by Clavin, Tom
The Dodge City Times informed readers that Wyatt “had a quiet way of taking the most desperate characters into custody, which invariably gave one the impression that the city was able to enforce or mandate and preserve her dignity. It wasn’t considered policy to draw a gun on Wyatt unless you got the drop and meant to burn powder without any preliminary talk.”
However, on July 21, his “quiet way” uncharacteristically left him. He was accosted by a woman named Frankie Bell, a prostitute. What their relationship was beyond acquaintance is not known, but apparently it was not a happy one. The newspaper reported that Miss Bell “heaped epithets” on Wyatt, and his goat was gotten to such an extent that he slapped her. The woman was the one hauled off to jail, and she was fined twenty dollars for disturbing the peace. For the slap, Wyatt was assessed a one-dollar fine.
A couple of weeks earlier, farther south, in Breckenridge, Texas, there had been a different confrontation that would have an impact on Wyatt, though this one was decidedly more serious.
Doc Holliday had been having a restless year thus far. The dentist-turned-gambler had spent time in Cheyenne and in Denver. Then, though never to be mistaken for a family man, he had visited an aunt in Kansas. The next stop was Texas. In Breckenridge, he resumed gambling. There were fireworks on July 4, but not to celebrate the country’s independence. Doc and another man, Henry Kahn, also a gambler and a member of a Dallas clothing family, got into an argument. Instead of going for his gun, Doc, reverting to his southern roots, used his walking stick on the other man. Local peace officers interrupted the fight and arrested both men, who were later fined and released.
John Henry Holliday had been born in Griffin, Georgia, in August 1851 to Henry Burroughs Holliday and Alice Jane Holliday. Griffin was surrounded by fertile farm fields, and the Holliday family had come there from South Carolina. His father, like Wyatt’s, served in the army during the Mexican-American War. His contingent was called Fannin’s Avengers, after the hero of Goliad who had been murdered. Carrying a banner that read YOUNG HICKORY and DALLAS AND VICTORY, the outfit helped to chase the Mexican Army out of Vera Cruz. Second Lieutenant Henry Holliday must have participated in plenty of action, because of the eighteen thousand men in the Georgia and Alabama regiments who had been sent off to fight, six thousand were killed, wounded, or declared missing.
Back home in Georgia, Holliday tended to his business interests and his son John Henry and to Francisco, whom he had brought home from Mexico and adopted. But he was back in uniform when the Civil War began, as a captain in the 27th Georgia Regiment. Once again, in 1862, he was in the thick of battle, with his regiment fighting at Seven Pines, Mechanicsville, Cold Harbor, and in other bloody conflicts. Every day, John Henry feared notification of his father’s death. What was left of the regiment was sent to Richmond, the survivors wounded, sick, and worn-out. Whatever afflicted Holliday, now a major, was serious enough that his resignation was accepted. He traveled south, to Georgia, while the 27th Regiment marched north, to Maryland, to fight its next battle, at Antietam.
The Hollidays picked up and moved farther south, away from the war, to Valdosta near the Florida border. It was there in 1866, right after the Civil War, that Alice Holliday died of tuberculosis. According to Pat Jahns in The Frontier World of Doc Holliday, John Henry “was completely stunned right after it happened … a rift that once made would deepen and widen under the smallest of blows until the house of morality collapsed and ‘Doc’ Holliday escaped from the wreckage of ‘John’ Holliday.”
Three months later, in December, John’s adopted brother, Francisco, was taken by the same disease. And only three months after that his father remarried, to a woman named Rachel, a twenty-four-year-old war widow.
Until he was eighteen, John Henry had been given an academic education appropriate for a young southern gentleman, or as much of one as was possible in the small town, at the Valdosta Institute, which had been founded by local parents. He studied Latin, Greek, French, rhetoric, mathematics, history, and other subjects. He appeared to be a bright young man with a lot of promise. Life took another turn, though, when he fell in love with Mattie Holliday, his Catholic first cousin.
