The summer of 1877 came and went in Dodge City, Kansas.

It was the second major cattle season in the newest hub for Texas cattle on the Southern

Plains, a town that was sometimes called the Queen of the Cow Towns, and sometimes called

the Wickedest Town in the West.

Wyatt Earp, Batmasterson, and a collection of other now-famous lawmen kept the piece as

best they could. And when the season

reached its traditional end in September or early October, the town quieted down substantially. It wasn't

done common for the lawmen to venture out on other opportunities, whether it was judicial business

or just trying to make a personal fortune in the gold fields

of Deadwood. Wyatt Earp's adventure during the early winter months was to hunt an outlaw. He

certainly wasn't opposed to chasing a fortune. After two more seasons in Dodge, he would turn

in his badge and head to Tombstone to try to get rich mining the miners.

But in early November 1877, he had been given a temporary appointment as a deputy U.S.

Marshal, in addition to his regular duties as a lawman in Dodge, for the express purpose

of arresting one man, David Rudabaw. Dirty Dave Rudabaw, as he would be known, had robbed

a railroad camp in Kansas a month earlier, and the Santa Fe Railroad wanted him caught and punished.

Wyatt had now tracked the desperado hundreds of miles south to the raucous town of Fort Griffin,

Texas.

Like many communities in Texas, a town had grown up around a military outpost that had

been constructed to protect settlers from the Comanche and Kiowa attacks on the western frontier.

Wyatt had been in the saddle for the better part of a month, and when he stepped down

to the dirt street of Fort Griffin, he headed for the better part of a month, and when he stepped down to

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