Early Life
Morgan Earp was born in Pella, Marion County, Iowa, to Nicholas Porter Earp (1813–1907), a cooper and farmer, and his second wife Virginia Ann Cooksey (1821–1893).
When elder brothers Newton, James, and Virgil went off to the American Civil War, they left their young teenage brothers Wyatt and Morgan to tend the family farm. James and Morgan grew up close, with a shared wish for adventure and a dislike of farming. Before adulthood, teen-aged Morgan followed James Earp up to Montana for a couple of years. Later he was with Wyatt on the Western frontier.
In 1875, Morgan departed the Earp clan living in Wichita, Kansas, and became a deputy marshal under Charlie Bassett at Dodge City. In late 1877, Morgan took his common-law wife Louisa A. Houston to Montana, where they lived until March, 1880.
At different times in Arizona, both Wyatt and Morgan worked as shotgun messengers for Wells Fargo & Co., deputy sheriffs for Pima County, and as deputies under Tombstone's Chief of Police Virgil Earp, their older brother. During early 1882, Morgan was appointed to the federal position of Deputy U.S. Marshal, an office subservient to Wyatt Earp, who had been given the position by the U.S. Marshal C. Dake, after Virgil was wounded, and had authority to deputize.
Morgan has gained an undeserved reputation for being a hot-tempered man, but this appears to be on the basis of incidents related in the book The Earp Brothers of Tombstone purportedly written by Virgil Earp's wife Allie. However, the incidents in the book involving Morgan, like much else in the book, are almost certainly fabricated. From the rest of what is known of Morgan's life, he normally showed the same even temper and cool reactions to danger as did his brothers.
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