When her parents objected, John Henry was sent north, to Philadelphia to study dentistry. He was not yet twenty-one when he graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery. He had won awards during his dentistry studies for his skills, and when he moved to St. Louis to begin practicing with a partner, the future was promising. He was a handsome-enough man from a good Georgia family, and he was addressed as Dr. Holliday. In July 1872, he moved to Atlanta, where he opened a private practice. Though he did not stay in Atlanta long, he would always be associated with it in a subtle way, as a cousin by marriage to Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind.
In Atlanta, Holliday was diagnosed with tuberculosis and informed he had only a few months left to live. Having seen how easily the disease killed his mother and brother, he had no trouble believing this. Instead of giving up, though, he followed his doctor’s suggestion that the drier fresh air of the Southwest might extend his life. First he detoured home. Mattie had vowed to wait for him. Once he was twenty-one and a dentist, they could go wherever they pleased and be together. But there was no chance for John Henry now. He couldn’t be romantically involved with any woman, especially one who would wind up being a young widow.
He packed his dentist tools and grabbed his guns—his father had made a keen marksman out of him—and visited Florida with a few friends before heading west. It was in Florida that he killed his first man, if conflicting accounts are to be believed.
When the Holliday group arrived at a popular bathing spot on the Withlacoochee River (which originates in Valdosta, Georgia), it was occupied by several young black men. A dispute began, which escalated to a point at which those present reached for their guns. Holliday, with a shotgun, killed one of the men and possibly two or three, depending on the account. Further motivated to travel, Holliday departed for Dallas.
There in Texas he and a partner, a fellow Georgian, John Seegar, opened a dental office. In his free time, Holliday frequented several Dallas saloons, where he took up gambling to go along with his increasing intake of whiskey. He was good at doing both. Soon, he was making more money from gambling than from pulling teeth. (Plus, a persistent cough made it difficult to retain patients.) But this was a risky sideline. In May 1874, he was arrested for being a gambler, and in the first month of 1875 Holliday was again carted off to jail, this time for a shoot-out with a saloon owner. He was acquitted of that charge, but when he was arrested again for gambling, Holliday decided to make his way to Denver.
He went by stagecoach from town to town, staying a few days in one or another if the gambling pickings looked good. Once he arrived in Denver in the summer of 1875, he assumed the name Tom Mackey and worked as a faro dealer at the Theater Comique on Blake Street. Holliday did not last long in Denver. An argument with another gambler, Bud Ryan, got out of control, and Holliday used a knife to carve him up. Wyoming seemed like a good place to visit, even in winter, and in February 1876 he was there working as a faro dealer again, this time in Cheyenne at a saloon named the Bella Union. When it was relocated to Deadwood that fall, Holliday went with it, where he may have been one of the observers when cowardly Jack McCall was hung for shooting Wild Bill Hickok in the back the previous August. Much of 1876 was a relatively stable period in Doc Holliday’s life on the frontier.
The following year, however, he took to wandering again. He left Deadwood to go back to Cheyenne, then to Denver, then took a side trip to Kansas to visit an aunt before heading to Breckenridge in Texas.
Later on the same day as the confrontation with Kahn, Doc made a mistake—rather, two mistakes. One was not fully appreciating Kahn’s continuing anger at being beaten. The second mistake was going out without his guns. When confronted, even though Doc was unarmed, Kahn shot him. Three days later The Dallas Weekly Herald reported that Doc Holliday had died.
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He hadn’t, but the serious wound combined with his worsening tuberculosis made it a close call. A cousin from Georgia, George Henry Holliday, moved to Breckenridge to help Doc recover. When he was finally up and about, he was arrested again, this time for gambling. A change of scenery seemed like a good idea, though he was to remain in Texas. His next stop was in Fort Griffin, and it was there he met the two people who would be the closest to him for the rest of his life—Mary Katharine Horoney, known as Kate Elder, and Wyatt Earp.
FOURTEEN
Dodge City is a wicked little town. Indeed, its character is so clearly and egregiously bad that one might conclude, were the evidence in these latter times positive of its possibility, that it was marked for special Providential punishment. Truly, the more demonstrative portion of humanity at Dodge City gives now no hopeful sign of moral improvement, no bright prospect of human exaltation; but with Dodge City itself, it will not always be as now.
