by Clavin, Tom
The wanderlust that Wyatt and his brothers exhibited throughout their lives was clearly inherited from their father. Nicholas had the misfortune of becoming a young widower, and that contributed to his roaming farther and farther west. Newton was born to the Earps on October 7, 1837, and Mariah Ann on February 12, 1839. Then there were twin tragedies. Abigail, only twenty-six, died in October, and her daughter lived for only ten months, leaving Nicholas by himself with a two-year-old son.
Not for long, though. Virginia Ann Cooksey of Kentucky was nineteen when she married Nicholas Earp on July 30, 1840. They wasted little time, giving birth to a son, James, in June 1841 in Hartford, Kentucky. Virgil followed in July 1843, also in Hartford; Martha in September 1845; and Wyatt in 1848. Martha had been named for Nicholas’s mother, and Wyatt, oddly, for an army officer.
When Wyatt came along, the family was living in a white two-story house in Monmouth, a town in western Illinois. They had moved there from Kentucky with Walter and at least two more of his sons. Nicholas was by 1848 a war veteran, though how much action he actually saw was debatable. Walter served as a justice of the peace in Monmouth—and was called Judge Earp by the citizens—and would eventually be buried there, in 1853. Nicholas did some farming, operated a saloon, and also was a justice of the peace. If Nicholas had not gotten restless, or patriotic, the growing family might have remained in Illinois indefinitely.
But then came the war with Mexico, in 1846, as a result of the United States having annexed Texas the year before. Though Nicholas was thirty-three and had a wife and children, he enlisted in the 2nd Company of the Illinois Mounted Volunteers. His commanding officer was a local merchant named Wyatt Berry Stapp. Nicholas admired his captain, and the company saw some fighting in Mexico, with a dozen men reported killed. Nicholas missed out on further action. As he explained in a statement included in his army pension file, “I received a specific disability occasioned by the kick of a mule in my groin … this disability being received at Magdalena, Mexico while in active service in the Mexican War for my country.” By December 1847, Nicholas was back in Monmouth, and Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was born four months later.
While he did not have a very distinguished military career, Nicholas’s service did make him eligible for a land grant from the federal government. (His service also provided him, beginning in 1894, with a pension of twelve dollars a month.) He moved his family of four sons and a daughter west across the Mississippi to Pella, Iowa, where he farmed eighty acres and again served as a justice of the peace. There, he and Virginia Ann had two more sons, Morgan in 1851 and Warren in 1855.
In 1856, the family moved back to Monmouth, but this time the reason wasn’t restlessness, it was grief. That May, Martha had died, four months shy of her eleventh birthday. No cause of death was recorded, but it was not uncommon for children to succumb to fevers or other ailments that today would be easily treated. It was in Monmouth, two years later, that Virginia was born. The presumably exhausted Mrs. Earp was to bear only one more child, who, fortunately and thanks to living into the middle of the next century, served as the Earp family historian for future generations.
It was a somewhat dizzying time for the family. Nicholas returned to farming and also became a constable … but not for long, and he and his brood were in Pella once again. All of this moving about up to the eve of the Civil War was not attributed completely to wanderlust. Nicholas had an uneasy relationship with the law, even though he himself had spent time administering it. While living in Kentucky, he had learned how to make moonshine whiskey. He supplemented his income by producing and selling it in Illinois, and whenever he was caught, he was fined. Nicholas was not particular about paying those fines. While Pella held the sad memory of a lost child, it was a familiar place in another state where he wasn’t viewed as a criminal.
The Civil War caused disagreements within the family. Though a resident of Iowa as well as Abe Lincoln’s Illinois, Nicholas considered himself a Southerner. He claimed that a reason he had signed up for the Mexican-American War was to defend Texas and make sure it became a Southern state. Nicholas was opposed to secession and slavery, however. His sons saw themselves as Northerners, so when Newton, James, and Virgil enlisted, they left home to do it and all entered the Union Army.
