00:26In 1861,
00:28the Civil War broke out, ripping America apart.
00:55White Earp had just turned 13.
00:59But with his father absent most of the time,
01:02and Virgil off fighting,
01:04it was left to Wyatt to protect his family,
01:07including his younger brother, Morgan.
01:14During the Civil War,
01:15Virgil enlisted in the Union Army.
01:18Wyatt, of course, was too young at the time, as was Morgan.
01:22But the brothers were very, very close,
01:24and that bond is critical in understanding
01:27Wyatt Earp's character.
01:32Wyatt was scared of Confederate attacks.
01:37And he practiced endlessly with a gun.
01:44It was an enormous responsibility for someone so young.
01:47It was a bad thing.
01:50It was a bad thing.
01:53It was a bad thing.
01:57It was a bad thing.
02:00Don't worry, Morgan.
02:01I'll protect you.
02:13I'll protect you.
02:18We'll protect you.
02:38Don't worry, Morgan. I'll protect you.
03:03Morgan Earp was only 30 when he died, gunned down in cold blood.
03:21I know who killed Morgan.
03:29The night before, two assassins came for the Earps.
03:50That guy there with Ike, that's Frank Stilwell, a gunslinger with a reputation as a sharpshooter.
04:00There you go.
04:02Once, he was a lawman. Then he crossed the line and joined Ike's gang.
04:08That was the thing about the Wild West. It was easy to go from lawman to outlaw.
04:19When the assassins came for Morgan Earp, they could look through the windows and they aimed at two targets.
04:26One was Morgan Earp leaning over the table to play pool.
04:30The other was Wyatt Earp watching the pool game.
04:39Now.
04:43Let's go.
04:45The two rifle shots went off.
04:48One hit Morgan Earp in the back.
04:50One barely went over Wyatt Earp's head and missed hitting him.
05:02And how do you know it was Frank?
05:05Someone heard the son of a bitch bragging about it.
05:23Frank Stilwell was full of himself.
05:26And it wasn't long before he was telling his friends about the killing.
05:36One person even wrote about it.
05:40One of our important sources for events in Tombstone is a diarist named George Parsons.
05:47And he has an entry about this incident and the killing of Morgan Earp.
05:51And he tells us it was quite evident Frank Stilwell was the guilty party.
05:56One, two, three.
06:16Wyatt Earp was profoundly affected by the murder of Morgan.
06:21He felt he should have been protecting his younger brother.
06:27And at that point Wyatt Earp was seeking revenge in any way he could get it.
06:34Don't hit me up.
06:38Since then, thank you.
06:38You sound ×—van
06:38It's been The punishment for II Ham accident.
06:53That reason why don't you think the damage should do.
06:54Wyatt says to Virgil Earp.
06:55I'm gonna get the guys that have done this to us, but I can't protect you at the same
06:59time.
07:00So I'm gonna have to get you to safety.
07:03Take it.
07:06Wyatt arranged for Virgil, his family, and Josephine to go to California, where he knew they'd be safe.
07:25Let's go.
07:26Yeah!
07:30Wyatt's plan was to escort them to Tucson, where they'd catch the train to San Francisco.
07:53Keep an eye out.
08:22Come with us.
08:25As soon as this is over.
08:33It'll be okay.
08:40You ready?
08:40Wait.
08:42This woman's in the way.
08:54Get down!
08:56Shit, they've seen us.
09:03They're here!
09:04On the tracks!
09:07They're here!
09:08On the tracks!
09:09Oh no!
09:11Oh no!
09:15Oh no!
09:17Oh no!
09:25Oh no!
09:41Hey!
09:58Whoa.
09:59Who got me?
10:06Why?
10:10Why?
10:12Please.
10:23With a blast of his shotgun,
10:26Wyatt Earp had taken out Frank Stilwell,
10:29one of his brother's killers.
10:32The incident at the Tucson train station
10:35is the real point of change in Wyatt Earp.
10:39It's the moment where the lawman
10:42becomes the killer.
10:44Wyatt gave him both barrels.
10:47Cold-blooded murder.
10:48No question about it.
10:52But Wyatt wasn't done.
10:57He went looking for Ike Clanton.
11:02But he wouldn't find him.
11:07Crazy Ike apparently runs faster than Frank Stilwell.
11:10I don't know how he avoided Wyatt Earp,
11:12but he was able to escape.
11:14Frank Stilwell didn't.
11:39That telegram was an arrest warrant for Wyatt Earp.
11:44That telegram was an arrest warrant for Wyatt Earp.
11:49That telegram was an arrest warrant for him.
11:49Get down!
