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Dodge City

Page 32

by Clavin, Tom


  Wyatt announced, “You sons of bitches have been looking for a fight, and now you can have it!” He later recalled:

  For answer, their six-shooters began to spit. Frank McLaury fired at me and Billy Clanton at Morgan. Both missed. I had a gun in my overcoat pocket and I jerked it out at Frank McLaury, hitting him in the stomach. At the same time Morgan shot Billy Clanton in the breast. So far we had got the best of it, but just then Tom McLaury, who got behind his horse, fired under the animal’s neck and bored a hole right through Morgan sideways. The bullet entered one shoulder and came out at the other.

  “I got hit, Wyatt!” said Morgan.

  “Then get behind me and keep quiet,” I said—but he didn’t.

  By this time bullets were flying so fast that I could not keep track of them. Frank McLaury had given a yell when I shot him, and made for the street, with his hand over his stomach. Ike Clanton and Billy Clanton were shooting fast, and so was Virgil, and the two latter made a break for the street. I fired a shot which hit Tom McLaury’s horse and made it break away, and Doc Holliday took the opportunity to pump a charge of buckshot out of a Wells Fargo shotgun into Tom McLaury, who promptly fell dead. In the excitement of the moment, Doc Holliday didn’t know what he had done and flung away the shotgun in disgust, pulling his six-shooter instead.

  * * *

  No doubt, every surviving member of that gunfight would have a recollection that differs from another’s. For example, supposedly Ike Clanton did not fire a weapon during the fight. Instead, he ran toward Wyatt, who said, “The fight has commenced. Go to fighting or get away.”

  The McLaurys and Billy Clanton died from their wounds. Virgil was shot in the left leg, Morgan in the shoulder, and a bullet grazed Doc’s hip. Wyatt was not wounded. He and Doc were arrested, and three days after the gunfight Virgil was suspended as chief of police.

  Following that a monthlong preliminary hearing before Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer was conducted. During it, testimony was given that supported the Earps and Doc Holliday, and other testimony placed the blame for the gunfight on them. On November 30, Spicer ordered the release of the defendants, declaring that based on what he had heard, no jury in the territory would find them guilty.

  But the Earps were judged guilty by an outlaw jury. In a letter dated April 13, 1884, Will McLaury revealed to his father that he hired “assassins” to avenge his two younger brothers. The group included Pete Spence, Florentino Cruz, Hank Swilling, and Indian Charley, and their mission was to kill the Earp brothers and any others, such as Doc, associated with them.

  The first attempt came on December 28, 1881. Virgil was on patrol that night, and as he walked along Allen Street, the post-Christmas quiet was shattered by shotgun blasts. Virgil was hit, most of the damage done to his left arm. As he was being treated, Virgil managed to say to Allie, “Never mind, I’ve got one arm left to hug you with.”

  For weeks reports circulated that Virgil was near death, but he gradually improved. U.S. Marshal Dake appointed Wyatt to take his brother’s place, and he assumed the role of federal peace officer. Peace was not necessarily uppermost in his mind, but he was not about to instigate a conflict, either. Doc took care of that, on January 17, 1882. In the middle of the street he faced off against Johnny Ringo. Both men were moments away from jerking their pistols when a peace officer, Joe Flynn, grabbed Ringo, and Wyatt wrapped his arms around Doc. Sheriff Behan was nowhere to be found.

  There was a concern that it was now open season on the Earps and anyone could be a target. All the family members took up residence at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, which could be more easily defended than individual cottages. But they could not simply hide inside the building. And after almost three months without violence, on the evening of March 18, it did not seem too risky for Wyatt and Morgan to go shoot pool.

  Across the street from the parlor was a saloon owned by Bob Hatch and John Campbell. From inside it, a man fired a rifle twice through a window in the back door. The second bullet just missed Wyatt, plunging into the wall behind where he was sitting. The first bullet had already torn into Morgan, severing his spine. As had happened with Bat Masterson four years earlier in Dodge City, in Tombstone Wyatt watched a brother die. Morgan, only thirty, breathed his last shortly after midnight, on Wyatt’s thirty-fourth birthday.

