Last update: 31-07-2009 14:31

Last update: 31-07-2009 14:28

Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed to it. Taking strong places is a particular trade, which you have taken up without serving an apprenticeship to it. Armies and veterans need skillful engineers to direct them in their attack. Have you any? But some seem to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff.

Benjamin Franklin: A letter to his brother in Boston before the siege of Louisbourg.

Lines of hurrying men, volunteer militia from Massachusetts and her sub-province of Maine, loaded munitions and supplies on ships moored to the wharves of Boston in the spring of 1745. Artillerymen hoisted aboard cannon, stripped from harbor defenses, and others borrowed from as far away as New York. Slings of roundshot were lowered into holds, along with casks of powder, salt meat, hard bread, of water and of rum. Crammed with troops and cargo, vessels cast off and moved out to anchor in the bay. On March 24, a fleet of sixty sail, transports with an escort of a frigate and a few armed sloops, put to sea.

Off the Nova Scotian fishing village of Canso, they would make rendezvous with contingents from New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and sail on to lay siege to Louisbourg in French Acadia, one of the mightiest fortresses of the day.

To New Englanders, Louisbourg was a frowning menace, never to be forgotten, lying grim and ominous just over the horizon—symbol of the threat which, as New England folk saw it, was implicit in French power in the North Country.

For Louisbourg represented not only the might of the French king but the majesty of the intricate professional military science of the day. It was a great masonry fortress, protected by strong outworks, laid out according to the principles of the famous Vauban, manned by veteran troops—definitely not the sort of place for amateurs to tackle. And it was an amateur army that was going to try to take it—a collection of some 4,000 citizen-soldiers, farmers and fishermen and shopkeepers and artisans, Colonials with the barest smattering of military training. William Pepperrell, commander of the expedition, was a prosperous merchant and politician from Kittery, in Maine, and a colonel of militia; a solid citizen and a good leader of men, but in no sense a professional military figure.

The old struggle between Great Britain and France over North American colonies had flared up in a conflict spilled over from Europe—King George’s War, declared in the past year. But New Englanders were ready and willing to claim this quarrel from the second George for their own. To them Louisbourg, sea link with France and gateway to Quebec, which must some day be taken in its turn, was a stronghold of “Popery, privateers, and pirates,” a menacing and insolent rival of New England commerce and fisheries. Louisbourg must fall.

Neither British Regulars nor the Royal Exchequer were asked to support this expedition, organized by Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts and commanded by doughty General Pepperrell. A British fleet in the West Indies had been requested to coëperate, but its commodore, lacking orders, refused. In sublime disregard of the Royal Navy as unessential, the American flotilla sailed north. Had even one French ship of the line intercepted, she could have blown the few small American warships out of the water and sunk the transports at leisure.

Louisbourg, famed as the Gibraltar of the West, had been 25 years in building. Its cost had mounted to thirty million livres, then equivalent to six million dollars. Two thousand Regulars and Canadian militia garrisoned it. On the land side, above an eight-foot moat, rose walls thirty feet high and forty feet thick at the base with jutting bastions and a citadel. Its seaward face was considered still more impregnable. Two formidable batteries protected the harbor entrance of its site on Cape Breton Island. Ramparts bristled with 250 cannon—powerful guns and mortars and swivels. Those small but murderous pieces could ruin attempts at an escalade, sweeping storming parties from their ladders with deadly blasts of langrage—charges of nails, bolts, chain links and other scrap iron linked together.

To counter the fire of the French batteries and to bombard and breach massive walls the Americans carried only eight 22-pounders, ten 18’s, twelve 9’s, and four mortars from 12- to 9-inch. A large proportion of the ammunition consisted of 42-pound cannonballs, almost twice too big for the caliber of the expedition’s heaviest ordnance. Those, however, would exactly fit the bores of heavy cannon known to form a considerable part of the French armament. It would only be necessary to storm the Grand or the Island Battery, load captured 42’s with balls foresightedly provided, open fire and demolish the remainder of Louisbourg’s defenses. Although such strategy, as Thomas Hutchinson caustically remarked, was “like selling the skin of a bear before catching him,” few paid any more heed to him than to Ben Franklin’s warning that fortified towns are not as easv taken as snuff.

