Right. The county sheriff's faction, i.e. John Behan and the Clanton/McLaurey ruffians, and the town marshall's faction, i.e. the Earps and Holliday, were bitter enemies. A large part of that mutual enmity was due to the Earps' well known status as Union Army veterans and the Clanton faction's history of sympathy for the Confederate cause, and if what I have read is correct both sides were much less than innocent in the shooting incident which claimed 3 lives and achieved notoriety all over the country.
It seems that the role of honest, brave LE officers assigned to the Earps and the role of cowardly cattle thieves assigned to the Clanton faction were assigned by the popular dime novels of that era rather than by the actual residents of Tombstone who knew the truth about both groups of gamblers, small time thieves, and politically motivated opportunists.
Was there really a robbery of that stage? Did Holliday do it? Was it a put-up job by the Clanton McLaurey faction to discredit the Earps?
Nobody will ever know the truth of it, but anyone who has done even a modicum of research into the whole thing knows that the dime novel version of the whole affair is just so much bunk...
the infowarrior
While Virgil Earp was, indeed, a veteran of the Union army, Neither Wyatt, nor his younger brother Morgan were (both were too young at the time). This actually worked in Wyatt's favor, when he became "peacekeeper" in both Witchita, and Dodge City, during the cattle boom.
Since the majority of the herds arriving for sale in these boom towns came from Texas, and were driven by ex-Confederates. The "powers that were" *wanted* these ex-Confederates to hang around long enough to put most of the herd sale money back into their pockets, in the form of entertainment for these cowboys who had spent long, hard months driving the herds to these market towns. A local lawman with a Union Army background, with an obvious axe to grind, didn't fit in with these plans.
Enter young Wyatt Earp, an ambitious, rather mercenary, young man, without *any* of that baggage. He became a good fit as their "town super-bouncer", and I'll admit, he was quite successful at it, moving from one boom town to the next. But in the final analysis, his actual "career" as a lawman reads more like the career of a Patrick Swayze "Roadhouse" style bouncer than anything else...
the infowarrior