Yesterday was St. Crispin’s Day (Oct 25). Anyone familiar with Henry V and Agincourt knows about St. Crispin’s Day. Maybe it is irony that the Gunfight at the OK Corral occurred on October 26, the day after traditional celebration of that saint’s day.

Yesterday I had an experience that was new to me. I’ve had the honor of being the author to transcribe, footnote, and annotate Endicott Peabody’s diary of the construction of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church here in Tombstone. He was here for a six-month period during the most turbulent days of the Earp era. The importance of the diary is the fact he did not have an ax to grind and didn’t take sides in the argument.

Yesterday, I wanted to stop by St. Paul’s to see when the Sunday service was (10:30AM). As I walked into the church and went up to the altar to bow and cross myself in the traditional Episcopalian manner, I realized I was the first person, since Endicott Peabody and George Parsons were in the church in the 1930s, to know the full story about how it was built. It was a very strange feeling to walk into a building and look at the pews and remember how hard Peabody worked to have them cleaned and polished for the first service. I was flooded with impressions of the diary and his stories. I realized, until today and the arrival of the newly published book, no one knew those stories but me.

This brings me back to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. A few weeks ago, on one of the Internet forums dedicated to the Wild West, someone posted a think piece about not going into the festivities with a light heart. I thought very little about it until I walked into St. Paul’s yesterday. It gave me an entirely new perspective. I don’t even know if I can enjoy all the exciting events that are planned now. People died here. Families lost loved ones. Lives were ruined. Futures were destroyed. Families were uprooted. This was not a three-ring circus. It was a life and death struggle to the bitter end. It was a war. Granted, it was short and relatively quiet as wars go, but it was a war.

Instead of celebrating the events that mark the shooting, perhaps we should step back and think about the lives of those involved in a two-year struggle between law and disorder. It was not pretty. It was cruel, dirty, and vicious. It involved betrayal and lies. Do we celebrate this? As the young Endicott Peabody discovered when he arrived here, reality isn’t pretty. It was brutal to the point he became weighted down with the sadness of life here in Tombstone.

Let’s start with the Earps.

Morgan was murdered. Virgil spent the rest of his life in pain and crippled from his injuries. Hattie Ketchum married a man she did not love and ended up divorcing him. Frank split with his stepfather, James Earp, and broke his mother Bessie’s heart. She died a few years after leaving Tombstone, broken by the desertion of her children. Wyatt and Mattie’s divorce ended once and for all. His future changed. He lived under the shadow of his actions for the rest of his life. Warren was murdered in Wilcox in 1900. Mattie Blaylock Earp was murdered (I think) in 1887.