Tombstone

Wyatt Earp

Earp comes to the silver boomtown in December 1879 wearing a deputy marshal's badge, a veteran of Wichita and Dodge City who has hunted buffalo, fought Indians, and gambled his way across the frontier. He is thirty, long-faced and pale, with a booming voice and the stillness of sculptured stone, a man who follows his own silent trails with roughshod directness. In a town crawling with Cowboys and cattle thieves, his cold competence makes him the natural man of the hour, and the enemies he makes along the way will pull him down as surely as his courage lifts him up.

Doc Holliday

Holliday is the fighting ace of the Earp faction, considered by connoisseurs in deadliness the coldest-blooded killer in Tombstone, a man who laughs with Morgan Earp in front of saloons and straps a sawed-off shotgun beneath his coat for state occasions. Immaculate in attire and fastidious in habit, he might fly into a temper if his breakfast eggs are not just so, yet no man is cooler when bullets start to fly. His loyalty to Wyatt Earp and his hair-trigger temperament make him both the faction's sharpest weapon and its most unpredictable one.

Curly Bill

Curly Bill operates on a scale of magnificence along the Mexican border, stealing cattle in such volume that his depredations reach Congress and diplomatic correspondence, while respectable stockmen quietly fatten their herds on his stolen beeves. He is a familiar, free-spending figure in Tombstone's saloons, generous with drinks and deadly serious at the faro table, but his first recorded exploit in town ends with Marshal Fred White shot dead and Curly Bill jailed with a split scalp. That night's manhandling by Wyatt Earp plants a bitterness that will shadow every encounter between the outlaw and the lawman.

John Ringo

Ringo is the outlaw who drinks hard, unlike other bad men who take their liquor sparingly to keep their trigger fingers steady, a figure of dark reputation among the Clanton and McLowery crowd that salutes the Earps pleasantly while plotting against them. His death in a canyon, a single empty chamber and a body found in the forks of an oak, becomes one of Tombstone's enduring mysteries, with rumours pointing at Frank Leslie and evidence pointing at suicide. Whether killer or self-slain, Ringo embodies the haunted, self-destructive edge of the frontier's outlaw culture that the Earps must confront.

Ike Clanton

Ike Clanton is the rancher and Cowboy whose drunken belligerence on the day before the O.K. Corral fight turns simmering range-war tensions into open confrontation, flourishing his six-shooter in the Oriental and vowing that the ball will open as soon as the Earps show up. Virgil Earp clouts him over the head with a pistol and the brothers disarm and jail him, but not before he shrills threats of revenge at Wyatt that will not be forgotten. His arrival with Billy Clanton and the McLowery brothers, all heavily armed, sets the stage for the gunfight that defines Tombstone's history.

John Slaughter

Slaughter is the rancher-turned-sheriff who brings order to the Tombstone region after the Earps depart, a frontiersman who reads deserts and mountains like a printed page and follows trails invisible to less keen eyes. He rides alone, tracks men step by step, and usually ends his pursuits with a fugitive's surrender or death, sometimes ordering undesirables out of the country on the strength of his own authority rather than any statute. His fierce, czarlike justice and his silence about the men he has killed make him a legend of the later Tombstone peace, the quiet enforcer who outlasts the era of the gunfight.