Morgan’s killers. After the confession, Wyatt Earp shot Cruz, telling Lake that he had given Cruz a pistol, and told him to draw. The coroner’s inquest identified him as Florentino Cruz. Dr. George Goodfellow testified that he found that Cruz had a minor wound to his arm, a wound in his thigh, a serious wound in his groin and pelvis, and a shot in the side of his head. The coroner thought either of the last two shots would have been fatal. Rumor has it that before Cruz got what was coming to him he insisted that he had done what he had to do and should be allowed to have some peace now. I was recently informed that the cowards who took my brother’s life were asking for the same thing. If Cruz wanted peace he shouldn’t have been involved in a murder. If the cowards who took my brother wanted peace they shouldn’t have falsely accused him of a crime and they shouldn’t post obscene things about a dead man on their blog. They should prepare themselves for the fate that awaits all cowards – unrest, to be haunted. A coward will die many times before their actual demise. No one knew that better than the cowboys Earp tracked to their death.