by Clavin, Tom
To Bat’s mind, his affability as well as his effectiveness would be enough for voters. “Bat did not take himself too seriously; there was little of the gimlet-eyed killer about him,” analyzed Richard O’Connor in his chronicle of Bat’s life. “He proposed to relax in between jobs of shooting it out with desperate characters or leading man hunts across the prairies, and tending to his gambling business. Bat was a familiar figure in all the bars, the Lady Gay, the Lone Star, Peacock’s, Hoover’s, the Long Branch, Wright and Beverley’s, and there is no reason to believe that he shunned feminine company.”
By the time Bat realized that he needed to respond aggressively to the allegations, it was too late. On November 4, the vote was 404 for Hinkle and only 268 for Bat. A changing Ford County had allowed him only one term as sheriff.
His opponents were not done with him. A man named Charles Roden, who lived in Spearville in Ford County, claimed that Bat had launched an unprovoked attack on him and stolen his wallet during the tussle. However, an attorney who had witnessed the confrontation offered to set things straight. But at his office, when the two men encountered each other, things went south fast. Bat was upset that during the campaign Roden had been one of those spreading the false rumors in support of Hinkle.
Roden reached for his gun. Bat grabbed that hand and beat Roden with his other hand. “Pull it if you can,” he said, getting a few last punches in. When Bat released him, a reeling Roden fled the lawyer’s office.
Life only got worse for Roden. Later that month, items and cash that had gone missing after several recent robberies were found in his house, and he was arrested. He made bail, but rather than risk a trial, he disappeared.
Bat would remain sheriff until Hinkle was inaugurated in January 1880. He continued his routine duties and contemplated life as an ex-lawman. He had business interests in Dodge City, his brother Jim was still on the marshal’s staff, and for the most part this had been home since he and Ed had been buffalo hunters. Bat had many fond memories of the area, which was not all that far from the Masterson family farm near Wichita.
But he was bitterly disappointed with how the people of the county had been so quick to reject him and his good name. He deserved better, as Robert Wright pointed out in his memoir of Dodge City: “Bat was a most loyal man to his friends. If anyone did him a favor, he never forgot it. I believe that if one of his friends was confined to jail and there was the least doubt of his innocence, he would take a crow-bar and ‘jimmy’ and fight his way out, at the dead hour of midnight; and, if there were determined men guarding him, he would take these desperate chances.”
Wyatt had been right: it was time for Bat to put his skills and personality toward other pursuits, ones that would earn better money. Gambling could pay his way as he figured out what those pursuits would be, and there was not much of that in Dodge City in the winter. In February, a few weeks after Hinkle had become the new sheriff of Ford County, Bat hit the trail. Like Wyatt Earp and the hundreds if not thousands he had followed, Bat Masterson rode west.
ACT IV
The Dodge City Peace Commission, left to right: Charlie Bassett,
W. H. Harris, Wyatt Earp, Luke Short, Frank McLain,
Bat Masterson, Neil Brown, and W. F. Petillon.
(COURTESY OF KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
TWENTY-SEVEN
They looked alike as three peas in a pod—the same height, size and mustaches. In Tombstone later men were always mistakin’ one for the other.
—ALLIE EARP
Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson would meet again in Dodge City, but they took very different paths to get there. Wyatt, as was his way when his mind was made up, was done with Dodge. He turned his eyes west, and his long journey would include Arizona, Colorado, California, and even Alaska. Bat traveled a lot, too, but he couldn’t quit Kansas. As was his way when there were long friendships to preserve, he returned to Dodge City again and again to experience the charms of the saloons and gambling halls. Both men, as a new decade dawned, began to explore an American West that was striving to keep pace with the progress of an increasingly sophisticated civilization.
