Legends of the Old West - TOMBSTONE | Introduction

Episode Date: August 5, 2018

The story of the 28 months that Wyatt Earp and his brothers spent in Tombstone, Arizona and the 27 seconds that made them legends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. On a bitterly cold morning in October 1881, a railroad engineer lingered outside a livery stable called the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He'd been in town only one day, and now he heard four or five men talking angrily about some trouble they'd had with the city marshal. They were going to kill him on sight. In fact, they were going to kill the city marshal's whole party, whoever they were. The engineer didn't know the men speaking, and he didn't know the city marshal, but he hurried away to warn the man of the danger.

He found Virgil Earp, city marshal of Tombstone, a block away and quickly told him about the threats. That was the last straw for Virgil. He and his brothers Wyatt and Morgan had been hearing threats against their lives all morning. Tensions between the Earps and the men the engineer overheard, the Clantons and the McClourys, had been simmering for months. Now they had boiled over. The brothers, along with Wyatt's good friend John Henry Holliday, marched through the streets of Tombstone toward a vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral. The most famous gunfight in American history was just minutes away. Over the course of five weeks, I'll unfold the stories of the mining town that was too tough to die,

the outlaws who terrorized southern Arizona, the dentist with a hair-trigger temper and a fondness for whiskey and gambling, and the five brothers who just wanted to make their fortunes. By the end of their time in the desert, one would be crippled, one would be dead, and another would ride into history as the most legendary lawman of the West. Welcome to Tombstone.