Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  The July 28, 1880, issue of the Tombstone Daily Nugget reported, “Sheriff Shibell has appointed Wyatt Earp Deputy Sheriff for this precinct.” Probably what a lawman new to Tombstone did not need was a companion who was an alcoholic, sickly, gunslinging former dentist, but that is what Wyatt got.

  Many years later, Wyatt claimed that “Doc Holliday thought he would move with me. Big Nose Kate had left him long before—they were always a quarrelsome couple—and settled in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He looked her up en route, and the old tenderness reasserted itself; she resolved to throw in her lot with us in Arizona.”

  However, when the Earps had left Las Vegas, Doc had remained. He soon came to regret the decision. On a slow afternoon in the fall of 1879, Charles White had been standing behind the bar when Doc entered the saloon. There must have been some unfinished business between the two men, because Doc had a six-shooter in his hand, and as soon as White saw him, he produced one of his own. Doc fired. No serious damage was done. Doc did not initially know this, though. One of his bullets creased his adversary’s scalp, and down he went. Doc had seen a flash of blood and hurried out of the saloon, believing he had sent the bartender to the great beyond. He set out for Arizona, hoping it was not too late to catch up to Wyatt.

  It was, however, because by the time he arrived in Prescott, the Earps had moved on. Doc decided to stay for a bit, most likely because he needed rest and money, and maybe luck would be with him at the gaming tables there. He was right. He gambled for days on end, wisely doing more card playing than drinking and keeping his temper under wraps. Thus, without killing anyone or getting killed, Doc was up forty thousand dollars. That day, Big Nose Kate walked into the saloon.

  It is possible this was a coincidence, with many people passing through Prescott for one reason or another. Or she’d gotten wind of Doc being there and missed the cantankerous bastard. In any event, by Doc’s standards, he gave her an effusive welcome. Kate may have been as happy to see his winnings as she was to see him.

  She had never been very fond of Wyatt, dating back to Wichita, yet she agreed to accompany Doc when he soon decided to pocket his winnings and push on to Tombstone. They arrived there in the summer of 1880. Doc may have felt safer in the company of the Earp brothers, but it seemed his life had shifted into a phase of trouble following him wherever he went.

  On a Sunday night in October, Doc and a man the Tombstone Daily Nugget would tentatively identify as John Tyley got into an argument at the Oriental Saloon. Most likely, Doc was drunk, and Tyley may have been, too. Fearing an escalation, several other men in the saloon relieved the two men of their weapons, and Tyley left. One of the saloon’s owners, a man named Joyce, gave Doc some guff for creating a disturbance. His pistol having been taken away, Doc left, then returned to the Oriental with another. When Joyce came out from behind the bar and was no more than ten feet away, Doc began firing. Once again, Doc’s accuracy was open to question. He stopped shooting and Joyce advanced on him, wrested the gun away, and hit Doc in the head with it. Doc fell to the floor, and Joyce sat on him until peace officers arrived. The only damage Doc had inflicted was hitting Joyce in one hand and another man in the big toe. The next day a sober and sore Doc was fined twenty dollars for assault.

  Tombstone was not a fresh start for Doc and Kate. “Happily ever after” was never in the cards for them. She was not in Tombstone long before recognizing that with all these Earp brothers and their women around, there was little room for her. Doc was deeply loyal to Wyatt and by extension his brothers, and that did not allow for much regard left over for her. So Kate left. She wound up running a boardinghouse, which probably doubled as a cathouse, in Globe, Arizona, 180 miles north of Tombstone.

  She was not done with Doc, though, which would turn out to be too bad for both of them. With travel becoming more difficult for Doc as his respiratory illness worsened, Kate made the trip as often as she could to visit, staying with Doc in his rooms in Tombstone. The reunions must not have been particularly warm ones, because Kate would get very drunk and then she would be much more inclined to dish it out than to take it. Even on his best days, Doc was not a patient man, so no wonder his limit was reached. Early in 1881, Doc ordered her to get out and stay out, and Kate did.

