by Clavin, Tom
Stuart Lake’s biography claimed that Wyatt Earp arrived on the scene to see what all the commotion was about, and the mayor immediately made him the new marshal of Ellsworth. However unlikely this is, it does seem that Wyatt intervened to help defuse the situation. He may have encountered Thompson before, perhaps only just weeks earlier as fellow gamblers in the saloons, or maybe he simply didn’t want to see his new hometown shot up. A mortally wounded sheriff may have tipped the scales. In any case, this was Wyatt’s first confrontation that began to build his reputation as a lawman.
Wyatt told his third wife a few years later that he squared off against Ben Thompson: “I thought he would shoot me. I really expected to be killed unless I could see his wrist move in time to draw and fire before he could pull the trigger. I just kept looking him in the eye as I walked toward him. And when he started talking to me I was pretty sure I had him. I tried to talk in as pleasant a voice as I could manage and I told him to throw his gun in the road. He did and that’s all there was to it.”
Thompson was arrested by a county deputy sheriff named Edward O. Hougue. As soon as Ben was securely behind bars, a posse was formed to go find Billy. They went on their way, and shortly afterward a gambler friend of Ben’s, Cad Pierce, offered a thousand dollars for the formation of a new posse that would chase down and stop the first posse. There were no takers, but the first posse lost Billy’s trail, anyway.
The next day, Ben Thompson was brought before a judge. He was fined twenty-five dollars, he paid it, and then he rode off to track down his brother. A new police force was installed in Ellsworth, and one of its members killed Cad Pierce in a gunfight. Billy eventually returned to Ellsworth and was acquitted of murder. Before Whitney died, the sheriff stated that his shooting had been an accident.
When Wyatt finally arrived in Wichita, in 1874, the town was at its peak in transporting cattle, with one reasonable estimate being eighty thousand of them packed into railroad cars and sent off to the slaughterhouses. Some years before, the site had been little more than tall, waving prairie grass on the bank of the Arkansas River, and now it was a bustling, noisy, dusty Eden for ranchers selling their animals. Wyatt’s older brother James, now married to a woman named Bessie, had already settled in Wichita, working at a saloon. Bessie operated a brothel. (In a census taken the following year, Bessie’s occupation was listed as “Sporting.”)
With a steady flow of cowboys into town, saloons were springing up on every corner. Officials went so far as to post signs on the trails leading in that read EVERYTHING GOES IN WICHITA. At night, wafting through the dry air and vying with the stench of the penned-up cattle, were the scents of beer and whiskey, horses, cheap perfume, and men who had gone too long between baths.
The tinkling of pianos came from the saloons, background to the laughter and the occasional crashing sounds when a fight broke out. It took a lot of rambunctiousness to put a cowboy in jail, where he could not spend money. Besides going to alcohol, that money was taken readily enough by the card players who stayed glued to chairs at saloon gaming tables. Young women in fluffy dresses offered songs and other favors. In Wichita, prostitution was legal as long as the ladies were licensed.
The city was gaining the sort of reputation that would soon be replicated and exceeded by Dodge City’s. “Wichita resembles a brevet hell after sundown,” intoned The St. Louis Republican. “Brass bands whooping it up; harlots and hack drivers yelling and cursing; dogs yelping, pistols going off; bullwhackers cracking their whips; saloons open wide their doors, and gayly attired females thump and drum up pianos, and in dulcet tones and mocking smiles invite the boys in and night is commenced in earnest.”
One of those fights led to Wyatt becoming a Wichita lawman. In May 1874, a brawl broke out in one of the saloons that spilled out into the streets, inviting more participants to join in. Somehow, Wyatt got mixed up in it and was arrested. He was being escorted to the jail by the deputy marshal when a new group of rowdy cowboys entered town. With the deputy marshal looking for a way out, Wyatt talked the newcomers out of causing further damage. When Marshal Bill Smith heard about this, he offered Wyatt the deputy marshal’s job. Wyatt took it, though it was not a full-time position, more of an as-needed job.
