Wyatt Earp :: essays research papers

Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp Wyatt Earp was born on March 19, 1848. He is the son of Nicholas Earp, a lawyer/farmer and Virginia Earp and was born at 406 South Third Street, Monmouth, Illinois. Wyatt was given the name of his father's Army captain. When Wyatt was quiet young, his two older brother, James and Virgil, went off to fight in the Civil War for the Union. A story is told in which Wyatt tried to run away and join the Army, but his father caught him in a corn field and took him back to the house. As a young man Earp was a stagecoach driver, railroad construction worker, surveyor, buffalo hunter, and lawman. In his early adulthood, Wyatt married and his wife died shortly after of Typhoid fever. Wyatt was devastated and went off and got into some trouble for horse stealing. Later, he became a stagecoach driver and traveled to Los Angeles, Ca and Prescott, Arizona. Wyatt also hunted buffalo for so me time. There are rumors that it was during this tiem that Wyatt met Bat Masterson. In 1876 he became chief deputy marshal of Dodge City, Kansas, a lawless frontier town. Within a year, having brought relative peace to Dodge City, he moved on to Deadwood in the Dakota Territoy. In the fall of 1879, Wyatt and his brothers Morgan and Virgil journeyed by horseback down to Tombstone, Arizona. There he furthered his reputation as a gunfighter, first as deputy sheriff of Pima Co. and later as deputy U.S. marshal for the entire Arizona Territory. Earp and three of his brothers, together with the American frontiersman Doc Holliday, participated in the famous O.K. Corral gunfighter in 1881, during which they killed several suspected cattle rustlers. The following year, Ike Clanton attempted to kill Wyatt and Morgan while they were playing pool; Morgan was killed.