11:52You see, no one actually witnessed
11:54Ike and Frank trying to kill Wyatt.
11:57But there were plenty of witnesses
11:58who'd seen Wyatt and Doc guns drawn
12:01hunting someone down at Tucson Station.
12:05And people heard the gunshots.
12:12And then they found the bullet-riddled body of Frank Stilwell.
12:21With a warrant now out for Wyatt's arrest,
12:25Ike decided to give local reporters even more ammunition.
12:29I bumped into Frank in the morning.
12:32Ike gives an interview and she claims
12:34he just happened to be in Tucson.
12:36He told me he was terrified.
12:37And they bumped into Frank Stilwell,
12:39and Stilwell was scared because Wyatt was after him.
12:42Later, I was returned from an evening stroll
12:46and I heard shots, and Frank was dead.
12:50Once again, Ike Clanton is changing the story,
12:54presenting himself as this innocent victim
12:56who just happened to be in the wrong place
12:58at the wrong time,
12:59and the Earps are out to get him.
13:03As far as I'm concerned, nobody's safe.
13:08For the second time in less than five months,
13:12Wyatt Earp was being accused of murder.
13:17But this time,
13:18Wyatt wasn't going to let himself be arrested.
13:29He was going on the run
13:32so he could get his revenge on Ike Clanton.
13:42Wyatt Earp desperately wanted revenge
13:44for the murder of Morgan Earp
13:48and the attempted murder of Virgil.
13:50He recognized that it was going to be very difficult
13:54to obtain justice in the Arizona courts,
13:57and he decided that he was going to take law
13:59into his own hands.
14:05Wyatt had a tip-off of where Ike was hiding out.
14:11But when he got there,
14:13the only thing he found was this guy,
14:16Florentino Cruz.
14:19Florentino Cruz is a Texas cattle wrestler
14:21who is said to be a member of Ike's gang
14:23and who was rumored to be the lookout
14:25on the evening of Morgan's assassination.
14:38Ike's not here.
14:52I only held the horses.
14:54I only held the horses.
14:55I only held the horses.
14:56I swear.
14:56Okay.
15:21How much?
15:27How much did they pay you?
15:32$25.
15:45$25.
15:46$25.
16:16$26!
16:27$29.
16:30$28.
16:31What would they pay for not their horses?
16:32$inc.
16:32$32.
16:32$42.
16:32$6.
16:32$50, $3!
16:33$50.
16:33$$%$.
16:33$75.
16:40$X! $1!
16:57By the time Wyatt Earp killed Florentino Cruz, he had decided, just as the Cowboys had,
17:04that the law could no longer provide justice.
17:07He appointed himself as justice, and he killed a man when he did not have to do it.
17:23The word of Cruz's murder made headlines the next day.
17:28A witness was able to place Wyatt at the scene of the crime.
17:32With two murders in two days, local papers started to refer to Wyatt's actions as the Earp Vendetta.
17:40In the San Francisco papers, it became the Arizona Vendetta.
17:45Then the story went nationwide and eventually became known as the Vendetta Ride.
17:53When Wyatt Earp and his posse head out on his so-called Vendetta Ride, it receives enormous media coverage.
17:59He is now going rogue. He is becoming a vigilante.
18:03He's not going to wait for justice to be served. He's going to serve it himself.
18:07Well, it's at this point that the newspapers turn on Wyatt.
18:11No longer is he seen as a frontier force of justice.
18:15Now they actually refer to him as a highwayman, as if he is now contributing to the chaos in the
18:21West.
18:26But amongst this onslaught, there was one newspaper article that painted a very different picture.
18:35On the same day that Wyatt killed Cruz, executives at Wells Fargo gave an interview to a San Francisco newspaper.
18:45Saying that the press had gotten it all wrong.
18:49That the Earps were the heroes and the Cowboys were the villains.
18:55Now, why would they do that?
18:58Well, it had to do with money.
19:04Don't forget that the Cowboys had been robbing their stagecoaches.
19:10Wells Fargo has a seriously vested interest in the safe transit of silver out of that area to the East.
19:18And the Cowboys, that represent this kind of violent gangland threat,
19:22Wells Fargo sees this as a big threat to their whole business model.
19:26So the representatives of the Wells Fargo company have a tremendous self-interest
19:30in seeing people like Wyatt Earp take on the Cowboys and defeat them.
19:35So when they saw all the negative news about Wyatt,
19:39Wells Fargo decided to set the record straight.
19:42One of the leaders of Wells Fargo stated to a reporter
19:47that the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday were not stage robbers and cattle thieves
19:52as their enemies had declared.