Newton was twenty-four when, on November 11, 1861, he signed up with Company F of the Fourth Cavalry, Iowa Volunteers. In September 1863, he was promoted to corporal, and three months later he apparently passed up the opportunity to go home by reenlisting. He was in the fourth year of service in the Union Army when he was discharged in Louisville, Kentucky, in June 1865, having risen to the sergeant’s rank.
Virgil’s desire to join the Union Army may have been motivated by more than a call to arms. He was only seventeen when he fell in love with Ellen Rysdam, a daughter of the large Dutch community in Pella. In September 1861, the two teenagers eloped, getting married in the next county under the assumed names of Walter Earp and Ellen Donahoo. Just over nine months later Nellie Jane Earp was born and would be only a year younger than her aunt Adelia, born to Nicholas and Virginia in 1861. A couple of weeks later, on July 26, 1862, Virgil was back in Monmouth, exchanging the role of new father for the rank of private when, having just turned nineteen, he enlisted and went off to war.
Like Newton, Virgil was involved in some fighting and managed not to be severely wounded. He was a member of Company C of the 83rd Illinois Volunteer Regiment that was stationed in Tennessee and Kentucky. The muster roll of the company describes Virgil as five feet ten with “light hair, blue eyes, light complexion, single, farmer.” Wyatt would become almost like a twin brother to Virgil, so close was their physical resemblance.
The regiment didn’t fight in any major battles, but it did mix it up near Fort Donelson in 1863, against troops led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Most of the regiment’s time was spent guarding roads and supply trains. Virgil spent almost three years in the army, and was discharged in Nashville in June 1865.
Yet in a way he was a casualty—he had been reported killed in action. Virgil didn’t know this until he returned to Illinois. Don Chaput, in his biography Virgil Earp: Western Peace Officer, speculates that Virgil’s doom was authored by Ellen’s father with Nicholas Earp’s approval because the two men had not wanted the marriage and the war offered a way out. Ellen was told that Virgil was badly wounded in a battle and a short time later he reportedly succumbed to those wounds. The Rysdams, with Ellen taking the “fatherless” Nellie Jane with them, emigrated west and south, settling in Kansas.
When Virgil came home, all he was told was that his wife and son were gone. Maybe he was relieved, because he did not set out in search of them. Ellen unknowingly committed bigamy when she married in 1867. Virgil would be reunited with his daughter, his only child, and his “widow,” but that would not be until decades later.
James Earp would be the only one of the three brothers to sustain a serious injury in the war. During an early battle, in Fredericktown, Missouri, he was struck in the left shoulder by a musket ball. It went through the shoulder, shattered the joint, and flew out of his chest. In an age of routine amputation, James was fortunate to keep the arm, but enough agonizing damage had been done that he spent the next seventeen months in military hospitals. He could never get back to fit-for-duty status, because he would not recover full use of the arm. When he was discharged from the army in 1863, he returned to the Earp homestead.
While his brothers were off saving the Union, Wyatt had remained at home, and he wasn’t happy about it. He was thirteen when the Civil War began and had no chance of following his brothers into the army. Worse, as the oldest of the Earp sons remaining on the eighty-acre farm—Morgan and Warren were only ten and six—many of the responsibilities fell to him. Wyatt did not like farming and he spent the rest of his life avoiding it. When the day came that he couldn’t stand the plowing and milking and other onerous chores anymore, he ran away.
There are several versions to this story, but
the gist of it is that Wyatt, thinking that his father had business to attend to in the western part of the county, took off in another direction, to Ottumwa, Iowa, intending to join the Union Army. Most likely, because he was still underage, he must have hoped to find a disinterested recruiter and one not familiar with the Earp family. What he found there instead was his father, who had either been tipped off or knew his restless son well enough. Wyatt was hauled home and ordered back into the cornfields.
