Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  The couple moved to the mining town of Vanderbilt, California, and built Earp’s Hall, a gambling emporium that also featured Saturday boxing matches and Sunday church services. When the Vanderbilt boom went bust, Virgil reunited with Wyatt in Cripple Creek, Colorado, but it already had all the liquor and gaming it could handle, so Virgil and Allie returned to the familiar environs of Prescott. He invested in what was called the Grizzly Mine, which promised to produce profits, until it collapsed—literally. Virgil was in the mine that day in November 1896 and was knocked down and out for a few hours after a tunnel gave way. Several broken bones and bad bruises required months of recuperation.

  He had a much more enjoyable experience in 1898, when he was fifty-five. That autumn, a letter from a woman with the delightfully coincidental name of Jane Law, mailed from Portland, Oregon, found him. Virgil was informed that she was his daughter, the one born to Ellen Rysdam in 1862, who had given him a purpose other than patriotism to join the Union Army. A few months later, he and Allie traveled to Oregon and father and daughter and Ellen were reunited. Allie commented, “It was a meeting of great feelings and after these had been dispensed with, they went to her home.” Virgil also met his three grandchildren for the first time. In the following years he and his daughter would exchange visits.

  Allie was not jealous but overjoyed. She would write, “All these years and me and Virge never had a baby, and here was Virge finding out for the first time in his life he had a grown-up young lady daughter, Jane!”

  Virgil and his third wife divided their time between Prescott and Colton. In Colton in 1901, he and Wyatt reunited to operate a gambling hall. However, after determining the city already had enough such establishments, town fathers rejected the brothers’ application.

  Presumably, while Wyatt was in Colton he visited his father and his stepmother. Virginia Ann Cooksey Earp had passed away in January 1893, and Nicholas had remarried nine months later. In 1901, at eighty-eight, he was placed in the Veterans Home in Sawtelle, which was on the western fringe of Los Angeles. He lived long enough to be part of an Earp reunion a couple of years later, which included Virgil, Wyatt, James, Adelia, and probably Newton and their spouses and children. In February 1907, shortly after being elected to the Los Angeles County Court and having outlived six of his ten children, Nicholas Earp died at ninety-four.

  A couple of years earlier, reports of new gold strikes had brought Virgil and Wyatt to southwestern Nevada. It would be the last time those two brothers were together. They did not stay long, and when Wyatt and Josephine moved on, Virgil and Allie stayed put.

  Early in 1905, Virgil became a peace officer again when he was appointed a deputy sheriff of Esmeralda County, in Nevada. And even with just one functioning arm, he also served as a bouncer in one of the saloons in Goldfield. Next door was the Northern, built by Tex Rickard, and it soon became very successful, boasting the longest bar in the West. Virgil did not keep both positions very long because his health became more fragile. He was just plain worn out, and a bout of pneumonia tipped the scales.

  Lying in bed in a hospital in Goldfield, Virgil asked Allie for a cigar. Then he asked her to place a grandniece’s letter to him under his pillow, and to “light my cigar, and stay here and hold my hand.” On October 19, 1905, at age sixty-two, Virgil Earp died. He was buried in the Riverview Cemetery in Portland, where he could be near his daughter when her turn came.

  Allie and Virgil had been together for thirty years, and she outlived him by forty-two more. For some of those years she lived in San Bernardino and was a close friend of Adelia Earp Edwards, and then she moved to Los Angeles. She died there in November 1947 at age ninety-eight, and she and Adelia share a grave site in the Mountain View Cemetery in San Bernardino.

  The older and youngest of the Earp brothers had very different lives and endings, with the oldest living the longest. Newton continued to avoid lawing, content to be a carpenter and builder in northern California and Nevada. He and his wife, Jennie, raised five children, who in turn married and had families of their own, mostly on the West Coast. Jennie and their daughter Effie May both died on March 29, 1898. A heartbroken Newton outlived them by two decades. He died at age ninety-one in December 1928 and was buried at the East Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Sacramento.