It might look possible, on paper. But for a volunteer army, ill-equipped with artillery and poorly trained in its use, to go up against a fortress whose reduction would require a greater use of artillery than any fight in the New World had yet involved, was a very chancy venture. In future generations Americans would show that they were singularly apt at the use of heavy guns; here, in 1745, would be the first time for them to develop and demonstrate that knack.

Experienced gunners for the campaign were as few as guns were scant and light. In the New World, cannon of fortresses from Canada to Spanish Florida and defenses of seaboard towns were manned by small detachments, trained and commanded by such European professionals as might be available. For the most part American gunnery was confined to privateersmen and remained a naval specialty, as testified by the term for a cannoneer, matross, derived from the French for sailor, matelot, and more closely the Dutch matroos.

Fortunately the expedition’s artillery train included officers with some knowledge of the gunner’s art. Twenty were or had been members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston. Founded in 1638 by colonists from the London Company, chartered 100 years earlier, this oldest military organization in America is still in existence, with headquarters at Faneuil Hall. As “scholars of great gunnes,” the Company had learned at least the rudiments of handling engines of war, developed from the catapult and ballista after the Chinese discovered the explosive mixture they called “thunder of the earth”—gunpowder—and Thirteenth-Century Europeans improved it.

Colonel Joseph Dwight and Lieutenant Colonel Richard Gridley of the artillery had mustered artificers to maintain and repair the guns. In addition they could count upon the services of gunsmiths, black-smiths, and armorers in other commands, such as Major Seth Pomeroy of one of the infantry regiments. Pomeroy, who carried a musket of his own make, would come to the aid of the gunners at a critical moment with his smith’s skill. And in the rank and file of the army, many, though they might never have seen a cannon before, possessed the resourcefulness and handiness of pioneers. Show them how to put a piece in position, to load, aim and fire, and they would manage.

Spirit and resolution were strong in these volunteers who had flocked to enlist for the attack on Louisbourg at meager pay, though not without hopes of plunder. Booty, trade, and fishing rights aside, the campaign was hailed as a Protestant crusade against a New World Rome, a crusade proclaimed and sustained by the presence of a “goodly company of preachers.” Chief of Chaplains was the redoubtable Samuel Moody whose York, Maine, congregation endured its winter worship standing in an icy meetinghouse for his two-hour prayers, followed by sermons demanding equal fortitude; only the gift of a barrel of cider would induce the minister to show mercy. Chaplain Moses Coffin of Newbury—his life would be providentially saved by a pocket Bible in which a bullet lodged—doubled as a drummer and was known as “the drum ecclesiastic.”

Not every regiment carried a parson on its rolls, but the artillery train took care to list its chaplain, Joseph Hawley. An aura of brimstone still lingered from the days when the secrets of the gunners’ guild were denounced as a compact with the Devil. Servers of cannon long were regarded with superstitious horror, and captured artillerymen in early European wars were likely to be tortured and mutilated before they were put to death. One Pope saw fit to ex-communicate all artillerymen.

Prejudice was not slow to cross the Atlantic. “Many a time it falleth out that most men employed for gunners are very negligent of the fear of God,” declared a Puritan moralist, who added a fable about a wicked artilleryman scathingly named “Christopher Slime” and claimed by the Devil for his own. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, soon after its organization, prudently banned infernal associations by requesting some eminent divine to preach them an annual sermon. None other than the celebrated Cotton Mather had obligingly responded with a redeeming discourse which pronounced that “Prayer was the great field-piece of Jehoshaphat, and Luther was wont to style it the gun-shot of the soul.”