According to a story he told in later years—which, like many of his stories, may or may not have been embellished by a biographer—Wyatt was about to be punished by a switch. As Nicholas moved in, Virginia Ann got between him and her son. Nicholas moved her aside. Wyatt viewed this as manhandling his mother and rushed his father. Nicholas was impressed by this bold action and canceled the punishment.
Despite his Southern sympathies, Nicholas was active during the war as a deputy U.S. provost marshal in charge of recruiting in his congressional district. This role was apparently not enough to satisfy him, because in the spring of 1864 he couldn’t resist the temptation to take to the road again. But this time, the trek wouldn’t be across the border to the adjacent state. The new destination was California.
Because of his Mexican War experience and a tall tale he told in which he had prospected for gold in that state in 1850, Nicholas was selected as the leader of a wagon train of 150 Pella residents ready to do their part in the manifest-destiny scenario. Sharing Nicholas’s wagon would be his wife, Wyatt, Morgan, Warren, the still-recovering James, and Adelia. Specifically, the migrants aimed to wind up in San Bernardino and begin farming there.
Along the way, though, there was some friction between Nicholas and his fellow travelers. As leader, he was gruff, short-tempered, and a stickler for the rules he had laid down. One of the group was Dr. J. A. Rousseau, whose wife kept a diary during the trek. In one of her entries she notes that “Mr. Earp had another rippet” because Warren had gotten into a fight with another boy, and “then he commenced about all the children. Used very profane language and swore if the children’s parents did not whip or correct their children he would whip every last one of them.”
Nicholas was not necessarily being arrogant, though there was some of that in his personality. The fact was he was leading farmers and their families on a long and rugged journey across the Great American Desert and up and down mountains, and there would be all kinds of weather and other risks to face. In a letter written to a friend in Pella in 1865, Nicholas described one of them, a day when his troop of amateurs fought off an Indian attack.
In old age, Wyatt told a biographer that he had participated in the defense of the wagon train several times, and during one attack his quick thinking in provoking horses and oxen to stampede succeeded in turning back a force of onrushing Indians. This may have been an invented incident but it was Wyatt’s story and he stuck to it. He told a nephew a story about his father tossing a Paiute Indian out of the wagon train’s camp because he had the annoying habit of never leaving and possibly stealing from the travelers’ wagons. When the Paiute returned, he had a group of braves with him. He pulled a knife and his comrades appeared menacing, but they backed down when Nicholas and his son drew pistols. “If he’d have got Pa, I aimed to cut him down,” Wyatt told his nephew.
Wyatt also claimed to have met Jim Bridger in Utah. This is possible, as the legendary mountain man, though in his advanced years and arthritic by 1864, was still active as a scout for the army and private hunting parties throughout the Great Plains. Supposedly, Bridger taught the sixteen-year-old about hunting and fishing in the mountains.
Despite all the hardships, the wagon train did make it to San Bernardino that December, completing a two-thousand-mile trip with no loss of life.
The only “loss” was James. No, the wounds did not get to him; the lure of gambling and other entertainment did. As the wagon train neared Austin, Nevada, James veered off to it. He found a mining camp enjoying some prosperity. A man who could deal cards and pour drinks and tell war stories could find a decent job there. For James, this was the beginning of a lifelong career.
After Virgil found out that he was as single as he had put on his enlistment papers and there was nothing for him to do in Illinois or Iowa, he made his way west, too, joining the other Earps in San Bernardino. No chance he was going to be a farmer, though. With his physical strength and way with horses, driving a stagecoach was more to his liking. Virgil was hired to drive coaches in the triangle that was San Bernardino and Los Angeles and Prescott, Arizona. At times the triangle expanded to a rectangle when runs to Salt Lake City were included. Prescott was where shipments went to the goldfields and mining camps in the territory. His coaches always got through because Virgil had great stamina and he carried with him from the war a reputation as a tough man.