  She did not go far. If she had the intention of retreating to the boardinghouse in Globe, whiskey persuaded her otherwise. Kate went on a bender. Doc had to know she had remained in Tombstone, and he made sure to avoid her. Still, on March 15, Big Nose Kate was around to get Doc into an even bigger heap of trouble.

  On that day, four mask-wearing men held up a stagecoach near Contention, and in the process the driver and a passenger were shot dead. It somehow got into the heads of the local lawmen that Doc Holliday was involved. The sheriff heading the investigation of the holdup went to see Kate in Tombstone. In her drunken stupor and still angry with Doc for kicking her out, it was easy to convince her that she should sign a statement that Doc had been one of the thieves and had gunned down the stagecoach driver. He was not immediately arrested, however, because Wyatt and his brothers were gathering eyewitness accounts of Doc’s whereabouts at the time of the robbery. And then Kate sobered up.

  She found the sheriff who had taken the statement and told him to tear it up. The case against Doc, such as it was, fell apart. But there was not to be a tender reunion of the two onetime lovers. Doc gave Kate some money and stuck her on a stagecoach out of Tombstone, vowing to have nothing more to do with her.

  While Tombstone was far from the hoof-beaten cattle trails of the Texas Panhandle and Kansas, cowboys could be found in Arizona, too. It could be said that during its boom years Dodge City had hosted a higher caliber of cowboy. There were plenty of yahoos and a few who were worse, but many of those trail hands wanted to make a living and had bosses to answer to, who in turn had the cattle owners to answer to. The cowboys who frequented Tombstone were mostly about getting what they could for themselves, and the law wasn’t about to stop their harsh activities.

  Many of them worked at the ranches surrounding the town, while others were drifters looking for a score near the Mexican border. The “score” was often rustling. Cowboys slipped into Mexico, cut out part of a herd, drove it north into Arizona, and sold the cattle to the ranchers who did not care where they came from. Whatever other crimes were committed in the process were none of the ranchers’ business, either.

  Local residents had an uneasy relationship with the cowboys. They disapproved of their criminal acts, especially when it escalated to robbing stages and wounding or killing guards and passengers. On the other hand, as in Dodge City, they helped to fuel the economy of Tombstone. And roaming cowboys were a line of defense against marauding Apache.

  In an interview with the San Francisco Examiner in 1882, Virgil referred to the cowboys as “saddlers” because they spent most of their time in the saddle “largely engaged in raiding into Sonora and adjacent country and stealing cattle. When cattle are not handy the cowboys rob stages and engage in similar enterprises to raise money. As soon as they are in funds they ride into town, drink, gamble, and fight.”

  This caused a problem for the honest, hardworking cowboys, because they were lumped in with the bunch who were thieves and hurrahed the town late at night. There was also increasing rancor between those cowboys and peace officers like Virgil, and that conflict began to include the ranchers who did business with and offered protection to cattle rustlers. Two of the most well known ranching families in the area benefiting from the illegal raids of the cowboys were headed by Frank and Tom McLaury and Newman “Old Man” Clanton.

  The first time the Earps came up against the Clanton family was late in the summer of 1880. Camp Rucker was an army outpost seventy-five miles east of Tombstone, and one night six mules disappeared from it. Suspecting that they were stolen, the army requested that Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp accompany a contingent of troopers sent in search of the missing animals. He in turn recruited Wyatt and Morgan to go with him. Along the way th
e searchers were told that the mules had indeed been stolen, by the McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton, the Old Man’s youngest son. When the Earps and the troopers arrived at the McLaury ranch, they spied the missing mules.

  The matter was resolved without criminal charges, but a week later Frank McLaury came into Tombstone to tell Virgil never to come near his ranch again. Virgil replied, “If any warrant for your arrest were put into my hands, I would endeavor to catch you, and no compromise would be made.”

  While Charlie Shibell was the county sheriff, his deputies, Wyatt and Newton Babcock, did most of the patrolling and corralling of lawbreakers. There were shootings and stabbings and drunks to be hauled off to the calaboose. Wyatt was found to be a particularly effective lawman, thanks to his buffaloing skills and his experience in the ways of crooks. While a man named Roger King was being held for the shooting death of another man until Wyatt could transport him to Tucson, a telegram arrived from Shibell instructing Wyatt to turn custody over to a Tombstone resident. Wyatt knew this trick. He sent his own telegram to Shibell, who responded that he had not sent the first one. Wyatt made sure King was delivered for trial in Tucson.

