Wisconsin Eyewitnesses to the Gunfight at the OK Corral

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Photo courtesy Larry Widen

Billy Breakenridge

Billy Breakenridge

William Milton Breakenridge was born in Watertown in 1846. He joined the Army at age 16 and served during the 1864 Massacre at Sand Creek. A force of 675 soldiers attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, killing an estimated 150 men, women and children. Following his stint with the army, Breakenridge moved to Arizona and became a Maricopa County deputy sheriff in Phoenix.

A year later Breakenridge went to Tombstone and worked as a peace officer for Sheriff John Behan at the height of the silver boom. There were more than 3,000 miners laboring within 10 miles of Tombstone, and the town’s casinos, saloons, and houses of ill-repute were filled nearly every evening. 

Curly Bill Brocius, John Ringo, and Isaac “Ike” Clanton ran a gang of thieves and killers known as the Cowboys.  Behan and Breakenridge were suspected of maintaining a clandestine relationship with Brocius, which led to several murders of lawmen and civilians. After the Gunfight at the OK Corral in October 1881, Breakenridge led a dozen Cowboys to apprehend Wyatt Earp and Dr. John “Doc” Holliday for killing Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers in the violent gunfight. By 1882, the citizens of Tombstone voted John Behan out of office. Breakenridge worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and eventually dropped out of sight. 

In 1927 Breakenridge published an autobiography, “Helldorado: Bringing Law to the Mesquite”. The book sold well, but people who were around Breakenridge decades earlier denounced his memoirs as more fiction rather than fact. Wyatt Earp was depicted as a thief, pimp, crooked gambler, and murderer. The publicity generated by Breakenridge’s prompted Tombstone citizens to hold a festival the celebrated the anniversary of the famous shoot-out. “Helldorado Days” became an annual October event that continues to this day. Breakenridge when 84 years old when he died from cardiac failure in January 1930. The Watertown native is buried in Tucson’s Evergreen cemetery. 

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Public Domain

Louisa Earp

Louisa Earp

Louisa Houston, who became the wife of gunfighter Morgan Earp, was born January 24, 1855, in Iowa Wisconsin, near Watertown. She left home at 17 with her sister, Agnes, and they found employment in Kansas with Fred Harvey’s famous chain of restaurants along the railroads of the west. Passengers arriving in a town were greeted by one of the Harvey girls, wearing a black dress and a crisp white apron. Harvey hired attractive, intelligent women and put them under contract to display good moral character, live in a supervised dormitory, and remain single for one year.

Louisa was transferred to the Harvey restaurant in Dodge City where she met 29-year-old Morgan Earp. When her agreement with Harvey expired in 1877, Morgan and Louisa married. They relocated to Montana when Morgan was hired as a policeman. But the 30 to 40° below zero temperatures aggravated Louisa’s chronic rheumatoid arthritis. When Morgan was critically wounded in a gun battle, the couple went to the Earp family farm in San Bernardino, California. They counted on the warmer climate and medicinal hot springs to alleviate Louisa’s arthritis. She wrote letters to her family describing trees full of lemons, a freshwater stream from the nearby mountains, and flowers always in bloom.

But in November 1878, news of a $4 million dollar silver strike in Tombstone, Arizona reached Wyatt and Virgil Earp, and they encouraged Morgan to join them in the frontier’s newest boom town. Within a year, Tombstone’s population swelled to nearly 5,000 people and the Earp brothers’ wives hated living there. The city boasted 110 saloons, 50 hotels and boarding houses, and several hundred whores. Tombstone was filthy and dangerous, and the women rarely ventured outside their homes.

On October 26, 1881, Louisa was mending shirts when 30 gunshots roared from a block away. A breathless messenger boy told her Morgan had been shot in front of the O.K. Corral. She hurried down Fremont Street to find the coroner loading corpses into a wagon, and several town physicians tending the wounded. Louisa heaved a sigh of relief when she learned her husband was alive, having been shot in both shoulders. 

Four months later, three assassins shot Morgan in a billiard parlor on Allen Street. When Louisa arrived at the scene, she was told that he had been murdered. Louisa fell to the ground and sobbed. “He told me would lay down his life anytime to save his brothers”, she said. “God is too good to let his murderers go unpunished”. Louisa took Morgan’s coffin back to San Bernardino and he was buried on the Earp farm. She left soon after and never spoke to the family again. Depressed and angry, Louisa went to Los Angeles and rashly married a wealthy man named Gustave Peters. He was unfaithful to her and even attempted to ignite a romance with her sister, Agnes. Louisa’s medical condition became unmanageable and died in 1894 at the age of 39. Louisa Houston Earp Peters was buried in East Los Angeles, 2,000 miles from Watertown, Wisconsin.