by Clavin, Tom
On December 21, 1866, one of Carrington’s officers, Captain William Fetterman, led eighty men in an attack on what he thought was a small group of Indians riding with Crazy Horse. He fell into the trap planned by Red Cloud, and the army contingent was wiped out. The following year there was another battle, this one called the Wagon Box Fight, in northeast Wyoming. It wasn’t as fierce or as deadly as what had become known as the Fetterman Massacre (to the Sioux, it was the Battle of the Hundred Hands), but it was a close call for Jim Wilson and the others pinned down by attacking Indians for much of a hot August day. The next year, Wilson and another man got into trouble in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the incident included killing four men. To try to hide his violent past, when Wilson showed up in Kansas to hunt buffalo, he was “Jim White.” (Mayhem would always follow White, who was killed in 1880 at his hunting camp in Wyoming.)
From Dodge City west into Colorado there were dozens of hunting camps operating at a brisk and bloody pace into 1873. Tens of thousands of buffalo were felled and skinned. Though some buffalo meat was sold to the railroad to feed its construction crews, the harsh, hot breezes scouring the frontier carried the smell of rotting carcasses. Hunters were looked at with some disgust when they came to town because of the gagging scents they carried and their unkempt, gore-stained appearance. But everyone was making money and would continue to as long as the population of the animals held out.
Before 1872 ended and around the time of Bat’s nineteenth birthday, Jim Masterson arrived in Dodge City. At seventeen, he too had had enough of farming and he wanted to experience the adventures his brothers Bat and Ed—who had returned to hunting with Bat—were having. Skinning the hides off animals his brothers shot might not have been Jim’s idea of adventure, but he made more money than on the farm because the hunting was good right up until Christmas, when the last of the buffalo that had remained that far north with winter coming on were killed. The first week of January 1873 saw the brothers break up, with Ed and Jim heading to Sedgwick County and Bat staying in Dodge City.
Ed returned the following month. The brothers signed up again with the Nixon-and-White outfit even though there was little hunting to be done between snowstorms. Ed spent more time in town, working at a saloon, and probably served his brother drinks, when Bat rumbled in with a wagon full of hides. It was around this time that the patient and persevering Bat exacted his revenge on Raymond Ritter.
A friend who had been laying tracks in Colorado arrived in Dodge City and informed Bat that Ritter was on his way east, possibly on the very next train. Grabbing his six-shooter, Bat headed to the Dodge City station.
When the train pulled in, Bat got on board. He went from car to car until, sure enough, there was Ritter, who had to be shocked to see the young man who had become hardened by hunting since the last time Ritter had seen him. Bat hadn’t been pointing a pistol at him last time, either. Bat hauled the scoundrel out onto the platform. Word of the confrontation spread quickly, and a crowd gathered.
When Bat demanded the three hundred dollars, Ritter called for help, claiming he was being robbed. But he hadn’t left a good reputation behind, and in the time that Bat had lived in Dodge City, people had come to know a hardworking, reliable, and personable young man. No one came to Ritter’s aid. Instead, Bat was encouraged to pull the trigger, but he’d seen enough blood every day on the prairie and he just wanted the money he and his two companions had earned. Bat pressed the gun into Ritter’s ribs and tried to appear as menacing as his nineteen-year-old face would allow.
“I’m only collecting what you owe me, and everybody here knows that,” Bat said. “You ran out on me and Ed, but now you’re going to pay up.”
This explanation coupled with the pistol was persuasive enough for Ritter. He produced a round roll of bills, peeled off three hundred dollars, handed those bills to Bat, and boarded the train, which to his mind couldn’t depart fast enough.
Another thing the people of Dodge City had discovered about the young Masterson man was that he could hold his liquor and could be friendly and outgoing. He proved this all over again when he led the crowd to the Front Street saloon where Ed tended bar and dipped into the three hundred dollars to buy everyone a round of drinks.
