The Cochise County Cowboys

Book excerpt: Joyce Aros combines her considerable artistic skill with careful research plus a fair amount of intuition, thus giving us a new and refreshing look at a variety of Cochise County "cowboy" characters associated with stories about the Earps.Heretofore, the "cowboys" have been portrayed as gun-slinging, snaggle-toothed bad guys bent on destruction with no family history, morals, or redeeming qualities.This book gives us a better understanding of the Earp enemies who have been written off as little more than scoundrels and scallywags. Certainly most of these men rode dark trails, but the Earps were not exactly choir boys. Tough times bred tough men.This is another side to the Tombstone story.