Wyatt joined not a moment too soon. That same month, Charley Sanders returned home to find two Texas cowboys attempting to have their way with his wife. He was a strapping, black hod carrier, and the cowboys were no match for him. Sanders beat them both badly and tossed them out in the street. This humiliation had to be avenged. The next day the two bruised men and several other cowboys rode into town, found Sanders working at the construction of a building, and shot him twice. Rather than wait for the marshal, the men went and found Smith, who wouldn’t dare challenge so many guns. He stepped aside and the cowboys sauntered off. Clearly, a more aggressive form of policing was needed in Wichita.
The town got it, Wyatt’s way. Ida May was the owner of a brothel who provided a piano from Kansas City purchased for $1000 as additional entertainment. Actually, she had paid a quarter of that price and didn’t bother forking over the remaining $750. The piano store owner wired the marshal’s office in Wichita, requesting that the piano be repossessed and held until he could come get it. Wyatt showed up at the brothel with several men to do just that. When he found the parlor filled with drunken cowboys, he shamed them into passing the hat for money to make a payment on the piano. It stayed in the parlor, but the Texans were angry with Wyatt’s manner.
The next day, about fifty of them banded together on the southwest side of the Arkansas River, led by a man named Mannen “Gip” Clements, who was a cousin of John Wesley Hardin. It was time to remind the law who really ruled Wichita. Expecting trouble, Wyatt had recruited a force of gun-toting citizens to support the police force, and they waited on the Wichita side of the river. When the cowboys rode across the bridge, they were surprised to be confronted. Wyatt, with a shotgun crooked in his arm, ordered Clements and his men to holster their pistols. There was a tense standoff for a few moments; then the cowboys returned to their camp.
By now, a host of Hollywood screenwriters would have concocted plots based on a chance meeting in Wichita between the man who would become the most famous lawman of the West and a thirteen-year-old who would become one of its most notorious outlaws. There are accounts of Henry Antrim and his mother living in an apartment near the courthouse where Wyatt worked. He had been born William Henry McCarty Jr. in New York City, and after his mother married William Antrim, the boy was called by his middle name. He and his mother were stopping for a while in the bustling Wichita on their way to New Mexico, where he would achieve infamy as Billy the Kid. Alas, here is a case of the legend being more enticing than the fact: his mother had married Antrim and they had settled in New Mexico the year before, and in 1874 she died of tuberculosis.
In late October, Wyatt was called upon to chase down a group of men identified in the local press as the “Higgenbotham outfit.” These “scalawags,” as The Wichita City Eagle called them, had toted up over twenty thousand dollars in debts and run out on them by stealing a man’s new wagon. The theft victim filed a complaint, and officers John Behrens and Wyatt set off. They tracked the wagon for seventy-five miles. One has to think there was a more effective way for the fugitives to make good their escape, or they never expected the lawmen to be so persistent. In any case, Behrens and Wyatt confronted the Higgenbotham outfit with shotguns and six-shooters, and restitution was arranged.
In Wichita, Wyatt was putting his life back together, but he was no choirboy. In between his deputy responsibilities he was a gambler and, evidence indicates, working again as a bordello bouncer or manager. This would not necessarily be redemption in the modern sense, but in Wichita at that time that was a legitimate occupation. Someone had to protect the “soiled doves,” as prostitutes were often condescendingly called, from the cowboys, miners, mule skinners, and other ruffians who could be violent. Moonlighting lawmen often made for good guardians, muc
h the same as policemen today moonlight as security guards—though not, presumably, where prostitution is being practiced.
That Wyatt was wearing a badge regularly and was gaining the trust of the citizenry in Wichita was a form of redemption. And it would seem his grieving over Aurilla had faded, because there was a new woman in his life, one who would be considered his second wife, even if they never wound up standing in front of a preacher.
Sarah Haspel was sixteen at the time that Wyatt worked for her mother at the brothel in Peoria. Their “wedding,” such as it was, had occurred in September 1872, when Sarah and Wyatt were arrested and a Peoria newspaper identified her as Sarah Earp. (Wyatt was identified as “the Peoria bummer.”) Sarah’s father, Frederick Haspel, a German immigrant, had lost a leg while fighting in the Union Army and did not return to Illinois afterward. By then, Jane Haspel had three youngsters to feed and house, and she did so by opening a brothel. During Sarah’s teenage years, she became one of her mother’s employees.
