Earp Vendetta Ride - Stilwell Shooting in Tucson

Stilwell Shooting in Tucson

For more details on his death, see Frank Stilwell.

Wyatt made arrangements to escort Virgil and Addie to the train in Contention. On Monday, March 20, Wyatt received information that Ike Clanton, Frank Stilwell, Hank Swilling, and another Cowboy were watching the passenger trains in Tucson with the aim to kill Virgil. He thought getting the still invalid Virgil through to Tucson safely would require extra help. Wyatt, accompanied by Warren Earp, Doc Holliday, "Turkey Creek" Jack Johnson, and Sherman McMaster, took Virgil and Allie to nearby Contention City, where they stabled their horses and picked up an extra wagon. They rode in the wagons to Benson, where they caught the next train to Tucson. In Tucson, Virgil and Allie would connect with a train for California.

Upon their arrival in Tucson, they were greeted at the train station by Deputy U.S. Marshal J. W. Evans. Virgil later reported that they saw Stilwell and other Cowboys at the train station, but when they saw how well guarded Virgil was, withdrew from the station platform. Holliday deposited his shotguns in a safe place at the train station.

The group had dinner at Porter's Hotel near the station and returned to the train. Holliday asked someone to get his shotguns. Wyatt escorted Virgil and Allie aboard the train. A passenger told Virgil he saw men lying on a flatcar near the engine. Wyatt saw them too and slipped between the tracks, looking for the men. When the train pulled away from the Tucson station, gunfire was heard. Witnesses gave differing accounts but Frank Stilwell's body was found the next morning alongside the tracks riddled with two buckshot and three gunshot wounds. The coroner reported that Stilwell had been shot by five different weapons and had received a shotgun wound to the leg and a second shotgun wound to the chest. Many years later, Wyatt told his biographer Flood that he and his party had seen Clanton and Stilwell on the tracks with weapons, and he had shot Stilwell.

The other man, whom Wyatt identified as Ike Clanton, got away. Ike claimed in a newspaper interview afterward that he and Stilwell had been in Tucson to respond to a federal subpoena for interfering with a U.S. mail carrier when he allegedly robbed the Sandy Bob line of the Bisbee stage on September 8, 1881. The federal charges had been filed by Virgil Earp after Stilwell was acquitted for lack of evidence on the state charges of robbery.

Clanton said he had heard that the Earps were coming in on a train to kill Stilwell. According to Clanton, Stilwell for unknown reasons left the hotel and was found later, blocks away, on the tracks. Virgil told the Examiner, "One thing is certain, if I had been without an escort they would have killed me."