Tombstone was becoming a booming town.  What comes with a boom?  Yes, money and power, exactly.  Not only is there opportunity for miners and businessmen in Tombstone, there are also opportunities for the power brokers.  With Tombstone growing, the county of Cochise also grew, resulting in the need for a county sheriff.  This is a position that both Wyatt Earp and Johnny Behan wanted, an incredibly powerful and lucrative position.  The job might pay around $40,000 a year due to extras, like tax assessing and getting 10 percent from tax collecting.  Remember, this is around 1880.  Unbelievable!  Behan was a Democrat and Earp a Republican, and the Governor of the Arizona Territory, John Charles Fremont was also a Republican.  So it was safe to assume that Fremont would put Earp in the job.  Well, that didn’t happen and Behan got the job.  We will see later how Behan was perceived as letting the Cowboys get away with whatever they wanted to get away with, driving a bigger wedge between him and the Earps.

Now, Phineas would have you believe that politics is everything.  Well, he would be wrong.  Earp and Behan also contested each other over the affection of a young actress, Josephine Sarah Marcus.  We will talk more about that later too.