Whatever detours Wyatt took in 1872–1873, when he arrived in Wichita he had Sarah with him. Carrying on the family tradition—both families, it seems—she joined forces with Bessie Earp in operating a brothel. This was not anything like the domestic life that Wyatt had envisioned and had begun to live in Lamar, but now he was older and wiser about life and how much to expect from it. Wichita was home now, he had a “wife,” at least one of his brothers was a neighbor, and once again—at least, most of the time—Wyatt was working on the right side of the law. For now—maybe for good—this was enough.
SEVEN
You who live your lives in cities or among peaceful ways cannot always tell whether your friends are the kind who would go through fire for you. But on the Plains one’s friends have an opportunity to prove their mettle.
—WILLIAM F. “BUFFALO BILL” CODY
Bat was glad to be back in Dodge City. Unlike some of the others from Adobe Walls who wanted to return there while it was still hunting season and the army had Quanah Parker and the Comanche occupied, Bat intended to stay put.
Not that Dodge City was an oasis of calm in the summer of 1874. Many people were frightened by the outbreak of violence and the threat of marauding Indian bands. It was said that over a hundred white people had been killed between the Arkansas River and the Rio Grande, a high enough total that some homesteaders and hunters sought the shelter of Fort Dodge. Bat wasn’t about to do that, either. The Adobe Walls adventure had left him without nearly as much money as he had anticipated, and he had to do something about that. For a time, that something was gambling.
But Bat’s luck must have been all used up by surviving the Battle of Adobe Walls and the subsequent trip back from the Panhandle to Dodge City with his scalp still attached to his skull. Though short of his twenty-first birthday, Bat was mature and experienced enough to know that a man down on his luck could get into a lot of trouble in Dodge City. Thus, in August, when his friend Billy Dixon signed on as an army scout, Bat decided to do the same.
The campaigns being waged by Colonel Mackenzie and affiliated commands meant such scouts were in high demand. Nelson Miles was in charge of eight cavalry companies and four companies of infantry being organized at Fort Dodge. Miles had risen to the rank of general during the Civil War and had been wounded in battle four times, his actions during the Battle of Chancellorsville had earned him the Medal of Honor, and when Lee surrendered to Grant in April 1865 he was, at just twenty-six, an infantry corps commander. Now a colonel—after the war, many officers were reduced in rank or lopped off the active list altogether—Miles was about to lead a force from Fort Dodge south and he needed scouts who knew Indian Territory. Bat and Billy did, and they were welcomed. In turn, the young men welcomed the pay of seventy-five dollars a month plus the possibility of bonuses if the campaign was successful.
There would be thirty-seven scouts working for Miles, twenty of them Delaware Indians. Most of the seventeen white men were former buffalo hunters. They joined the Bluebellies on the banks of the Arkansas River, and on August 11, 1874, they crossed over and began the journey across the Cherokee Strip and into Texas. It was a hot, dry summer, especially for men whose horses kicked up choking dust from sunup to sundown. Still, it didn’t seem very long before Bat and Billy were in familiar surroundings.
While hunting Comanche and Apache war parties, Miles and his force paid a visit to the Adobe Walls settlement. At least a dozen hunters were still there. Not much hunting was being done, because a war party could appear at any moment, but the hunters, with plenty of supplies and whiskey, figured they were better off inside the walls than making a run for it across the Panhandle. Bat agreed with the wisdom of this when he observed two hunters who had gone out to pick wild plums only to be attacked, with the Indians managing to kill one of them.
With the inhabitants in relatively good shape, the army soldiers moved out, heading west and south, away from Adobe Walls. The battle there in June had earned Bat the admiration of his fellow hunters. The adventure he was about to undertake would earn him his first taste of true frontier fame.
Near the Canadian River the soldiers and scouts fought their first engagement. It was a minor one against a small group of Indians, with one being killed and another wounded. Believing that more hostiles must be close by, Miles’s command picked up the pace the last week of August. This made for tough going for men and horses, as the territory being covered was even hotter and drier than in Kansas, with temperatures sometimes topping 110 degrees. Saloon ceiling fans and ready access to water and whiskey back in Dodge City must have seemed very appealing to Bat and Billy.
