Revenge on the Frontier

The legal ruling settled nothing. The cowboys wanted blood, and they got it.

In December 1881, Virgil Earp was ambushed in the dark and left with a crippled arm for life. Three months later, Morgan Earp was shot dead through a window while playing billiards.

Wyatt answered with a notorious vendetta ride, hunting down and killing the men he blamed, all while wearing a badge but operating well outside the law.

With Morgan dead and warrants out for his own arrest, Wyatt Earp left Arizona for good.

He drifted west and eventually landed in Los Angeles, where he lived out a long, quiet life far from the desert that made his name. He died there in 1929, an old man in a city that was about to turn his worst thirty seconds into entertainment.