Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp with their wives, 1879
The Earp family was a Scots-Irish American dynasty of lawmen of the Wild West. Thomas Earp Jr. arrived in Anne Arundel County, Maryland on 6 July 1674 as an indentured servant from County Armagh, Ireland, and his family went on to be Methodist Republicans and settlers of the frontier. Sheriff Nicholas Porter Earp had three sons, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, who went on to serve in the Union Army during the American Civil War and become lawmen. In 1879, the Earps settled in Tombstone, Arizona, where the brothers became rivals with the Cochise County Cowboys while attempting to start their own business. From 1881-1882, the Earps and Cowboys engaged in a feud which resulted in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and left Virgil crippled and Morgan murdered, and Wyatt engaged in a "vendetta ride" against the Cowboys, who were backed by the town sheriff Johnny Behan. The vendetta ride ended in the deaths of Brocius, Johnny Ringo, and several Cowboys, and Wyatt went on to pursue a new life in California with his wife Josephine.