FOUR
While a northern attorney was visiting in Wichita he dropped into the court room to see how the law was administered in that locality. A placard above the judge’s seat read: “No smoking allowed,” but the judge, nine of the jurymen, and half of the attorneys were smoking pipes or cigars.
—The Girard Press
Wyatt took to being a teamster right away. The work wasn’t any easier than plowing and harvesting and other responsibilities on the farm, but at least he wasn’t looking at the same fields every day. By the spring of 1866, Wyatt and Virgil Earp were very busy transporting cargo to and from towns and cities that included San Bernardino, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas in New Mexico.
After two years of that, Wyatt changed jobs, being hired to haul supplies to construction sites of the Union Pacific Railroad. If one of his goals was to see more of the American West, he certainly succeeded, because his routes allowed him to cover hundreds of miles between destinations. The hard work and being exposed to all kinds of weather and long stretches when he was driving alone and isolated in a vast, changing landscape hardened Wyatt in several ways. By the time he was twenty in 1868, he was a tall, strong, handsome man with piercing, cold blue eyes who had to depend on his strength and wits and patience to deal with a variety of places and people.
He and the protective Virgil relaxed together when not working together. While Wyatt never quite got the handle of hard liquor, he learned how to gamble and do it well at saloons and mining camps. He also took a shine to boxing. He was quick and packed a powerful punch. This came in handy when disputes, especially if the other person was drunk, could have led to shooting. Wyatt learned that a fast and well-placed fist or butt of a pistol could end a fight before it escalated.
But boxing became more than just recreation for him; it was a lifelong interest. Wyatt did not become a prizefighter himself; he instead learned how to referee boxing matches—and, of course, to bet on them. He would do one or both with boxing matches for most of his life, including high-profile championship bouts.
If he and Virgil weren’t already as close as two brothers can be, it was during this time that they became the best friend each other could have. In his biography of Virgil, Don Chaput has him as “an experienced farm hand and well-traveled stage driver [who] would be described in the coming years as a smiling, pleasant, rough frontiersman, with a keen sense of humor, afraid of nothing, eager to help, and all-around good company, for campfire, gambling hall, fence mending, and chewing the fat with friends, neighbors, and relatives.” Wyatt was not nearly as outgoing, but he and his brother had each other’s back.
Wyatt’s career as a peace officer might never have happened if he had remained traveling to and from California and the towns and camps in between. There was no indication that anything to do with being a lawman interested him at all. Probably, men like him worked and played with as little contact with the law as possible. And the restlessness in Wyatt had to be satisfied by hauling freight over hundreds of miles, not patrolling a city street.
Life changed thanks to the unabated restlessness of his father. Nicholas, even at fifty-five, was not content to stay put, and in 1868, only four years after making the perilous trip west, he was on the road again. After a short stay in Wyoming, the family arrived in southwestern Missouri. Nicholas and Virginia Ann and their youngest sons and daughter found a place to live in Lamar, and somehow he wangled a job as constable. Also living in Lamar was one of Nicholas’s brothers, Jonathan, who was a minister, like their father, Walter, had been.
Nicholas may have felt more comfortable being back in the South. Lamar, founded as recently as 1852, still showed signs of having been in the thick of the fighting. Only seven of the town’s buildings were still standing when the Civil
War ended. When the Earps arrived, Lamar was recovering, as evidenced by the construction of a courthouse and a bank. Soon, Wyatt showed up in the town. Perhaps he’d had enough of the dust of the Great American Desert in his nostrils and clothes, or even as a full-grown man he didn’t want to be too far away from family. Wyatt’s reason for giving up an itinerant life to try to settle down in Missouri can only be conjectured, because until the end of his days he refused to talk about Lamar.
It was there that Wyatt received his first taste of being a lawman. When a justice-of-the-peace position opened up, Nicholas took it, and his son was appointed to take his place as constable. Around the same time, in late autumn 1869, Wyatt experienced another life-changing event: he fell in love. In his travels as a teamster, Wyatt may have been smitten more than once with an appealing young woman, but it didn’t take long for him to conclude that his feeling for Aurilla Sutherland was the real thing.
