Wyatt's experiences with Arizona's legal system over the previous half year had soured him on courtroom justice. marshal, made no attempt to arrest the accused murderer and bring him before a judge. Witnesses had identified Stilwell as one of Morgan's killers, and a coroner's jury in Tombstone had indicted him for the crime.Īs Stilwell's wounds suggested, Wyatt, despite his commission as a deputy U.S. Two nights earlier, in Tombstone, gunmen had murdered Wyatt's younger brother Morgan. Wyatt had long known Stilwell was a blackguard, but he had another, more important reason to confront him at the train station in Tucson. He was at the train station awaiting the arrival of a cowboy who would provide him with an alibi in court-the cowboy was likely prepared to commit perjury. He was in Tucson, seventy-five miles northwest of Tombstone, to face prosecution for having participated in a stage robbery himself. As a deputy sheriff in Cochise County, Arizona, which included the silver boomtown of Tombstone, he was one of several corrupt lawmen who shielded cattle rustlers and stage-robbers from justice. The gunfight was one-sided: Stilwell's pistol had not been fired.1īy most accounts, Stilwell was a villain.
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Members of Earp's posse, which included his youngest brother, Warren, and his closest friend, the professional gambler John Henry "Doc" Holliday, had opened fire with their own weapons to make sure of Stilwell's death. The shotgun blast alone was a mortal wound, but when a railroad worker discovered Stilwell's body the next morning, he found that Stillwell had been shot multiple times.
Wyatt aimed to kill, firing his shotgun into Stilwell's chest at such close range that powder burns encircled the gaping wound. On the night of March 20, 1882, at a train station in Tucson, Arizona Territory, Wyatt Earp, a deputy United States marshal, shot Frank Stilwell, an accused stage-robber and murderer.
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