But even the most fervent did not expect prayer to make a second Jericho of Louisbourg. Its walls would have to be scaled or battered down. By the time the Canso rendezvous was kept, no better plan had been evolved than a complicated night attack. Four divisions were to land separately, advance in “profound silence” (unlikely in view of the expected generous issue of rum), and launch an assault on the Grand Battery.

While the Provincial fleet was held at Canso by a report that Louisbourg harbor was ice-locked, five warships of the Royal Navy, led by the 6o-gun Superbe, arrived after all, Commodore Peter Warren having received orders. He could be relied on to beat off French attempts to relieve the fortress by sea. The expeditionary force sailed on, more confident than ever, its assurance echoed in a letter, brought by a dispatch boat from Boston, to one of its colonels:

“I hope this will find you at Louisbourg with a Bowl of Punch, a Pipe, and a P—k of C—ds in your hand and whatever else you desire (I had forgot to mention a Pretty French Madammoselle).”

At first sight of hostile sails on April 30, signal cannon on the Louisbourg battlements boomed, and alarm bells called in all inhabitants living outside the town. Pepperrell wasted no time. Hardly had his transports anchored when boats were lowered, and infantry clambered down into them. Sturdy arms at the oars drove them through crashing surf past jagged rocks, pulling for Gabarus Bay west of the harbor. A party from the garrison raced along the shore to repulse them. The boats were beached ahead of them, and cheering Americans poured out. There was a short, sharp clash. The French fled, leaving twenty dead. By nightfall 2,000 troops had landed, followed by the rest of the force the next day. It was a neat amphibious operation, but the militiamen, huddled around their campfires, lost some of their confidence as they stared in awe toward the citadel of Louisbourg and its flanking batteries, looming high and forbidding above them.

Louisbourg had two principal outworks—the seemingly impregnable Island Battery situated on an outcrop in the middle of the harbor entrance, and an ominous work known as the Grand Battery, across the harbor from the fortress itself. To open a successful fire on the fortress, it would be necessary to reduce both of these works first, along with any lesser outworks which the French might have established in support. In addition, guns would have to be mounted on high ground overlooking Louisbourg, and the ponderous guns would have to be brought ashore from ships, taken across soggy ground, and lugged up steep slopes by main strength—under fire, no doubt, of the French defenders. All in all, it would be a tough assignment.

Colonel William Vaughan, leading his regiment inland, came upon several undefended naval storehouses. Promptly he put the torch to them. Clouds of smoke, thick and black from tar, pitch and oil, drifted down on the Grand or Royal Battery. The colonel and his troops, grinning over the coughing and eye-smarting to which they had treated the Frenchies, turned in for the night.

In the morning Vaughan advanced with thirteen men to reconnoitre. When they drew no fire from the battery, the colonel bribed an Indian of his detachment with a flask of brandy and sent him forward. Climbing up through an embrasure, the scout soon signaled them on with a whoop. They rushed in to find the works abandoned by their 400-man garrison. The Grand Battery had been swept clean by a smoke screen with nothing behind it.

While a young soldier hoisted his scarlet coat on the staff to serve as a flag and the guns of the citadel loosed an angry, futile salvo, Colonel Vaughan sent for reinforcements. Before they could arrive, four boatloads from Louisbourg sped in to attack and redeem the ignominious loss of the vital battery. The little party of Americans rushed down to the beach and blazed away until the French retreated before a regiment coming up on the double to clinch the victory.

In the Grand Battery were found large supplies of powder and shot and twenty heavy cannon. The French artillerymen had failed miserably and disgracefully to blow up the magazine and permanently disable their ordnance. They had hastily spiked the guns with iron rods hammered into their vents but neglected to knock off trunnions, supporting the barrels on carriages, and to burn the latter. Major Pomeroy and twenty other gunsmiths, quickly summoned, handily drilled out the vents. By next morning the captured pieces were ready for action. Jubilant Yankee gunners shifted them, trained them on the town and opened a thunderous bombardment. “The enemy,” wrote the Habitant de Louisbourg, “saluted us with our own cannon and made a terrific fire, smashing everything within range.” There was no need for the Americans to be sparing of the French ammunition, for most of the Grand Battery guns were 42’s. The 42-pound cannonballs, so optimistically stowed at Boston, would shortly be available and serve admirably.