The year 1880 would see the first electric streetlight installed, in Wabash, Indiana, which by the end of March would be the first electrically lighted city in the world. With financial backing from Thomas Edison, the journal Science would first be published. James Garfield would defeat Winfield Hancock to become the twentieth president of the United States, the last Civil War general to attain that office. (He would hold it less than a year, becoming the second president to be assassinated.) The first cash register, in Dayton, Ohio, would be patented. The prolific Edison would perform the first test of an electric railway. And born that year would be Tom Mix, who would become Hollywood’s most popular cowboy star and a good friend to both Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.
Virgil’s letters from Arizona had set the Earp migration in motion. He had informed Wyatt that he was doing pretty well for himself as a lumberman. On land he owned west of Prescott he cut down pine trees, and he fashioned them into lumber in the sawmill he owned, which he sold to construction crews building new residences and shops, to a nearby army post, and to the many mining enterprises whose activity continued unabated. He also continued to work as a stage driver. Life was pretty satisfying for Virgil and Allie.
So it was a bit surprising that he kept his eye out for lawman positions. Back in September 1878, he had been appointed a night watchman. Two months later, he ran for constable in Prescott and came out on top in a three-man race and resigned the watchman job. As constable, Virgil earned seventy-five dollars a month, meaning he had to keep selling lumber and driving stages.
He found time to concoct the plan that would reunite most of the Earp clan and make them money. From what he was hearing from visitors to Prescott and during his stage-driving journeys, Tombstone was the next hot spot. The place was booming because of all the silver being scooped out of the brown windswept hills and was thus a fertile town for ambitious men, especially those willing to work together. Virgil was ready to give Tombstone a try, and maybe his brothers would do so, too.
The only real objection was from Allie, who was not inclined to be uprooted from Prescott. According to her reminiscences many years later, she said that they “had a good home right here” and she had no interest in “traipsin’ round the country.” But as she and their other women knew, when the Earp brothers decided to do something, there was no use resisting. Allie, especially, recognized their “silence, secrecy, and clannish solidarity.”
Tombstone had been founded by sheer luck. It was regarded as a godforsaken area thirty miles north of the Mexican border. Water was scarce. The only things there were plenty of were dirt and dust and scorpions and wandering bands of Apache, who were not intimidated by the presence of Fort Huachuca and its listless Bluebellies, who would rather not be out on patrol baking in the Southwest sun. There was little appeal to the area except to those seeking solitude or snakes.
But in 1877, a man named Ed Schieffelin, prospecting by himself, made a discovery. He had ignored the warning given to him at the fort that all he would find out in the scorched hills was his tombstone, and what he did find was a silver deposit. Subsequently, bigger and bigger ones were uncovered. There was still not much water, but the area was flooded by miners, and as money was made, all manner of entrepreneurs followed them. Two years later, the tongue-in-cheek name of Tombstone had stuck and it was becoming another in a long line of American frontier boomtowns.
Because their travels had taken a lot longer than they’d expected, Wyatt and Mattie and James and Bessie did not arrive in Tombstone until the spring of 1880. They had ridden past brush-filled hills blooming with mines that were offering up silver and gold to hardworking and hopeful men. Of course, most of the profits went into the deep pockets of the mining companies, with the larger ones paying their investors up to six hundred thousand dollars a year.
For such a young town, Tombstone had advanced swif
tly as a community. The population had already exceeded five thousand, and it had churches and genteel hotels and saloons. The three wide main streets were named Allen, Fremont, and Toughnut. They also offered gambling dens and dance halls. Farther from downtown were dozens upon dozens of tents that housed small shops and residences. When the tents ended, the dusty desert with its endless supply of sagebrush and cacti began. To the newcomers the air was fresher than Dodge City’s, thanks to the lack of cattle. It was a more ethnically diverse community, too, because of the presence of a large number of Mexicans and of Chinese, who were referred to by the local press as “celestials.” (There were by now one hundred thousand Chinese men and three thousand Chinese women living in the western United States.) Some visitors went so far as to compare Tombstone to San Francisco.