William and Permelia Sutherland were real city folk, originally from New York. Aurilla was the sixth child and second daughter born to the couple, on January 10, 1850. Like Wyatt, she had been born in Illinois. When she was ten years old the Sutherlands moved south, to Missouri, to own and operate William’s Exchange Hotel right in the Lamar town square.
The twenty-one-year-old Wyatt and Aurilla could have met each other simply when Constable Earp stopped into the hotel. Or it may have been at a social event in Lamar, a town that had only sixteen hundred residents. Sherry Monahan, in her book Mrs. Earp, about all the women who were or fancied themselves wives of the Earp brothers, points out that the peripatetic and enterprising Nicholas Earp sold baked goods and oysters from a shop three doors down from William’s Exchange Hotel. It is even possible that they met at church, with members of both families attending Methodist services on Sundays.
In any case, Wyatt did not waste any time courting his new love in the fall of 1869 and through the holidays. With Nicholas officiating, Wyatt and Aurilla were married six days after her twentieth birthday, on January 16, 1870. Perhaps Wyatt had sown enough wild oats as a teamster and freight hauler out west that he would be content for many years with a wife and family and a steady job in Lamar.
Wyatt did not waste any time, either, starting that family. Aurilla became pregnant soon after the wedding. In August, to provide a home for his wife and expected child, Wyatt paid seventy-five dollars for a small house next to ones where Nicholas and Virginia Ann and their youngest children lived and where Newton resided. Also living in Lamar by then was Virgil. He too may not have wanted so much distance between himself and family. On May 30, also with Nicholas doing the honors, Virgil married Rozilla Draggoo. She was just seventeen.
The 1870 U.S. Census, conducted in Lamar on September 3, listed Nicholas and Virgil as grocers, Virginia Ann as keeping house for her husband, the children Warren and Adelia as members of the household, and Newton Earp as a farmer. Wyatt and Aurilla were listed as constable and homemaker. Life, it would seem, was good.
It got better when Wyatt won the election (receiving 137 votes) that month to remain as constable. He did it by defeating his own brother. Newton had not run against him out of any sibling rivalry but more likely to ensure the office stayed in the family. With Nicholas still justice of the peace, the Earps had the local legal system sewn up. They could look forward to the holidays with some financial security and an expanding family.
And then Aurilla died. The baby did not survive.
There is no record of a cause of death, though typhus or childbirth has been speculated. Wyatt’s never talking about Lamar certainly meant not mentioning anything about his first wife. Even in his later years, the memory must have been too painful, in addition to risking the jealousy of his fourth wife.
In November, the dreams of a home for his family dashed, Wyatt sold the lot, making a twenty-five-dollar profit on the transaction. It probably would have been best if he’d left Lamar and its painful memories. He didn’t, and he would soon live to regret it. He would go lower than the loss of his wife.
The first sign of Wyatt heading for trouble was when there was a brawl between Virgil and Wyatt (Newton or James may have been involved, too) and two of Aurilla’s brothers and three of their friends. There may have been some bitterness over her marriage and subsequent death, or it was a financial dispute. It is even possible that Wyatt was in a reckless mood—and Virgil, too, after Rozilla apparently left him—and went looking for mischief. In any event, the boxing Earp brothers took on five men, and no one was badly hurt.
Then early in 1871, Wyatt was hauled into court, accused of stealing or not repaying a loan of twenty dollars. The charge was dismissed, but clearly Wyatt was in a downward spiral, driven almost mad with grief. He resigned as constable, and his next step after that—decidedly a step down—was to become a horse thief.
The two horses stolen belonged to a man named William Keys, who lived in Indian Territory. Wyatt must have made his way to what is now eastern Oklahoma, because in the company of two men, John Shown and Edward Kennedy, he showed up at the home of Keys in Fort Gibson. A strange statement later given to the court by Shown’s wife alleges that Wyatt and Kennedy got Shown drunk and they rode for three nights into Kansas with two horses stolen from Keys. They were arrested and arraigned on April 14, and Anna Shown claimed that Wyatt and Kennedy threatened to kill her husband if he testified against them.
