Tombstone by Walter Noble Burns — Read

Wyatt Earp, who was to achieve sinister eminence as the six-shooter boss of Tombstone, and whose name, for good or bad, was to be bruited more widely, perhaps, than that of any other man in Tombstone's history, was born in Monmouth, Illinois, March 19, 1849. He went West as a youth, when Kansas and Nebraska were the frontier and Omaha and Kansas City were border towns. As a freighter, he drove bull teams on the Overland and Santa Fe trails. He hunted buffalo for a living when the prairies were black with the wild herds. He had experience as an Indian fighter. He became a professional gambler in the days when euchre was giving way to faro and draw poker on the frontier. He served as a policeman from 1874 to 1876 in Wichita, when that town was as hard boiled as any west of the Missouri. He was town marshal of Dodge City from early in 1877 to late in 1879.

Dodge City was then in its palmy days. It was the last of a succession of Kansas railroad towns that rose to lurid prestige at the end of the cattle trails from Texas. Abilene, Caldwell, Wichita, Newton, Ellsworth, and Hays had had their crowded hour and passed into peaceful obscurity. Farmers had spread over eastern Kansas and the old Texas trails were blocked by fenced fields of corn and wheat. Texas, still without railroads, was the West's only great cattle preserve. The cattle business in New Mexico and Arizona was still in its infancy. Northern ranges in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, in later years to swarm with cattle, were still wilderness. Millions of longhorns pastured half wild over the vast pampas between the Rio Grande and Red River and to Dodge City poured the Texas herds for shipment over the Santa Fe Railroad to Eastern markets.