  The most serious trouble yet with the cowboys took place the last week of October 1880. By that time Tombstone had a marshal, Fred White. One night he made a mistake that got him killed.

  A crowd of cowboys who considered Curly Bill Brocius their leader had congregated in a saloon because they could, and whiskey flowed. A tall man with a full head of black hair, Brocius was the head wrangler at the McLaury ranch. The job description included plenty of cattle rustling and intimidating anyone who objected to illegal cowboy activities. While he did not have the far-flung reputation of a Clay Allison, Curly Bill was known to have a quick temper and a deep reservoir of viciousness to draw from, so most people, including lawmen, kept their distance.

  When he and the boys went out into a night that was beginning to feel a winter chill, they fired a few rounds in the air, laughing and howling at the moon. Marshal White’s mistake was not simply letting Curly Bill’s crew get off that last bit of steam before hopping on their horses and riding back to the ranch. A second mistake was taking them on alone. White angrily told the cowboys to disperse, and when Curly Bill sassed him, the marshal lit after him, chasing him down an alley. Shots were fired.

  Within seconds, Wyatt was on the scene, and he was joined moments later by Morgan. They saw cowboys running. Assuming they had fired the shots, the unarmed Wyatt borrowed a pistol, and he and his brother ran after them. Near the alley they heard Fred White demand a gun. Entering, Wyatt saw Curly Bill draw his gun and threw his arms around him. Snarling, “You goddamn son of a bitch, give me that gun,” White grabbed the barrel of Brocius’s gun and yanked it toward him. The gun fired. As had happened with Ed Masterson, White’s clothes caught fire. The bullet hit him in the groin. Wyatt took his pistol and hit Curly Bill on the head, knocking him down.

  As the stricken marshal was carried to the nearest doctor, Wyatt and Morgan hauled Curly Bill off to jail. Suspecting that an angry mob could seek vengeance at the end of a rope, Wyatt deputized Doc Holliday and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, and when Virgil joined them the five shotgun-toting officers stood guard outside the jail. After the hasty arraignment, Wyatt snuck Curly Bill out of Tombstone and brought him to the jail in Tucson. Two days later, at only age thirty-two, Fred White died.

  A consequence of the shooting was that Virgil’s lawing chores expanded to include being the acting marshal of Tombstone, and as a consequence of the confrontation between White and Curly Bill, Virgil ordered that carrying weapons in town was prohibited. That November, a special election was held and Ben Sippy was elected as the new marshal, returning Virgil to his previous responsibilities.

  Two months later, in January 1881, Curly Bill would be acquitted of murder because the court believed the shooting was accidental. On the second Saturday of the new year, reunited with his crew, he wanted to celebrate. The cowboys rode into nearby Charleston, found a dance hall mostly frequented by Mexicans, and entered and drew their guns. They ordered the music to stop, the dancers to take off all their clothes, and the dancing to recommence.

  In another election that November, this one for Pima County sheriff, the outcome between Charlie Shibell, running for reelection, and Bob Paul was in such dispute, with everyone from Ike Clanton—son of Old Man Clanton and older brother of Billy—to John Behan putting in their two cents, that it would not be decided until the following April, when a judge ruled in favor of Paul. Long before then, though, wanting to wash his hands of the mess and go back to focusing on making money with his brothers, Wyatt resigned. He was replaced as deputy sheriff by Behan.

  Also aligning himself with the Clantons was Johnny Ringo. He was reputed to not have a typical outlaw pedigree. Stories claimed that he had attended William Jewell College in Missouri and enjoyed quoting from the plays of Shakespeare. In truth, he had never made it past elementary school, and with his sordid personality he was fated to drift over the line to the wrong side of the law. After being arrested for an unknown crime he committed with John Wesley Hardin and two others, he went west, winding up in the Tombstone area. He made his presence known there in December 1879. A man drinking next to him at a bar made a remark about a woman who had just passed by. Ringo took offense and beat the man with the butt of his pistol. When the victim began to shout for help, Ringo shot him in the throat. By 1880, he had found work rustling cattle and thus fell in with the Clantons and the McLaurys. He and Curly Bill Brocius made for a dynamic duo of evil who were not fans of the Earps.

