Lady at the O.K. Corral by Ann Kirschner Read Free Book Online

light-haired, wore bushy mustaches, and topped six feet. When they walked down the street together, they were an imposing group, with lean, rugged physiques and a certain athletic grace.
    Among the Earp brothers, Virgil was the most responsible and Wyatt the most handsome. One of the earliest Tombstone chroniclers, Walter Noble Burns, captured Wyatt as “the lion of Tombstone”:
    His face was long and pale, his deep set eyes were blue gray, chin was massive, heavy tawny moustache, hair as yellow as a lion’s mane, deep voice was a booming lion-like growl, and he suggested a lion in the slow, slithery ease of his movements and in his gaunt, heavy-boned, loose-limbed, powerful frame.
    Burns had never seen young Earp, but Burns’s flowery prose was matched by contemporaries who knew Wyatt in his prime. When Kansas judge Charles Hatton was interviewed about Wyatt, his wife interrupted to add her two cents that he was “the handsomest, best-mannered young man in Wichita.” Men were no less effusive and lingering in their description of Earp’s hunky good looks. Wyatt’s close friend Bat Masterson described Earp as “weighing in the neighborhood of one hundred and sixty pounds, all of it muscle. He stood six feet in height, with light blue eyes, and a complexion bordering on the blond.” John Clum, the mayor of Tombstone, recalled Earp as “tall, erect, manly, serene, and in neat attire . . . I still have a clear vision of that dignified figure walking calmly along Allen Street.” Clum went on to praise Wyatt’s manner as friendly but reserved, “equally unperturbed whether he was anticipating a meeting with a friend or a foe.”
    The Earp brothers preferred each other’s company to that of any outsider. All veterans of an outdoor life and a frontier philosophy that had toughened them, they relied on each other. Their wives were equally clannish and mutually supportive. But Tombstone would be the first time—and the last—that all of them lived and worked together.
    THE EARPS BELONGED to an old Scotch-Irish family who immigrated to Maryland around 1680. Ever a roving clan, generations of Earps changed their residences as the borders of the young country expanded, crisscrossing the thirteen original colonies and eventually wandering westward to the frontier.
    Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was born on March 19, 1848, in Illinois, the fifth of the eight children of Nicholas and Virginia Cooksey Earp. Named for his father’s commanding officer in the Mexican War, Wyatt was too young to serve in the Civil War, but three brothers fought on the Union side. Oldest brother Newton was unharmed, but James Earp was injured enough to qualify for a lifetime pension. Virgil suffered a less visible wound: before going off to war, he had married without the consent of his bride’s parents, who took advantage of his absence to spirit the young woman away. They told Virgil that she was dead. It would be nearly thirty years before Virgil would discover what had become of his young wife.
    As the Civil War drew to a close, the Earp family uprooted themselves once again to join one of the great migrations of American history, the fulfillment of the “manifest destiny” that had driven American policies and demography since the founding of the country. Nicholas Earp was asked to lead a wagon train headed to California. A strict disciplinarian with a salty tongue, Nicholas soon alienated some of his constituency with his profane language and his intolerance of noisy and active children, whom he threatened to whip if their parents did not. Tensions were high during this long and dangerous journey. As attacks by Indians were relatively rare, deprivation and disease caused the most fatalities during the seven-month journey, especially for children and the many babies who were born along the way. While men emphasized the adventure and the economic objectives of the trip,