The Grand Battery, easy prize of panic, roared on, crushing outer works and riddling houses in the town. But its shot alone could not breach the principal defenses of the citadel nor even reach the Island Battery, which barred entrance to the harbor and supported the main fortress. Guns must be brought ashore from the fleet and put in commanding positions.

The achievement of that tremendous feat by raw militia would establish traditions for American artillery, carried on but never surpassed in all our wars.

Flatboats were launched from the transports, tossing at anchor. Down into those clumsy craft were lowered cannon, ammunition, and stores. Rowers plunged sweeps in waves that dashed over gunwales, threatening swamping, and pulled with all their might. The flatboats, too big and heavily laden to clear rocky barriers offshore and be beached, had to be held in the shallows by force of arm and oar, while soldiers swung overside and waded waist-deep through the icy surf, unloading them. Tide and backwash wrenched at them as they struggled ashore, powder casks lifted high on head and shoulders. They risked the rocks to bring the cannon barges closer in and, for every gun landed, lost a boat, pounded to pulpwood. Drenched, exhausted men slept shelterless through cold, foggy nights and each morning limped stiffly back to their task until it was finished.

Worse still lay before them. Over rough and roadless terrain, without any transport animals, the guns must be dragged more than two miles by manpower. Inland rose a line of hills commanding the town and harbor. That high ground could be the key to Louisbourg, as the Plains of Abraham would prove for Quebec and Mount Defiance for Fort Ticonderoga.

Sand first—easy going considering what was to come. Brawny hands laid hold of long anchor cables, attached to gun and mortar carriages, and heaved away. On they rolled at a good pace. Rocks now, slowing them, lest they break wheels. Long stretches of dense scrub and brush to push through or be hacked clear by axemen. Finally swamps confronted them, boulderstudded bogs deceptively carpeted with moss. Wheels mired, sank past hubs till carriages, then guns, went under, gulped down by sucking mud. They hauled them out on to patches of firmer ground and halted in bafflement. There was no other approach to the heights except through the swamp. While they stood there, gunners in Louisbourg sighted them and opened fire with every piece that would bear, forcing them to take cover.

A man stepped forward to meet the crisis—Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Meserve of New Hampshire, a shipbuilder. He set lumbermen, farmers, and carpenters to constructing sledges, six-feet-by-five, like the familiar stone boats used to clear New England fields of rocks.

A cannon was placed on each and a team of 200 men harnessed themselves in like horses with breaststraps and rope traces. By night or in fog, to avoid the daylight hail of French shells, they hauled and tugged, staggering ahead, floundering through the clinging mud. No route could be used twice; the passage of a single sledge had churned it into an impassable slough. Gun by gun, they won their way through the blackness and the haze to solid footing.

Earthworks and emplacements were waiting for them. Six pieces were sited on Green Hill, little more than a mile from the citadel, the King’s Bastion. A week more of back-breaking toil, and another battery was in position: four 22’s and ten of the small mortars called “coehorns” after the Dutch baron who invented them. At length five batteries were in action, the last consisting of five captured French 42-pounders, which had required teams of 300 men to drag each one through the quagmire. Muzzles flamed, and iron fists knocked clangorously at the gates of Louisbourg.

Din of cannonading mingled with the rattle of musketry where the range was close. The French ventured one half-hearted sortie which was beaten back—then resumed the artillery duel. Between salvos their gunners drank toasts and leaned over the ramparts to make mocking offers of brimming cups of wine to the thirsty Bostonais.

Gallic bravado soon was dispelled by converging fire from the semi-circle of American batteries in the hills. They blasted away with captured ammunition and their own, landed from the fleet.