He couldn’t do the entire job by himself, and by the late summer of 1865 he needed a sidekick. Who better than his brother Wyatt? Though Wyatt was still in his teens, there was no way that Nicholas could keep him on the farm, and maybe he didn’t want to, because the routine chores of farming kept the seventeen-year-old in a chronic bad humor. From that point on, when Virgil climbed on a stagecoach, Wyatt was up top with him. His role was “swamper,” which involved helping to load and unload the coaches and spell Virgil as driver, gaining valuable experience.
Then one time the two brothers went out from San Bernardino and didn’t come back. According to their youngest sister, Adelia, interviewed many years later by a California newspaper, “When Virgil finished stage driving he and Wyatt went to Prescott, working for a big San Bernardino freight company with great wagons and long teams of mules and oxen.”
This might not sound like very romantic work, but for young Wyatt Earp it was a big step toward a more adventurous life. Part of that life was getting schooled by Virgil and other freight-company workers on the joys of alcohol. For Wyatt, though, there was not much joy.
As Adelia wrote in her memoir, “When they arrived in Prescott, all the men went to a saloon in town to celebrate a mite. Wyatt had hardly taken a drink before and the whiskey soon had him reeling. Real drunk. He just passed out and Virgil and another friend took him off to his bed. When he woke up, he was in a terrible state all right, sick, headache, perspiring and trembling all over. Virge told him the only cure was to take a few more drinks. He did just that, and got as bad as before.”
For the rest of his life, Wyatt’s preferred drink was coffee, with the occasional exception of a small glass of beer. And there were times when being sober at a crucial moment probably saved his life.
THREE
“We’re going to do well here, Caroline,” Pa said. “This is a great country. This is a country I’ll be contented to stay in the rest of my life.”
Laura knew what he meant. She liked this place, too. She liked the enormous sky and the winds, and the land that you couldn’t see to the end of. Everything was so free and big and splendid.
—LAURA INGALLS WILDER, Little House on the Prairie
Portrayals of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral do not include Bat Masterson. That is as it should be because although he was in Tombstone in 1881, Bat went off to a different adventure before the iconic fight took place that October. But many portrayals in books and movies and television episodes of Wyatt Earp’s adventures and activities previous to Tombstone also don’t include Bat, even if he was present. When he is there, he’s usually portrayed as being little more than a comic foil or coat holder to Wyatt in favor of giving Wyatt himself or even Doc Holliday more attention. Doc and Bat were not fond of each other, and if the latter could see into the future of American culture, this subservient role would only have given him even more reason to dislike the dissolute dentist.
The fact is, Bat Masterson was no one’s Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, or Slim Pickens. Nor was he a retiring personality who let others do the talking, with their mouths or their six-shooters. His life was as adventurous as Wyatt’s, probably even mor
e so when one includes his cosmopolitan days in New York City, but Bat did not have a gunfight in Tombstone to burnish his legend to an iconic glow.
Most accounts of his life have had him born, like Wyatt and Wild Bill Hickok, in Illinois. He was not. Bertholomiew Masterson was born in Quebec, Ontario, Canada, on November 26, 1853. When his supposed Illinois birth was reported during his lifetime, Bat did not try to correct it. Perhaps he didn’t think it was important enough to make the effort, or as with the twenty or more men he was alleged to have killed in gunfights, the fallacy was more interesting and he simply went along with it. But here is an instance when the truth would have been at least as intriguing as the legend: if Bat never formally became a U.S. citizen, as a Canadian he never should have voted or held a federal office. William Barclay Masterson, the name he later claimed as his, did both.
On the other hand, the fact of how he acquired his nickname “Bat” is not as intriguing as the various published explanations. One was that as a child he was an especially talented baseball player and swung a good bat, as unlikely as this explanation was for a youngster in the 1850s. Another reason came about years later, when he was wounded in a gunfight, and thereafter walked with the aid of a gold-topped cane that he wielded as a weapon. But what is believed the most accurate explanation was that as a youngster his parents and siblings shortened the Anglicized “Bartholomew” to “Bat.”