Finally, soon after sunup on August 30, the hard-riding scouts found a large force of Indians. More accurately, the Indians found them. As Bat and the others were riding on a trail between two lines of bluffs, at least two hundred warriors appeared above them and opened fire. The scouts jerked their carbines out of their saddle holsters and jumped off their horses. From the ground and behind rocks and withered brown bushes they returned fire. It was touch and go until the cavalry arrived and routed the Indians.
Helping them do that was a recent addition to the firearms of the West, a Gatling gun. The Indians were astonished as the ancestor of the twentieth-century machine gun, bolted onto a baggage wagon, spewed bullets faster than a dozen men could shoot. Once again, the technological advances of the white man forecast the ultimate defeat of the Southwest and Plains tribes.
The scouts got back on their horses and the chase was on. For twenty miles they and the army were in hot pursuit—too hot, as men suffering from incredible thirst and heat exhaustion fell by the wayside. Still, Bat and those with stronger stamina persisted, day after day, with the army soldiers and their exhausted horses trailing behind them.
Finally, the chase ended. The whites were in an area known as the Staked Plains, so named because of a series of poles or stakes that had been driven into the ground to mark a route for cowboys to direct their herds to sources of water. Miles ordered that camp be made there. He hadn’t scored the decisive victory he sought, but he wasn’t going to retreat, either.
A few days turned into a few weeks. Miles sent scouts to Camp Supply inside the Cherokee Strip with dispatches on his lack of progress, and they returned with supplies. One of these trips was taken by four troopers guided by Dixon and the grizzled Amos Chapman, who had warned the merchants at Adobe Walls back in June that Quanah Parker was organizing an attack. At a site called Buffalo Wallow the six men were ambushed by over a hundred Comanche and Kiowa. This time there was no cavalry on the way, so the scouts and soldiers kept firing as fast as they could, keeping the Indians at bay until nightfall, when they retreated. One soldier was killed and the others were wounded, including Chapman, who lost a leg. It was for his bravery and deadly accuracy with his rifle during this engagement that Billy Dixon would receive the Medal of Honor.
Essentially, Miles had pinned his own command down, neither advancing to find and engage the Comanche bands nor moving ba
ck toward Fort Dodge and offering the Indians an opportunity to raid prairie settlements. Meanwhile, an event back in Kansas would have a powerful effect on Bat Masterson.
Over four years earlier, a man named German and his wife left Georgia bound for Colorado. Accompanying the couple were their seven children, six of them girls. They stopped several times as they made their way west, earning enough money each time to resupply and move on. For the Germans, Colorado was viewed as a dream to be realized.
Their migration turned into a nightmare. The family’s last stop before expecting to reach the Colorado border was in Ellis, Kansas. On the morning of September 11, 1874, their wagon and a few head of cattle left Ellis, expecting an easy trip to Fort Wallace. It wasn’t. The family was ambushed by seventeen Cheyenne Dog Soldiers led by Kicking Horse. As the four youngest daughters watched in horror, their parents, brother, and two older sisters were killed and scalped. Katherine, Julia, Adelaide, and Sophia German, ranging in age from nine to fifteen, were dragged off as captives of the Cheyenne.
When word of this reached Miles and his men, finding the four kidnapped girls became their new mission. The scouts learned that the Dog Soldiers had entered the Panhandle. They also heard that the German sisters had been separated, with two girls going with a band headed by Gray Beard and the other two with Stone Calf. Bat and a few of the other scouts had crossed trails with Stone Calf before, at Adobe Walls, when his son was one of those killed during that June attack.
The Cheyenne bands and the white girls with them proved very elusive as the weeks passed. Especially frustrating was the thought that two or all four of the German sisters had been brought hundreds of miles to Mexico and traded away there. If so, they would never be recovered. The scouts consoled themselves that Cheyenne were not known to go that far south, away from their hunting grounds and familiar surroundings. They kept searching and hoping.