  There were several accounts of Morgan’s last words. The biographer Casey Tefertiller sides with what Wyatt reportedly offered two months later: “I promised my brother to get even, and I’ve kept my word so far. When they shot him he said the only thing he regretted was that he wouldn’t have a chance to get even. I told him I’d attend to that for him.”

  Later that day, Wyatt and James escorted a wagon bearing Morgan’s casket to the train station in Benson. When the next westbound train came through, James and his dead brother were on it, bound for the Earp homestead in Colton, California. Next was to get Virgil along with Allie, Bessie, and Mattie to safety. Two nights later, they were put on a train in Contention, with Wyatt, his brother Warren, and Doc providing protection.

  After the train pulled out, Wyatt spotted Ike Clanton and another man believed responsible for the shootings—Frank Stilwell—with shotguns. Firing erupted, and Stilwell was killed. Again, Clanton had run off. What became known as the Earp Vendetta Ride had begun. Wyatt would recall, “For a long time thereafter I occupied the anomalous position of being a fugitive from the county authorities, and performing the duties of Deputy United States Marshal, with the sanction and moral support of my chief.” Wyatt had lost faith in the court system. He had always upheld the decisions of the system in Dodge City, even those he disagreed with, but in Arizona it was a different story.

  The vendetta lasted several weeks, and during it the posse led by Wyatt was credited with killing three more men—Curly Bill Brocius, Indian Charlie, and Johnny Barnes. That July, Johnny Ringo was shot and killed, and some accused Wyatt of doing it, but by then the vendetta was over and Wyatt was in Colorado. In an odd twist, during the rest of March and into April, the two Earp brothers and Doc and a few fellow riders were being pursued by a posse formed by Behan. When he drew close, though, courage failed him. He and his halfhearted helpers gave up when Wyatt’s posse left Arizona.

  When all was said and done, the fight that began at the O.K. Corral culminated with at least eight men dead. Morgan was the only Earp to die, though Virgil would be disabled the rest of his life.

  Wyatt and his posse were worn out and certain that whoever was left worth killing was long gone. Doc’s declining health was another reason to call it quits. Arriving in Silver City, New Mexico, they sold their horses and took a stagecoach to where they could get a train to Trinidad, Colorado. For all his previous attempts at bravado, Warren had seen enough killing. Even Doc had. He split off from the others, to gamble his way to Denver. By the end of April, Wyatt had arrived by train in Gunnison, Colorado. He was sick at heart and exhausted, and he needed to reunite with an old friend.

  It had to be a bittersweet get-together for Bat and Wyatt when the latter arrived in Trinidad, where Bat was the city marshal. The last time Bat had seen his close friend, in Tombstone, Virgil and Morgan had been hale and hearty. At least now, Wyatt could recover under Bat’s protection. He found a job dealing faro at a Trinidad saloon. He was done with lawing. For that reason, and Wyatt still being a wanted man himself, it was Bat who had to rescue Doc when he was arrested.

  In Denver, Doc had been corralled by a lawman from Arizona named Perry Mallan, and the Denver authorities were content to be bystanders and watch the deadly dentist be extradited. Bat knew the marshal in Pueblo—Henry Jamieson—and wired him, asking a favor. Sure enough, Jamieson arrived in Denver with an arrest warrant, claiming that Doc had swindled a Pueblo man out of $150. But the Denver authorities refused to release Doc, insisting they would hold him until Arizona lawmen arrived to take custody.

  So Doc sat in jail, with The Denver Republican reporting about him that “murders committed by him are counted by the score
s and his other crimes are legion. For years he has roamed the West, gaining his living by gambling, robbery and murder. In the Southwest his name is a terror.”

  Bat’s second ploy was to confront Mallan in the Denver sheriff’s office, and he must have been pretty intimidated, because he confessed to not being a lawman at all but a swindler who was hoping to make money off his sudden fame as the man who had arrested the terror who was Doc Holliday. Bat then went to Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin, who agreed to stall the extradition request from Arizona. He also agreed to have the custody of Doc transferred to Jamieson. No sooner was that done than the marshal, Doc, and Bat were on a train to Pueblo.

  THIRTY

  Now, gentlemen, there being nothing further to do, suppose we adjourn to the bar and take a little something just for old time’s sake.