Virgil and Allie had arrived from Prescott the previous autumn. Toward the end of November 1879, Crawley Dake—who in addition to being Virgil’s politically connected friend was the U.S. marshal for the Arizona Territory—had appointed Virgil as deputy U.S. marshal for the Tombstone mining district. This meant that he represented federal law enforcement in all of southeast Arizona.
Here it was a few months later, and Virgil, Wyatt, and James were finally back together again and Morgan was said to be on his way to Tombstone. James became the bartender and manager of Vogan’s Bowling Alley on Allen Street, but he would soon open his own watering hole called the Sampling Room. Wyatt and Mattie and James and Bessie rented nearby houses and began to seek their fortunes. Unlike James, Wyatt would not have much support from his wife. The traveling and uncertainty about the future—especially her future with Wyatt—had given Mattie chronic headaches, and she was relying even more on laudanum. Perhaps Tombstone would provide a fresh start.
When Morgan, by then twenty-nine years old, finally did join his brothers, he was a married man. It may have been in Kansas but it was more likely in Montana that he had met Louisa Alice Houston. After serving as a sometime lawman in Dodge City and before traveling to Tombstone, Morgan had lived in Big Sky Country as a rancher and hunter, and he had considered staying there permanently. He had resumed lawing for a while, too, beginning in December 1879, when he had served as a policeman in the mining town of Butte, but he held on to the job for only three months.
Born in Wisconsin in January 1855, Louisa was the second child of H. Samuel Houston—there were unfounded rumors that he was related to the Texas rebellion hero—and Elizabeth Waughtal, and she would be followed by ten siblings. Louisa was often unwell and would be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and edema. Still, by only age fifteen she had left her family behind, and in 1872 she was living in Iowa. She and Morgan may have met before he relocated to Montana in September 1877, but they were living together there. The Pipestone Hot Springs in Butte was known as a treatment for arthritis sufferers, and they may have traveled there, or Louisa did and she and Morgan crossed paths.
In April 1878, Morgan and Louisa were living on a ranch on the Tongue River just outside Miles City. That September, when he had taken the job as a peace officer in Butte, Louisa moved there with him. But early in 1880 they left Montana, working their way west to eventually wind up in Temescal, California, where Nicholas and Virginia Earp lived for a time, with Warren being the only one of their children still living with them or nearby. After a visit, Morgan heeded the call from Virgil and Wyatt and James to head southeast to Tombstone. There he would, like Wyatt, ride shotgun on stagecoaches, from time to time be deputized by Virgil, and rent a house and join the expanding Earp compound.
Louisa’s health was too fragile that winter for her to travel, but she intended to join Morgan later. However, month after month went by and she continued to feel poorly. It would not be until December 1880 that she would be reunited with her husband and find herself surrounded by Earp brothers and their women. That would soon include Warren, too. The twenty-five-year-old had drifted down from California and would spend some time in Tombstone. When he did, that meant there were five Earp brothers in town making a living and looking for their piece of the mining boom.
All five were not alike, however. In her memoir, their sister Adelia gave her appraisal: “Wyatt and Virgil were not too much alike in nature. Wyatt and Jim were more alike, and Morg and Warren were too. Virgil was Virgil and there wasn’t nobody much like him. He was the biggest and had a big booming voice and laugh and a real big heart too. You would really have to push him some to make him angry but then he really did explode. I guess Wyatt and Jim were the same way, like mother, and me, I reckon.”
For Wyatt, someone in addition to Morgan had arrived in the area recently who would also have an impact on his personal life. Despite the fragile health of his third wife, Wyatt wasn’t necessarily looking for a fourth one, and he especially could not have anticipated the most romantic relationship he would have since the tragic death of Aurilla.
According to the detailed research done by Sherry Monahan for her book Mrs. Earp, Josephine Sarah Marcuse was born in June 1861 to Hyman Henry Marcuse, a member of a Jewish family in Poland, and the former Sophie Lewis-Levy, eight years his senior, who was from either Germany or Prussia. The two had met in New York after emigrating to the United States. The couple had three children and lived on Hester Street in New York City alongside many other European Jewish immigrants.