Wyatt somehow came up with five hundred dollars to make bail. He was never convicted; it is believed that after Kennedy’s trial resulted in his acquittal, Wyatt was let loose. There is a story that Kennedy and Wyatt were kept in a jail in Van Buren, Arkansas, from which they and five other prisoners escaped on May 8. In any event, if he had been tried and convicted of what was a very serious crime, there may not have been lawman Wyatt Earp.
It would have been that autumn, perhaps trying to stay as far away from peace officers as possible, that Wyatt joined up with a buffalo-hunting outfit and crossed trails with Bat Masterson. Corroboration comes from two other sources. Bat’s good friend Billy Dixon, in a book written many years later, recalled meeting Wyatt in the hunting camps and that he “was a shy young man with few intimates. With casual acquaintances he seldom spoke unless spoken to. When he did say anything, it was to the point, without fear or favor, which wasn’t relished by some; but that never bothered Wyatt.”
Another source is Bill Tilghman, who would become one of the more famous frontier lawmen. He recalled meeting Wyatt while buffalo hunting, and noted that what separated him from the other men was that Wyatt never drank alcohol.
And many years later in her family memoir, Adelia Earp Edwards recalled an incident: “Morgan was in a fight with a buffalo hunter one day and it would have come to shooting if Newton had not gotten between them and talked them into shaking hands. Morgan had a terrible temper while Newton was always very even in his ways. I recall he used to say, ‘Morg and Warren will be the death of me.’” Hundreds of young men had turned to buffalo hunting to make good money, and with no other prospects, it makes sense that Wyatt was one of them.
In March 1872, he turned twenty-four. He was already a widower and a fellow who had had repeated brushes with the law. He had no home and no real prospects and, writes Sherry Monahan, he “apparently continued his downward spiral into the depths of depravity.” Wyatt was a lonely man touched by tragedy, who was reluctant or unable to make friends and to let anyone get close to him. It would have been very easy for him to fall in with the wrong crowd and repeat the ill-advised horse-stealing escapade, or worse.
Instead, Wyatt went to Wichita and found redemption.
FIVE
Bat was a handsome young fellow with a reckless devil-may-care look. He was already an experienced plainsman and a noted shot.
—BILL TILGHMAN
Jim Masterson mostly stayed in Dodge City while his brothers Bat and Ed continued hunting. But the harvest in the summer and fall of 1873 was down significantly—a combination of incessant hunting having thinned the herds and a
smaller migration than usual of buffalo coming north to the Arkansas River. And there was a national economic downturn that year. What was being called back east the Panic of 1873 reduced consumer demand across the board. Some men gave up hunting. The ones who remained found that they had to go farther afield to find the herds. This carried risks, chiefly being confronted by Indians also seeking a share of the dwindling resource.
One of those hunters was Bat, and after his confrontation with Indians, he almost went the way of the buffalo. But the result of his stomach-knotting experience was another bump up in his emerging reputation.
It was not smart for a hunter to set out alone, but that is what Bat did one day in the third week of December. He was unaware that his search for buffalo brought him near the camp of a Cheyenne band led by Bear Shield. Bat was happy to have found a stray buffalo, and he killed it. But as he was skinning the animal he was surrounded by five warriors. Before Bat could move, one Cheyenne lifted his Sharps rifle up off the ground, another yanked his pistol out of the holster, and when Bat turned to try to grab it back, the first Indian bashed him with the rifle barrel.
Blood flowed from a gash in his head. Bat fought to remain conscious, afraid that if he collapsed the Indians might choose to do to him what he’d been doing to the buffalo. He concluded from their gestures that the Cheyenne wanted him to leave the dead buffalo to them and go away … on foot, because they were keeping his horse, too. Bat had no choice but to make tracks. Somehow, he managed to find his camp, where other hunters stitched up his wound.