19:55It was just an outrageous false news.
19:59So Wells Fargo countered that by stating that the Earps were the good guys
20:03and the Cowboys were the bad guys.
20:05Not only did the Wells Fargo bosses call out Ike Clanton as a leader of an outlaw gang,
20:11the Cowboys,
20:12but they also accused Sheriff Behan of being one of them.
20:18But that article caused even more problems.
20:24So when Wells Fargo issues this statement to a San Francisco newspaper,
20:29you can imagine how this confirmed all the suspicions of the Democrats in Arizona,
20:37the Cowboys,
20:38of those who believed still in the Southern cause,
20:41that it's these banking interests and these corporate interests
20:45that are coming and destroying our way of life, our freedom.
20:48And now they're doing it so blatantly that they're backing this cold-blooded killer.
20:54Not only that,
20:56but they were actually sending out messengers to deliver cash to him.
21:00$1,000 here,
21:02$1,000 there
21:03to keep up his vendetta.
21:11Meanwhile,
21:13Ike was done with running.
21:16He'd come up with a plan to turn the tables on Wyatt.
21:20The hunter would become the hunted.
21:28You see,
21:30Ike had a big competitive advantage on Wyatt.
21:33He had the law on his side.
21:36We're ready.
21:40Send me word when you get him.
21:45Hello.
21:47A gang of Cowboys went to kill Wyatt.
21:50But to make it seem legit,
21:53B-Han led them.
21:55So they became known as Sheriff B-Han's Posse.
21:59B-Han even deputized Curly Bill,
22:02one of Ike's top lieutenants.
22:09Part of what makes this story so odd is that during the vendetta,
22:15Wyatt Earp's Posse is out chasing the murders of Morgan,
22:19but at the same time,
22:20B-Han has put together a posse to chase the Earps
22:24made up of a number of members of the Cowboy Gang.
22:27So you've got this outlaw posse chasing the Earps
22:31who are chasing the outlaws.
22:34It's crazy as you can imagine.
22:45There's a stabbing.
22:48Yeah.
22:51Yeah!
22:59Damn!
23:01There he is.
23:02I don't know.
23:52The next 10 seconds will seal Wyatt's fate and become a turning point in the history
23:58of the West.
24:19Come on!
24:26Run!
24:27You damn coward!
24:41The death of Curly Bill was the stuff of legend.
24:46Wyatt had ridden into a trap and was vastly outnumbered.
24:50And not only did he survive without a scratch, he managed to kill one of the cowboys responsible
24:56for the shooting of his brother Virgil.
25:03When the story came out of how Wyatt Earp single handedly took on a gang of cowboys, the American
25:09public couldn't get enough.
25:14It's got all the elements of a great story, right?
25:17It's got violence.
25:17It's got family.
25:19It's got the romance of the Wild West.
25:21And every day there's a new incident in this almost like episodic television where there's
25:28a new episode of violence and everybody on the edge of their seats wondering what's going
25:32to happen.
25:34But two versions of the story got reported.
25:39Northern newspapers celebrated Wyatt's victory in the death of Curly Bill.
25:45Some even gloated, saying the cowboys had scored only one while the Earps had scored six.
25:54But Southern newspapers condemned Wyatt's killing of Curly Bill as another ruthless murder.
26:01This time against a sheriff's deputy.
26:06The whole country was riveted.
26:08And then you layer on top of that the political divide between the North supporting the Earps
26:15versus the South supporting the cowboys.
26:19And you have this kind of clash of two Americas.
26:26But all this was the worst possible news for J.P. Morgan.
26:37Morgan saw how the vendetta was dividing America.
26:41And he'd heard the same sort of rhetoric before the Civil War.
26:46Battle lines were again being drawn between North and South.
26:50And it wasn't hard to see how this was going to end.
26:55You see, it wasn't just his railroad investment at stake.
26:59The future of America was at stake.
27:03Morgan's only hope was that the president would finally act.
27:15But all these events had happened so fast.
27:18Just six days.
27:21President Arthur was still trying to figure out how to respond.
27:26President Arthur already asked Congress to send in the army against the cowboys.
27:31And they said, no way.
27:32And now things are getting worse.
27:34He really doesn't know which way to turn.
27:37It could not rule all right.
27:46Meanwhile, back in Tombstone, the Cowboy War was about to escalate.
28:07and nobody knew how it was going to end
28:12but one thing was clear
28:16neither Wyatt
28:18nor Ike
28:19was going to stop
28:24until the other one
28:28was dead
28:56was going to stop
29:02was going to stop
29:58was going to stop
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