Americans suffered more from their own inexperience than from enemy retaliation. Guns and mortars, overcharged and double-shotted, burst, killing and wounding their crews. Since competent artillerists were too few to prevent such accidents, Commodore Warren spared four master gunners from his warships to help instruct the rash amateurs.

May wore into June. A month of constant combat, exhausting labor, and exposure had taken toll. But in spite of losses from bursting pieces, French counterbattery fire, and a sick list of 1,500 down with fever and dysentery, the bombardment of Louisbourg seldom slackened. American artillerymen, many barefoot and in tatters now, kept the guns in action.

Pepperrell and his council of war ordered the storming of the Island Battery. Far from being a weak point, it was armed with thirty heavy cannon, two mortars, and seven swivels, yet a surprise night attack might well carry it, if the French were caught off guard. On a dark June midnight a party of 300 volunteers paddled across the bay from the Grand Battery. They picked up 100 more men on Lighthouse Point and made a landing through high surf on the shores of a narrow cove beneath the walls. Twelve scaling ladders had been planted without detection when a trooper with a bellyfull of rum burst out with three loud and hearty cheers. Alerted, the garrison sprang to arms. Guns, swivels, and muskets poured down a withering fire from the ramparts. In a bloody repulse, the Provincials lost 189 men, casualties and prisoners. An assault that might have succeeded had been ruined by an undisciplined sot.

Now the issue depended again upon the besiegers’ guns. Lieutenant Colonel Gridley, acting as chief engineer as well as second in command of the artillery train, put cannon ashore on the rocks of almost inaccessible Lighthouse Point. Panting, sweating men hoisted them up a steep cliff—dragged them a mile and a quarter to a place of vantage. Soon ten more pieces, buried by the French in the sand, were spotted at low tide and sent up the cliff to join the others. Shot and shell rained down on the Island Battery. Bursting bombs shattered the casemates, and balls hurtled through embrasures, wrecking gun carriages. So fierce and effective was the bombardment that Frenchmen ran from the fort and dove into the sea to escape the storm of iron. Their cannon fell silent.

Fire from the inland emplacements and the Grand Battery redoubled. Great gaps yawned now in the citadel walls. Debris heaped higher, filling the moat. Pepperrell and Warren, whose reinforced fleet had been gathering in French prizes, made ready for a grand assault by land and sea.

It never was delivered. Suddenly a white flag of truce fluttered from the staff of the citadel. Louisbourg was surrendering.

Under terms of capitulation the garrison marched out, colors flying and drums beating, to be later embarked, along with the townsfolk, for France. They left behind them a shattered citadel.

Chaplain Moody raged through the French churches, wielding an axe with bigoted zeal on altar and images; mollified, he astonished and delighted hungry diners at the victory banquet by limiting himself to a two-sentence grace of record brevity. Spoils of war included a silver cross presented to Harvard College, but the army was bitterly disappointed in hopes of rich loot from Louisbourg. There ensued, wrote one disgusted trooper, “a great Noys and hubbub a mongst ye Soldiers a bout ye Plunder; Som Cursing, som a Swarein.” It was the British Crown and Navy that drew huge dividends from the triumph: five million dollars’ worth of French prizes, including a treasure ship from Peru, lured into the harbor by flying the fleur-de-lys banner over the citadel again in place of the English ensign.

In the end, it seemed almost a mockery, and many a New Englander felt that the blood and toil spent at Louisbourg had been spent in vain—and, in his mental account book, chalked up a remembered item against the British government in London. For the British statesmen of that particular moment had their eyes on India rather than on the bleak coast of Nova Scotia; and at the peace conference which brought the war to an end, they blithely traded Louisbourg back to the French in exchange for possession of Madras, in India. After the peace settlement, the flag of the French king flew again over Louisbourg—and in 1758, when another war came, it had to be taken all over again.