  —LUKE SHORT

  The Dodge City War had its roots in an action taken by nervous ranchers later backed by the law. Cattle coming up from South Texas were transmitting splenic fever to the longhorns in the Panhandle. When Governor Oran Roberts failed to quarantine cattle in the south, the rancher Charles Goodnight led a “Winchester Quarantine,” a line of defense consisting of armed men with orders to shoot any cattle and cowboys who tried to enter West Texas or the Panhandle. When the Kansas legislature contemplated (and would later issue) a ban on the importation of all Texas cattle, wherever they were from, and prohibited shipping them across the state in railroad cars, Dodge City waned as a cow town. The summer of 1881 saw the last big cattle drive along what had become known as the Great Western Trail.

  It was a step away from the wide-open frontier but another one toward civilization. Dodge City still had the railroad, at least, but by 1883, so did just about every place else of consequence. That November, to help organize and coordinate the shipping of passengers and freight every day over the thousands of miles of rail line that covered North America, at noon on the eighteenth the railroad companies in the United States and Canada would implement time zones. Timetables could then allow for there being an hour difference from Eastern to Central to Mountain to Pacific time zones.

  No longer being in a cow town, Dodge City saloon owners and some other businessmen had to figure out a future with far fewer cowboys spending their money fast and furiously. About the same time as this uncertain future was being pondered, Luke Short returned to town. He spent enough time at the Long Branch Saloon and did well enough at gambling and other pursuits that he would buy a piece of the place. And one indication of the hopes that the city would have a stable environment and truly leave the “wicked” days behind was the opening of the Bank of Dodge City, the first such institution. In 1882, with the surrounding frontier deemed safe enough, Fort Dodge closed its gates for good.

  It is one of those delicious ironies of history that such milestones pretty much coincided with the death of America’s most famous bank robber. By 1882, many of the outlaws who had put Dodge City and other notorious frontier towns on the map were in prison or dead. That April, they would be joined by one more.

  After the disastrous bank robbery attempt in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876, Jesse James and his brother Frank had spent several years under assumed names farming in the Nashville area. They probably could have lived out the rest of their lives there as history moved on, raising families. Frank had married seventeen-year-old Annie Ralston, and in 1878 the two had a son, Robert. But the brothers were not very good at farming, and in October 1879, the pockets of their overalls empty, a new James Gang was formed, and they robbed a train near Glendale, Missouri, hauling in a handsome thirty-five thousand dollars.

  This obviously held them over for a time because the gang’s next robbery was not until 1881, when they robbed a stage in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. That July, during a robbery of a train back in Missouri, two men were shot dead, reportedly both by Jesse. There was a big public outcry, and Governor Thomas Crittenden offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for the capture and conviction of the James brothers. However, this did not stop them from thievery. Jesse had even taken to reading dime-store novels about himself and no longer bothered to wear a mask. During another train robbery in Missouri, he entered a passenger car, announced, “I’m Jesse James,” and as if hosting a stage show, he introduced the other members of his gang. They took fifteen hundred dollars and rode off.

  The gang fell apart soon after, though, and the only two men left riding with the James brothers were Bob and Charlie Ford. On April 3, 1882, Jesse was at home in St. Joseph, Missouri, with his wife, Zee, and their two children. He invited the Ford brothers there to plan a robbery of the Platte County Bank. Jesse did not know that the Fords had secretly met with Crittenden about betraying Frank and his younger brother. After sharing a meal, the three men went into the parlor. Jesse stepped up on a stool to straighten a framed picture on the wall, and Bob Ford moved close behind him with a pistol and fired several times. Jesse was dead when he hit the floor. As the Fords ran from the house, Bob kept shouting, “I killed him! I killed Jesse James!” They went to the nearest telegraph office and wired the news to Crittenden.

  They were charged with murder, but the governor had the charges dropped and the ten-thousand-dollar reward was paid. The Fords lived in fear that Frank James would avenge his murdered brother, but five months later, he walked into Crittenden’s office, took off his gun belt, and surrendered. Still, Charlie Ford remained so frightened that he committed suicide. The “cowardly Bob Ford,” as he was known, made his way farther and farther west, through Kansas and into Colorado, working in saloons. In Creede, in 1892, he was shot to death.

