…..Called ‘Quick Vengeance' and ‘Murder'.
"The evening of March 20, 1882, a Monday, was destined to be a momentous one for small but rapidly growing Tucson, Arizona Territory. The dusty village was buzzing with excitement over the first gaslights to illuminate its streets. Even though the lights had to be individually hand lit, they would symbolically usher in a new era for a town eager to shed its wild and woolly image. Little did citizens know that the old pueblo, den of outlaws and gunmen, would not go so easily into the night.
Two nights earlier down in Tombstone someone had murdered Morgan Earp, shot him from ambush as he played pool at Campbell and Hatch's billiard parlor. Morgan, who the previous October had fought alongside brothers Virgil and Wyatt and friend Doc Holliday in the West's most famous gunfight, lived less than an hour after being shot (see "The Mysterious Morgan Earp," by Lee A. Silva, in the October 2010 Wild West). The March 20 Tombstone Epitaph reported, "The funeral cortege started away from the Cosmopolitan Hotel about 12:30 yesterday with the fire bell tolling out its solemn peals of ‘Earth to earth, dust to dust.'" The paper noted that Morgan's "body was placed in a casket and sent to his parents at Colton, Calif., for burial, being guarded to Contention by his brothers and two or three of his most intimate friends." James Earp, a saloonkeeper and older brother of the "fighting Earps," accompanied the body to Colton, where Morgan's widow, Lou, also waited…."
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