At some point before 1870, the Marcuse family uprooted itself and traveled completely across to the other side of the country and settled in San Francisco, where Hyman Marcuse worked as a baker. Because of the ebb and flow of making a living, the family moved from time to time, including living on Clara Street and Powell Street. Josephine went to public schools and took dancing classes. The latter proved to be more appealing because the teenager became involved in stage productions. It seems that around the time she was eighteen, Josephine had a choice to make: stay with her family in San Francisco and hope to find a suitable husband, or join a traveling show and hope to find adventure. She chose the latter.
Well, that is the version she told decades later. There is also evidence to suggest that when Josephine was only fourteen, she was recruited by a woman who ran a brothel in her family’s neighborhood. Coming from a family that had always struggled to pay the rent may have made the girl desperate or just very practical. The madam took her stable of girls on the road to Arizona mining country, also fertile ground for entrepreneurial females. (Josephine’s official story was that she had run off to join a traveling troupe of players performing the Gilbert and Sullivan musical H.M.S. Pinafore.) They had hardly shaken the dust of distance off their dresses when in or near Prescott, Josephine met John Harris Behan (everyone called him Johnny), probably as he was making the rounds campaigning for sheriff of Yavapai County. He was married with two children, but that did not stop Josephine from becoming infatuated with him.
However, the combination of the harsh life of being a hooker in the mining region, homesickness, and unrequited puppy love proved too much for the teenager. With the help of family members and friends of theirs in Prescott, Josephine left her life there, and in March 1876 she was back in San Francisco.
One of Behan’s flaws was he could not stay away from houses of ill repute, and his wife demanded a divorce, which was granted. It had to be a pleasant surprise for Josephine when, three months before her eighteenth birthday, she encountered Behan in San Francisco. He must have been impressed with how she had bloomed into a fetching young woman, because he proposed to her. She must have refused, because in May 1879, Behan was in Phoenix with his son—his daughter had died two years earlier from meningitis—not a fiancée. Well, again, that’s one version. The other one is that hiding under the name of Sadie Mansfield, which she may have used previously in the profession, Josephine followed Behan to Arizona. By November 1880, when Behan was in Tombstone as a deputy sheriff, Josephine Marcus, as her last name was spelled by then, was living with Behan and his son.
Alas, it was not marital bliss at last. Behan being Behan, he was soon back to his
adulterous ways. One of his more scandalous affairs involved a married woman. A betrayed and embarrassed Josephine bore such bad behavior as long as she could, then began making plans to return to her family in San Francisco. But she met Wyatt Earp instead, and everything changed.
Wyatt’s initial idea for a business in Tombstone was an old occupation. He said that from the time he left Dodge City, “I intended to start a stage line.” But he found out right away in Tombstone that there were already two stage lines operating and thus no room for a third. Instead, he and his brothers put down money for mining claims and water rights, hoping to be swept up in the boom. They weren’t. While waiting for any kind of profits, Virgil at least had a steady and decent-paying job as a federal peace officer and James had the saloon.
The Earps maintained some confidence that Tombstone would pay off for them. According to Casey Tefertiller, “All around was the banging of hammers and whizzing of saws, cutting and crafting to build a boomtown. The village with the odd-sounding name had a constant bustle about it: noise, excitement, anticipation. Optimism always flowed as freely as whiskey, for only the optimistic would chance their lives on an unproved hope of new riches.”
Wyatt may have had too taciturn a personality to be optimistic, but he certainly had hopes of finally striking it rich. First, though, he had to support himself and his wife, especially with Mattie no longer able to work. When he took a job there was a “Dodge” connection, but not to the city: Frederick James Dodge was an agent for Wells Fargo, and he hired Wyatt to ride shotgun on the stagecoaches that carried the company’s strongboxes. Wyatt could not have been too happy about this, because he had come to Tombstone to finally make his fortune and he was back to the same old risk-filled occupation. Maybe a lawing position should be looked at again.