Gunslingers at the Tucson Amtrak Station

In 2005 a group of Tucson citizens paid sculptor Dan Bates to create bronze statues of Wyatt Earp and John “Doc” Holliday holding long guns. The statues were placed behind the Amtrak station next to the Tucson Train Depot Museum downtown.

It’s a good thing that Earp and Holliday had become incredibly famous during the last century because what happened at the train station in Tucson on March 20, 1882 was obviously an assassination. Pima County law officers at that time even called it Murder. Earp and Holliday were hauled into court and, then, acquitted on grounds of self defense.

Self-defense?!?

The victim was Frank Stillwell, sometime rancher, sometime stage coach owner, sometime Deputy Sheriff of Cochise County whose loyalties lay with (former) Cochise County sheriff John Behan. Wyatt Earp’s brother, Virgil, had defeated Behan in an election for the sheriff’s office. There was also a young woman, Josephine Sadie Marcus, involved.

Behan’s election defeat and Josephine’s preference for Wyatt seem to have triggered a series of events that included the shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone.

Stillwell was not at the shootout, but he ended up on Wyatt Earp’s revenge list because of his affiliation with Behan and a gang of sometime lawbreakers who called themselves the “Cow-Boys”. The word “cowboy” meant rustler in those days. (And–Yes–Stillwell was a Deputy Sheriff at one point and also a “cowboy”.)

Who are the good guys, anyway?

And let me tell you this whole thing gets really complicated.

Actually, going back to 1880 in Tombstone it’s very difficult to tell who are good guys and who are bad guys, who wore Black Hats, who wore White ones.

It may have been that Earp and Holliday were acquitted because they were part of a federal posse authorized after the O.K. Corral shootout and other related ambushes and murders. Or it may have been that Stillwell, who wore a Black Hat some of the time, was not liked and his death was regarded as “good riddance”.

Wyatt Earp switched from wearing a White Hat to a Black Hat several times during his life. However, since his death in Los Angeles in 1929 he has consistently been identified as a good guy, an image reinforced by Hollywood film makers. And now there is a statue honoring him in downtown Tucson so his reputation lives on.

In the lead up to the shootout in Tombstone there were elections that sound a lot like Arizona today: accusations of voter fraud, dubious election “officials”, dogs and cats voting, and truth/lies hurling across Republican and Democrat party lines. To quote Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.“