Yet the siege, one of the most desperate and gallant exploits in the annals of warfare, an artillery epic, was far from futile. There, against long odds and logical military expectation, Americans justified their confidence in themselves, confidence they never would lose. It was strong thirty years later at the outbreak of the Revolution, and its token and symbol were veterans of Louisbourg, old men in faded uniforms marching once more to the sound of the guns.

Last update: 31-07-2009 14:28

The Mexican government was emphatic about the Cowboy rustling problem -- either the Americans would have to stop the Cowboys from coming across the border to steal or the Mexicans would. So there may have been Mexicans present in the canyon, too, either working with the American lawmen in a joint effort or simply observing the American effort to curb the outlaws. Both Doc Holliday and Warren Earp were wounded in that border gun battle, and they did not reappear in Tombstone until they had recovered. That explains why Holliday had a cane on October 26, 1881, and why Warren missed the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Tombstone was more divided than ever, with the Cowboys on one side and the Earps and Holliday on the other. Cowboys threatened to kill Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan and Doc if they didn't get out of town. But running was not Holliday's or the Earps' style. On the night of October 25, 1881, Ike Clanton and Holliday drank heavily and then began hurling obscenities at each other. Doc finally ended the cursing match by inviting Ike to use his gun. Clanton claimed that he was unarmed, so Holliday told him to go get heeled. Then, to goad him ever further, he told Ike that his big mouth had caused his old man to be killed and that he (Holliday) had had the pleasure of pulling the trigger. Furthermore, he would take much enjoyment in doing the same to Ike!

In shock, Ike Clanton left and went to the Grand Hotel. Holliday went to his room at Fly's Boardinghouse. The next day, the 26th, Ike appeared at Fly's, looking for Holliday. The doctor wasn't in. Big Nose Kate was visiting Doc at the time, and Mrs. Fly told her that Clanton had been there trying to find Holliday. When Kate informed Doc of this, he replied, "If God will let me live long enough, he will see me!"

Shortly afterward, word was conveyed to the Earps that the Cowboys were gathered in the wagon lot next to Fly's Photo Gallery and were wearing guns in violation of city law. Holliday met the Earps near Hafford's Saloon, at the corner of Allen and Fourth streets, and demanded that he be allowed to join them in their little walk. Five men, potential killers, lay in wait just down Fremont -- Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claibourne.

When the Earps and Holliday confronted four Cowboys (Claibourne fled before the shooting) in that narrow, 15-foot space between Fly's and the Harwood house, guns flamed and roared for less than half a minute, then ceased abruptly. Plenty of damage was done in that short time. The McLaurys and Billy Clanton were dead, and Morgan and Virgil Earp were both wounded. Holliday killed Tom McLaury and fired one of the bullets that struck Frank McLaury; he may have hit Billy Clanton as well.

Three days later, Ike Clanton, who had run away when the shooting started, filed a complaint. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were arrested, and hearings were held in Justice Wells Spicer's court from November 2 to November 29. When Spicer had heard all the testimony, he issued this opinion: "In view of all the facts and circumstances of the case, considering the threats made, the character and position of the parties, and the tragical results accomplished in manner and form as they were, with all surrounding influences bearing upon the result of the affair, I cannot resist the conclusion that the defendants were fully justified in committing these homicides, that it was a necessary act done in the discharge of official duty."

Retaliation from the Cowboy faction was sure to come, and it did. Near midnight on December 28, 1881, Virgil Earp, on his way from the Oriental Saloon to the Crystal Palace, was ambushed by three men with shotguns. Two out of the five shots fired struck Virgil, one badly shattering his left arm, the other entering his left side and back. These wounds crippled Virgil for the rest of his life. Virgil's wounds were serious, but he was able to walk back to the Oriental, where his brother Wyatt was playing poker.