—Washington (D.C.) Evening Star
In his book on Wyatt, Allen Barra writes, “However much Earp later exaggerated his position in Dodge, he did exactly what he was hired to do. In effect, after Wyatt Earp’s arrival Dodge City ceased to be Dodge City.”
This in itself is a bit of an exaggeration. In late summer 1877, it was still a wild and woolly city. With sixteen such watering holes, the city had reached the highest number of saloons it would have during the golden decade. However well the lawmen carried out their responsibilities and whatever steps toward a safer civilization had been taken, there were plenty of strange and sometimes violent characters in Dodge City, and from time to time they encountered each other.
Bat was kept busier than Wyatt. He was co-owner of the Lone Star at the most profitable time of year, and no doubt he had to act as bouncer on many a night. But when duty called, as undersheriff he had to drop everything and become a lawman. And if it can be confusing as to who held what position when on the Dodge City and Ford County police forces—the marshal and sheriff routinely deputized each other’s deputies and former deputies when extra manpower was needed—it could get confusing for citizens, too.
It was also confusing to keep them all straight—the cowboys, outlaws, and others who passed through the city. At one point in 1877, Robert Wright recorded the names of those he had recently encountered. They included Dirty Face Charlie, The Off Wheeler, The Near Wheeler, Eat ’Em Up Jake, Shoot ’Em Up Mike, Stink Finger Jim, Frosty, The Whitey Kid, Light Fingered Jack, Black Kelley, Bull Whack Joe, Conch Jones, Black Warrior, Hurricane Bill, Shoot His Eye Out Jack, Rowdy Joe, and The Stuttering Kid.
In September, a horse theft was reported to Sheriff Bassett, and he dispatched Bat to trail and apprehend the culprit. He did. No rest awaited Bat, though, because as soon as he returned, his next mission was to track down three thieves, which almost resulted in a deadly shoot-out.
Though the buffalo population continued to decline, enough of the beasts could still be found in late summer to make a living, albeit still a harsh and unsavory one. One day three hunters pulled their wagon to a stop in front of Robert Wright’s store and were allowed to pile supplies in it. They needed a Sharps rifle, too, but explained to the owner that they had enough money for the supplies but not the gun. However, they could pay for the latter with a gold watch and chain. After examining the twinkling timepiece, Wright agreed, and he requested that the men let him know when they were ready to settle up. The merchant was uncharacteristically naïve as well as distracted, because next time he looked out his front window, the wagon was gone.
It was probably Bassett’s jurisdiction, not Deger’s, because it was very unlikely the hunters had remained in Dodge City, but were somewhere else in Ford County. Bat saddled his horse, and because he was an experienced tracker—plus he deduced the thieves would not head north or east but south to the nearest hunting grounds—the wagon soon came into sight. Bat confronted the hunters. It was three against one out in the prairie, and the hunters had a new and loaded Sharps rifle, but most of the time Bat had a way of persuading people that gunplay was not the healthiest option.
This was one of those times. The hunters ponied up twenty-five dollars in cash and a gold watch and chain. A look at the supplies and quick figuring convinced Bat that would cover the bill. But then there was the rifle. It was hard for Bat to make enemies because he was a fair man, and accepting that the hunters really did need the rifle to kill buffalo, he let them keep it. That dumb Robert Wright should be happy enough with the cash and gold, he thought.
Bat rode back to Dodge City feeling pretty pleased with himself—unaware that he was carrying stolen property. Bob McCanse, the sheriff of nearby Edwards County, and two deputies were closing in on the three men who had made off with a gold watch and chain. At the same time, a rancher named J. E. Van Voorhis was as angry as a swarm of bees that some of his horses had disappeared. Obviously, they had been stolen. He couldn’t abide anyone getting away with his good horseflesh, and when he saw three armed men riding away from his ranch, that was it. Van Voorhis hopped on a horse and hurried to Dodge City to report the theft and the thieving varmints who had done it. This he did at the sheriff’s office, to the just-returned Bat and the deputy marshal Joe Mason.