  Perhaps never recovering from the brutality of the vendetta his brother Wyatt involved him in, Warren’s life was much more troubled as time passed. He drifted from town to town across the frontier, not returning to Arizona until 1891, when he found work as a driver of stages that transported the U.S. mail, interspersed with stints as a range detective. He may have had contact with his brothers during his travels, and if so they might not have been pleasant reunions. Warren had acquired the reputation of being something of a bully and exaggerated the exploits of Wyatt and Virgil, probably for free drinks and other favors. Virgil contended that Warren “is too hasty, quick-tempered and too ready to pick a quarrel. Besides he will not let bygones be bygones, and on that account, I expect that he will meet a violent death.”

  In July 1900, Warren was doing some detecting work for Henry Hooker, a prominent rancher in Cochise County, Arizona. Because of an interest in the same woman, and because they simply rubbed each other the wrong way, Warren and Johnny Boyett, Hooker’s range boss, were often in conflict. One day in Brown’s Saloon in Willcox, Arizona, the two men argued. The argument reignited that night in the same saloon, and this time both men were drunk. Warren said he had a gun and that Boyett should get one of his own.

  He went and got two, both .45-caliber Colts. When Warren appeared in the saloon doorway, Boyett fired twice and missed twice. Warren left and reentered. Boyett fired two more times and missed twice more. Warren advanced on him, opened his coat and vest, and said, “I have not got arms. You have a good deal the best of this.” Boyett either did not believe that Warren was unarmed or was too unhinged by the advancing Earp, because he fired a fifth time. This time the bullet went true, striking Warren in the chest, and moments later he was dead.

  He was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery in Willcox. One account has Virgil, under an assumed name, spending time in Willcox questioning witnesses and finding that his brother’s death was murder. However, none of the other Earps followed up, and though Boyett was arrested he was never tried. He continued his job at Hooker’s ranch, later moved to Redlands, California, and died in Texas. Unlike the assassins in Tombstone, he killed an Earp brother and got away with it.

  After the events in Tombstone, James and Bessie stayed put in California. She died only five years later, in 1887. James lived quietly well into old age, dying in January 1926 at eighty-four. He was buried in the Mountain View Cemetery, near Adelia and Allie.

  Mattie had been another casualty of events in Tombstone. Seemingly for her protection in the aftermath of Morgan’s murder, Wyatt had her accompany James and Bessie and their daughter Hattie to the Earp family farm. Mattie believed that after the expected bloody business was finished, Wyatt would come to Colton to collect her.

  She was mistaken. Leaving Tombstone meant the end of her life with Wyatt. She remained at the Earp farm until August, when she boarded a train to begin a return journey to Arizona. Wyatt and Josephine had moved on, and there was nothing left for her in Tombstone, so Mattie looked up Big Nose Kate, who took her in. The two women lived in the Globe boardinghouse. The first three years of her stay, Mattie lived a quiet life and her use of laudanum may have diminished or stopped. But in 1885—soon after a photo of her was taken in a studio showing a reasonably healthy frontier woman in her midthirties—Mattie spied Wyatt and Josephine in Globe. That they looked happy and prosperous was a blow to her, and Mattie went into a tailspin.

  She began to drink heavily and returned to using opium and laudanum in ever-increasing doses. Months later, in another blow, Kate Elder informed her that Doc Holliday was on his last legs in Colorado and she was going to him. Mattie remained in Globe until October 1887, when she boarded a stage for a smaller Arizona town,
Pinal. The only aspect that may have appealed to her about the dusty and derelict postboom mining community, with ghost town in its future, was anonymity. No one would care what or how much she drank, there was one doctor who could prescribe laudanum, and she even could return to being a prostitute if need be.

  By the late winter of 1888, Mattie was in severe pain, and this time it was more physical than emotional. Her teeth were decaying and Pinal did not have a dentist. Increasing abdominal anguish and decreasing appetite indicated she could have cancer, cervical or intestinal, or there was the possibility of a late-stage sexually transmitted disease. She required more and more laudanum to dull the pain, month after month. Finally, on the night of July 3, Mattie mixed an overdose of laudanum with whiskey, drank it down, passed out, and did not wake up.