The men responsible for the attack on Virgil were Ike Clanton, John Ringo, Frank Stilwell, Hank Swilling, Pete Spencer and Johnny Barnes. Some of the men were arrested and brought into court. A number of Cowboy witnesses swore that those charged with the crime were in Charleston at the time that Virgil was shot. The judge had no alternative but to release the defendants.

On January 17, 1882, Ringo confronted Holliday. Many writers would have us believe that Ringo challenged all the Earps, too. Not true. Morgan and Virgil were still incapacitated with painful wounds and were not yet out and about. Wyatt was present, but Ringo was not running much of a risk as there was little chance that his challenge would be accepted. Wyatt knew that Ringo had been drinking heavily and that the whiskey was talking. Besides, Wyatt already had troubles enough in the aftermath of the October gunfight. Holliday, though, was quite eager to accommodate Ringo in any kind of fight he wanted. James Flynn, the acting town marshal, grabbed Ringo and held him while Wyatt hustled the struggling Holliday away. That was the extent of the confrontation.

On March 18, 1882, assassins struck again. Morgan Earp was playing pool with Bob Hatch at Cambell and Hatch's Saloon and Billiard Parlor on Allen Street when a shot, fired from the darkness of the alley, struck him in the back and snuffed out his life. When Doc Holliday learned of Morgan's murder, he vowed to kill all the men responsible. In a wild rage, he went through the town, kicking in doors, searching for the men he suspected. Had he found them that night, there would have been several more bodies requiring the undertaker's attention. Wyatt Earp, of course, was none too pleased, either. He had seen Virgil shot and crippled for life and the ambushers go free. And now, Wyatt knew the law would do nothing again.

A coroner's jury ruled the next day that Morgan's murderers were Frank Stilwell, Pete Spence (actually Spencer), Joe Doe Freis (real name Frederick Bode), John Ringo, Indian Charlie and another Indian, name unknown. Consumed with hatred and frustration, Wyatt wanted revenge. Someone had to pay for Virgil's crippling and Morgan's death. Then Stilwell boasted that he had fired the shot that killed Morgan. He might as well have written his own death sentence. Either Wyatt, Holliday or both would certainly come for him before long.

Morgan's body was embalmed, dressed in a blue suit belonging to Doc Holliday and laid out for viewing in the Cosmopolitan Hotel. The funeral cortege started away from the hotel with the fire bell tolling out its solemn peals of "Earth to earth, dust to dust." Morgan was sent to his parents home in Colton, Calif., for burial. Morgan's wife, along with Virgil and his wife, went also. Wyatt and Warren Earp, Doc Holliday, Sherman McMasters, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson and Texas Jack Vermillion went along to provide protection all the way to Tucson.

The Earp party encountered Stilwell at the railroad station in Tucson on March 20. Wyatt chased him down the track and filled him full of holes. Holliday shot him twice more for good measure, even though Stilwell was already dead. A Tucson coroner's jury named Wyatt and Warren Earp, Holliday, Texas Jack and McMasters as the men who had killed Stilwell. The Tucson Weekly Citizen of March 28, 1882, noted: "Frank Stilwell was buried this afternoon, the coffin being conveyed to the grave in an express wagon, unfollowed by a single mourner."

The killing of Stilwell was only the beginning of Wyatt Earp's bloody trail of vengeance, and Doc Holliday rode along all the way. When they learned that Pete Spencer was at his wood camp at South Pass in the Dragoon Mountains, Earp, Holliday and the rest of the "federal posse" rode there on March 22, 1882. They did not find Spencer, but they came upon Florentino Cruz. When Cruz fled, the posse shot him to pieces. Two days later, the Earp party was riding along a deep wash near Iron Springs when Curly Bill Brocius and eight of his men opened fire on them. Wyatt Earp slid down from his horse and killed Curly Bill with a blast from a double-barrel shotgun. Johnny Barnes, who had been one of Virgil's ambushers, was badly wounded in the Iron Springs fight and never recovered.