Before Bat could hit the trail again, the three men whom the rancher had described rode into town. He and Mason must have suspected the thieves had hidden the stolen horses and were confident enough to come in for a drink, because otherwise it made no sense they would be coming into Dodge City instead of riding rapidly away from it. As the men were unsaddling their horses at the livery stable on the southwest side of Front Street, Bat and Mason were waiting for them. They emerged from the shadows with six-shooters in their hands.
McCanse and his deputies must have thought that everything bad they had heard about the “wicked little town” was true, because here they were chasing thieves to Dodge City and getting robbed for their trouble. Quickly, Bat snatched the pistol out of the holster of one deputy while Mason did the same for the other. He then got the sheriff’s gun—or tried to. It had been a long, hot, frustrating day, and McCanse had had enough. He held on to his pistol, prompting a tug of war. When he jerked it loose he backed up against the wall, ready to pull the trigger.
At that pivotal moment, the sheriff’s face was spotlit in the flare of a lantern. Bat had ridden with McCanse before on a couple of cases, and he recognized the Edwards County lawman. Bat put up his hands and announced himself. Mason was pretty confused, but after McCanse let out a big exhale of relief, explanations were traded. Bat escorted everyone to the nearest saloon, where the drinks were on him.
The gold chain and watch were handed over to McCanse, and Bat described where he had last seen the three buffalo hunters. The sheriff and deputies set off in that direction the next morning, and within a few days the hunters had traded the wide-open prairie for a small jail cell in Edwards County.
* * *
As would be emphasized to Wyatt the following year when the notorious bad guy Clay Allison came to town looking for him, there were those, especially the Texans, who were unhappy about the attempts by him and Bat and others to impose law and order on Dodge City. The cowboys could be angered by being buffaloed and otherwise subdued and jailed, but they were cowboys, mostly anonymous men who were here today, gone tomorrow, and city officials weren’t worried about them. However, they continued to be concerned that the cattle-ranch owners would listen to the complaints of their hungover and hurting employees and decide to take their herds to the next town on the railroad line.
An instance of this occurred toward the end of the summer of 1877—the second and last confrontation Wyatt was to have with Robert Wright.
One evening in one of the Front Street saloons, a cowboy was not fond of a tune a fiddler was playing. His musical criticism came in the form of taking his gun and smacking the man’s head with it, opening a gash. The terrified and bloodied fiddler fled.
Wyatt had been eating dinner in the restaurant section of the sal
oon and witnessed the attack. He braced the cowboy at the bar, telling him to turn over his gun and that he was under arrest for assault. The young drover said words to the effect that he was as fond of the local lawmen as he was of music. He may not have finished his sentence when Wyatt buffaloed him. By this time another assistant marshal, Neil Brown, alerted by the fast-moving fiddler, arrived, and he and Wyatt dragged the unconscious cowboy to the jail.
Wright got there just as they did. He pointed out to Wyatt that the man’s employer had previously complained about his cowboys winding up behind bars, and this new arrest might be one too many. Wright further explained about the wealthy rancher, “His business is worth half a million dollars a year to Dodge.”
Wyatt responded that he recognized the man’s value to the local economy … and while saying that, he opened the jail cell and pushed the prisoner inside it. This act of defiance infuriated Wright, who warned, “You’ll let him go, if you know what’s good for you.”
That approach hadn’t worked the first time, and it wouldn’t work this time either. Wyatt shut and locked the cell door. Wright grabbed his arm and tried to wrest the key away from the assistant marshal. Wyatt could have become furious himself, and perhaps he was, but his way of lawing was to be efficient and effective. Wright stopped wrestling with Wyatt when he unlocked the cell door and swung it open. But instead of taking the wobbly cowboy out, he put the apoplectic Wright in and shut the door again.
When a subdued Wright was let out of what was often called the “calaboose” and complained to the mayor, Dog Kelley backed his lawman. Change indeed was afoot in Dodge City.