  The tours that Frank led on the family farm in Kearney, Missouri, until his death at seventy-two in 1915 (with he and Bat Masterson still corresponding) included Jesse’s grave site. Visitors could buy stones right from the site. Whenever there were only a handful of stones left, Frank replaced them with more from a nearby creek. Ultimately, enough stones were sold to have covered dozens of graves.

  Luke Short was not the sole owner of the Long Branch, because in February 1883, when he bought out the interest of Chalk Beeson, Beeson’s partner, William Harris, became Luke’s partner. That was fine with both men, who had last done business together when Harris and Wyatt were partners in the Oriental Saloon back in Tombstone. Harris was a solid businessman and founder of the Bank of Dodge City. But when he ran for mayor, trouble followed.

  In the election that April, Harris lost to a familiar figure in Dodge City, Lawrence Edward Deger, the count being 214–143. Just beating Harris at the ballot box was not enough for the rotund new mayor: he wanted to put him—and by extension Luke—out of business. The campaign began on April 26 when it was decreed that brothel keepers and their prostitutes would be fined and other forms of unsavory entertainment were no longer welcome in Dodge City. That apparently included singing, because two days later, three women performing in the Long Branch Saloon were hauled off to jail. Singing wasn’t the primary way that girls in saloons brought in money, everyone knew, but it was a tad too vindictive to, as Bat put it, have them “locked up in the city calaboose.”

  When Luke Short learned that no other singers at the saloons in the city had been arrested, he strapped on his guns and headed for the jail to get them out. Once that task was attended to, Luke would take his grievances to the new mayor. He knew that Deger was the hand-picked successor of the outgoing mayor, Ab Webster, who owned the Stock Exchange, a rival saloon one door east of the Long Branch. And word around town was that Harris had been defeated thanks to railroad workers casting illegal ballots. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad wanted Dodge City even more tamed than it was when Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson had removed their badges and left it several years earlier. Other sins to be outlawed were “loitering, loafing, or wandering,” the idea being to get rid of vagrants and any others not contributing to the local economy.

  Deger knew that Short was a friend of Bat Masterson’s, and that alone put him on the wrong side of the law. He still bore a grudge
over Bat defeating him for Ford County sheriff in November 1877 and then losing his deputy job soon afterward. Let Luke Short and his six-shooters come on. If Deger couldn’t get Bat, he’d get one of his good friends.

  It was moonless and dark that cool late-April night when Luke marched toward the jail. Lou Hartman had the bad luck of being on the wooden sidewalk outside of it. He had been hired as a city policeman by Deger within the last couple of days, and here was a known killer coming his way. Not taking any chances, Hartman drew his gun and fired. His bad luck continued, because he missed his diminutive target, the bullet kicking up dust behind him. Luke whipped out his pistols. Clearly, Hartman had not signed up for this, and he turned and ran. His one piece of good luck was that he tripped and fell off the sidewalk, so that when Luke fired, the bullets flew overhead.

  Seeing the policeman topple out of sight caused Luke to think he’d killed Hartman, meaning he’d sure done more damage than he’d intended to do. He hightailed it back to the closed-up Long Branch and fortified it further by piling chairs and a table up against the door. He grabbed the shotgun from behind the bar, made sure it was loaded, and waited. Deger and his remaining crooked lackeys would have to come and get him.

  Luke needn’t have bothered erecting the barricade and, no doubt, losing a night’s sleep. Hartman was not hurt, just embarrassed. In the morning, a messenger was sent by City Marshal Jack Bridges, whom The Kansas City Evening Star would soon describe as “a well-known character”; whatever that meant, it wasn’t good. The deputy shouted the news about the resurrected Hartman through the saloon’s door. And, the groggy Luke was told, if he surrendered peacefully, the only punishment would be a small fine for shooting off his guns.

  The gambler in him saw this as a winning hand and not for the bluff it was. Down came the barricade, and Luke emerged, leaving his pistols on the bar along with the shotgun. But policemen took him into custody and he was tossed in jail. Luke was charged with assault—though the sidewalk had done more damage to Hartman than he had—and was released only when he put up two thousand dollars as bond.

 

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