  Resigning as a lawman did not completely stop Wyatt from trying to see that justice was done. One day in January 1881, Virgil was out exercising a fast horse that belonged to his brother. He was hailed by two men in a buckboard bouncing along the dirt road. One was a constable who explained that he had helped his handcuffed prisoner escape a lynch mob in nearby Charleston, and he was afraid they were now on their horses and catching up. Virgil hauled the prisoner up on the saddle behind him and raced for Tombstone.

  Wyatt was at the Wells Fargo office when they arrived, and he recognized Virgil’s cuffed companion as a precocious eighteen-year-old gambler nicknamed for a certain faro wager, “Johnny-Behind-the Deuce.” He admitted to killing a man in Charleston but insisted it was in self-defense. The mob had not been interested in his side of the story. Wyatt borrowed a shotgun from the office, and he and Virgil took Johnny to the saloon where James Earp worked. Only a few minutes later the angry citizens from Charleston were advancing down Allen Street. The Earp brothers were joined by Marshal Ben Sippy, Behan, Morgan, Doc Holliday, and a few others. (In the account published in The Tombstone Epitaph, only the three lawmen are listed.) Very soon, the air could be filled with gunsmoke and lead.

  So be it. Johnny’s guardians surrounded him, and with Sippy, Virgil, and Wyatt in the lead brandishing their shotguns, they began walking toward the livery stable. “Stand back there and make passage,” Wyatt ordered in a calm voice. “I am going to take this man to jail in Tucson.”

  Instead the mob advanced until the two sides met in the middle of the rutted street. Wyatt leveled his shotgun at the man who appeared to be leading the vengeful visitors, and told him that he would be the first to die if a battle began. Gazing into Wyatt’s cold, steady eyes—and the not as cold but just as intimidating eyes of Virgil—the man believed him. He backed off and a path opened up through the crowd. A few minutes later, the prisoner was on his way to Tucson, and no one in the Charleston crowd was motivated to follow him. Months later, before he could stand trial, Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, whose real name was Mike O’Rourke, escaped from the prison. He was last seen in the Dragoon Mountains, telling another traveler, “The climate of Arizona don’t agree with me.”

  Thanks to Curly Bill Brocius, the cowboys were increasingly getting out of hand. He and his crew visited another church in Charleston during a service and chased the minister out of it with blazing six-shooter
s. In Contention, they robbed a man in the street, and when angry citizens banded together, the thieves escaped with another hail of gunfire. There was criticism of local law enforcement for being unable or unwilling to put a stop to the rampage. Tarnishing the badge further, in a bizarre twist Curly Bill was appointed an assistant tax collector for Pima County. His particularly persuasive way of making sure that residents paid their taxes succeeded in raising more revenue for the county, which in turn put more money in the pocket of Deputy Sheriff John Behan, who often accompanied the tax collector on his rounds.

  For much of this time, Curly Bill was not the Earps’ concern. The wrangler tended to stay away from Tombstone, and Virgil saw the depredations as a county matter—in other words, Ben Sippy’s problem—that did not have to involve the deputy U.S. marshal. Wyatt and his brothers were finally seeing some profits from their investment in silver mines, and Wyatt used some of that revenue to buy an interest in the Oriental Saloon. Clara Brown, a visiting San Diego Union columnist, would tell her readers that the saloon was “simply gorgeous and is pronounced the finest place of the kind this side of San Francisco. The bar is a marvel of beauty; the sideboards were made for the Baldwin Hotel; the gaming room connected is brilliantly lighted, and furnished with reading matter and writing materials for its patrons.” The male-only patrons enjoyed piano and violin music every evening.

  Wyatt went to work every day as supervisor of the gambling operations. He was something of a frontier gentleman, dressed in black trousers and a black coat and groomed well, especially his thick dark mustache, in a respectable place of business that had a touch of elegance to it.