Wyatt and Warren Earp and Doc Holliday remained in Arizona Territory until April, reluctant to leave. They had been riding over the countryside in the hopes of encountering Ringo, Clanton, Spencer or Swilling. What they didn't know was that the men they sought were hiding in Mexico, near Fronteras, Sonora.

By May 1882, the two Earps and Holliday were in Colorado -- the Earps in Gunnison and Doc in Denver. Arizona Territory made an attempt to extradite Holliday from Colorado. Sheriff Behan and his Cowboy cronies would have been overjoyed to have had Doc delivered to them unarmed and handcuffed. Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin, however, decided that he could not honor the request from Arizona Territorial Governor Fred Tritle.

In Arizona Territory on July 14, 1882, a teamster named John Yoast, bound for Morse's sawmill, discovered a dead man in West Turkey Creek Canyon, east of the Dragoon Mountains. The body was sitting in the intertwined limbs of oak trees. A bullet had entered the right temple and exited through the top of the head. The dead man was one of the more famous Cowboys -- John Ringo. Yoast quickly notified the sheriff of his grisly find. A suicide, it was suggested by some members of a coroner's jury, but most people disagreed. They did not agree on who had shot him, only that someone had.

What had happened was that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday had returned to Arizona and had rendezvoused with several friends -- Fred Dodge, Oregin Smith, Johnny Green, John Meagher and one other, probably Lou Cooley -- near Henry Hooker's ranch. A short time later, they all had taken the trail toward Galeyville. Ringo had been spotted while camped on Turkey Creek, and when he ran up a canyon, Wyatt had shot him. The body had then been placed between the oak trees. Bat Masterson, Warren Earp and some newspaper friends helped establish alibis for Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday -- things they said and wrote made it appear as if Wyatt and Doc had never left Colorado.

Once back in Colorado, Holliday decided to go to Leadville. He was living quietly there until he ran into old enemies -- Johnny Tyler and Billy Allen. Friends advised Holliday that Allen was armed and making threats. On the afternoon of August 19, 1884, Holliday strolled into Hyman's Saloon and placed himself at the end of the bar. As Billy Allen crossed the threshold, Holliday leveled his revolver and fired, hitting Allen in the right arm. Allen fell to the floor, screaming, and Holliday rushed behind the cigar case, leaned over and fired again. The second bullet missed Allen's head by a hairbreadth. Doc leveled his revolver once more, but bystanders seized him and disarmed him. Holliday was arrested and tried for shooting Allen, but on March 28, 1885, a jury found him not guilty.

In May 1887, Holliday went to Glenwood Spring, Colo., to try the sulphur vapors, since his health was worsening. He stayed at the Hotel Glenwood, not a sanitarium, although the hotel catered to those who hoped to be "healed" by the Yampah Hot Springs. Nothing could be done for him; his tuberculosis was more relentless than any human enemy. He spent his last 57 days in bed and was delirious for 14 of them. On November 8, 1887, John Henry "Doc" Holliday awoke, clear-eyed, and asked for a glass of whiskey. It was given to him, and he drank it down with obvious enjoyment. Then he said, "This is funny," and died.

"Few men have been better known to a certain class of sporting people, and few men of his character had more friends or stronger champions," said the Denver Republican in Holliday's obituary. That obituary went on to say that Doc had "killed several men during his life in Arizona." Wrong. But then most writers get Holliday's kill total dead wrong. There is no doubt whatsoever that he killed Tom McLaury near the O.K. Corral. Enough evidence exists to convince this author that Holliday killed Old Man Clanton, too. That makes a total of two. He shot eight more men -- White, Joyce, Parker, Frank McLaury, Billy Clanton, Stilwell, Cruz and Allen -- but none of those men died by his bullets. No matter how much blood he did or did not contribute to the blood-stained pages of Western history, though, Doc Holliday will not be forgotten. His deeds, his dentistry, his disease, his death and that name "Doc" have brought the Southern boy named John Henry a secure place among the immortals who inhabited the Old West.

Last update: 31-07-2009 14:28