Welcome to the "Tucson Arizona 1882" movie website. Please watch our theme music video.
The movie is about the famous famous Tucson Train Shootout in 1882. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday were there.
And we are also producing a weekly TV talk show on Facebook.
Below is the history of the events leading up to the Tucson Train Shootout on March 20, 1882.
Al Young
Producer
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Email: al@alyoung.net
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson Arizona 1882 History
Wyatt Earp sought revenge for the shooting of his brother Morgan Earp in Tombstone, Arizona on March 18,1882.
Two nights later, Monday night March 20, 1882, was destined to be a momentous night for the small but rapidly growing Tucson, Arizona. 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 in Tombstone, Arizona someone had shot Wyatt Earp's brother Morgan Earp. They shot him from an ambush as he played pool at Campbell and Hatch’s billiard parlor. The previous October, Morgan had fought alongside brothers Wyatt and Virgil, and friend Doc Holliday, in the West’s most famous gunfight "The Shootout at OK Corral".
On March 20th, Morgan’s brother Virgil Earp, a onetime deputy U.S. marshal and city marshal, also left Tombstone, bound for Colton, California. Four months earlier Virgil, too, had been shot from ambush. His well-armed escort party this day included brothers Wyatt and Warren, Doc Holliday, Sherman McMaster and “Turkey Creek” Jack Johnson. They traveled by horse and buggy to Contention, Arizona and from there by train to Benson, Arizona and then on another train to Tucson.
The party had intended to escort Virgil only as far as Benson, but at some point along the route, Wyatt received word that the man who shot Morgan Earp was in Tucson. “We were notified by persons in Tucson that Ike Clanton, Frank Stilwell, Billy Miller and another cowboy were watching every train coming through to get me,” Virgil recalled in a San Francisco Examiner newspaper interview two months later.
Twenty-seven-year-old Frank Stilwell was no stranger to the Earps or their associates. In 1877 he shot a man near Prescott, and in November 1878 he was accused of the shooting of J. Van Houten at the Brunckow Mine. In 1881 he caught the full attention of the Earps, and vice versa, after Virgil brought up Stilwell and partner Pete Spence on federal charges in connection with robbery of the Bisbee stage. Wyatt now considered Stilwell the prime suspect in Morgan’s shooting.
Wyatt and party were carrying shotguns, Winchester rifles, sidearms and multiple cartridge belts when they stepped from the train in Tucson. Clearly, they expected a fight. Nothing happened immediately, but the heavily armed escort caused quite a stir. Eyewitness accounts mentioned “four men dressed in dark clothes and carrying guns” and “all heavily armed.” The train newsboy told Tucson baggage clerk David Gibson, “I guess there will be hell here tonight.”
The Earp party dined at the trackside Porter’s Hotel as they awaited the 7:15 p.m. departure of the westbound Southern Pacific. The train engineer noticed a man armed with a Winchester pacing back and forth alongside the train and was told it was “one of the Earps guarding a party going through to California.” He later noted that as Virgil emerged from the hotel, two men with Winchesters walked behind them. “They got on the cars, the one outside still looking everywhere,” the engineer said.
Stilwell was indeed in town, facing charges stemming from the Bisbee stage robbery. And Ike Clanton was a scheduled witness in the next day’s hearing for strong-fisted Charleston saloonkeeper Jerry Barton, accused of shooting a man two weeks earlier. Witnesses later placed Stilwell and Clanton together at Porter’s Hotal. Indications were the pair, and possibly other Cowboys, intended to strike again at the Earps.
In his May 28, 1882 interview in the San Francisco Examiner, Virgil Earp stated: “Almost the first men we met on the platform there were Stilwell and his friends, armed to the teeth. They fell back into the crowd as soon as they saw I had an escort, and the boys took me to the hotel to dinner. While waiting for the train to move out, a passenger notified me that some men were lying on a flatcar near the engine. Just then the train moved out, and immediately the firing started.”
If Stilwell and Clanton were indeed atop a flatcar awaiting a parting shot at Virgil, they bolted quickly enough when they saw the well-armed Earp party on the platform. Clanton again fled for his life. Locomotive fireman James Miller later testified that Stilwell ran “down the track on the east side of the engine and crossed the track in front of it.” Stilwell’s movements suggest he, too, was trying to escape. “Saw four armed men pass on the west side of the engine and down to the left of the coaches standing on the sidetrack,” said Miller. “In about five minutes afterward I heard five or six shots fired in rapid succession.”
The engineer then said he heard “some cheering in the direction in which the shots were fired.” Tombstone diarist and longtime Earp supporter George Parsons summed up the results of that shooting: “Tonight came news of Frank Stilwell’s body being shot. A quick vengeance, and a bad character sent to Hell, where he will be the chief attraction until a few more accompany him.” Moments after the shooting the California-bound train with Virgil pulled out of the train station.
Stilwell’s body wasn’t discovered until dawn on March 21st. A track man for the Southern Pacific stumbled upon the Cowboy where he fell alongside the track 100 yards north of Porter’s Hotel. A brief autopsy by Dr. Dexter Lyford found bullets fired at very close range.
Wyatt Earp had his revenge with the help of Doc Holliday, who it was said loved Morgan like a brother. Accordingly, Doc had also shot Stilwell. And Stilwell had been armed but had not drawn the Frontier Model Colt .45 found in his pocket the next morning. In a May 14, 1893, interview in The Denver Republican, Wyatt Earp gave his version of the shooting: “I ran straight for Stilwell. It was he shot my brother. As I rushed upon him, he put out his hands and clutched at my shotgun and I shot him with both barrels. I started for Ike Clanton then, but he escaped behind a moving train of cars.”
Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride which would claim several more Cowboy lives had begun. Delayed by the shooting, Earp’s posse missed the eastbound train to Benson and hiked nine miles east to Papago Station, where they flagged a passing freight train at around midnight. They would arrive in Tombstone in time for breakfast. Although an appointed deputy U.S. marshal, Earp had operated outside the law in killing Stilwell. The morning after, Pima County Sheriff wired warrants to the Cochise County Sheriff.
On March 20, 2005, Tucson celebrated the 125th anniversary of the arrival of rail service to the city. It also unveiled bronze statues of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to mark the Stilwell shooting 123 years before. It seems present-day citizens in the bustling city of Tucson wish to remember wild and woolly Tucson.
Credit and attribution to the author Wild West. December, 2011 issue.