  After Bat Masterson, putting aside his personal feelings, had delivered Doc from custody in Denver and deposited him in Pueblo, Doc spent the rest of his days in Colorado. It was reported that he and Wyatt got together in Gunnison, perhaps to gamble or to resolve any conflicts lingering from the vendetta ride, and if so, that would be the last time the two close friends would see each other.

  Doc was living in Leadville—his health declining and his dependence on alcohol and now laudanum increasing—when he had his last gunfight. A man named Billy Allen, looking to earn a reputation, challenged Doc in a saloon. Doc demurred, but when Allen drew his gun Doc drew faster, firing twice and hitting Allen in his shooting arm. Doc could have killed him, but the last thing he needed was more trouble from the law.

  Entering 1887, Doc was gravely ill and he moved to Glenwood Springs, hoping the sulfurous waters would offer some relief. However, they failed to extend his life. According to Kate Elder, it was here the longtime lovers said their good-byes. She claims to have nursed him during Doc’s last weeks that autumn, which were mostly spent in bed because he was too weak to do anything else, even drink alcohol. But on November 8, he asked a nurse for whiskey, and he drank it down in two gulps. He looked at his feet and said, “Damn, this is funny,” probably thinking of the prediction given to him years earlier that he would never die in bed with his boots off. By dying that day, he proved the prediction false. Dr. John Holliday was thirty-six.

  A hastily arranged funeral was held that very afternoon, presided over by a local minister, W. S. Rudolph. Because Doc had died flat broke, a collection was taken up by gamblers and bartenders to pay for the expenses of the funeral and interment. Doc was buried at the Linwood Cemetery. His tombstone reads HE DIED IN BED.

  The following year, Kate married George Cummings, a blacksmith. They settled in Arizona, but a year later the restless Kate moved from Bisbee to Cochise, alone. She found work at the one-floor, ramshackle Cochise Hotel, and in 1900 she moved in with a man reputed to be a mining executive, John J. Howard. When he died thirty years later, she went to live in the Arizona Pioneers’ Home, an old-age facility. There Kate Elder remained until November 1940, when she died five days before her ninetieth birthday. Her tombstone at the facility’s cemetery in Prescott has MARY K. CUMMINGS carved into it.

  After leaving Dodge City in 1883 for what would be the last time, Wyatt collected Josephine, and she became his fourth wife, though it is unclear when or if that became official. He called her “Sadie,” after her middle name of Sarah, even though that was also the name of his second wife and the one Josephine had used as a pseudonym while being courted by Johnny Behan and possibly being a prostitute.

  The couple began a wandering journey through the West, a combination of Wyatt’s ongoing search for wealth and the inherent Earp restlessness. During the 1880s they spent time in Galveston, Texas, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Idaho, where for a time Wyatt owned a saloon. In San Diego, Wyatt was a real estate speculator and he owned racehorses, none of which were fast enough to be consistent winners. Around this time Sadie developed her own addiction, this one to gambling. Wyatt was constantly buying jewelry back from pawnshops and regifting it to his wife.

  In the 1890s, while living in Arizona, Wyatt heard about the gold strikes in the Klondike area of Alaska and decided that would be their next adventure. He did not find gold in the hills, but apparently a saloon he owned in Nome did a brisk business. In 1901, he cashed out and he and his wife relocated to Los Angeles, where one newspaper referred to him as “the well-known sporting authority,” alluding to his connection to boxing. Like Bat, he enjoyed the sport and had found work as a referee. Then there was Nevada, his last get-together with Virgil, and back to California. Wyatt and Sadie finally settled down for good in Los Angeles.

  Over the next two decades Wyatt was approached to cooperate on writing projects. This would mean talking, not his strong suit, and perhaps revealing more about his life than he cared to. He could use money, though, because ill-advised investments had taken most of what he’d previously earned. In fact, he was arrested for “bunco steering” in 1911, when he was sixty-three. Wyatt cooperated with writer and friend John Flood, but his much-exaggerated “biography” was never published. Next up was Stuart Lake, and he and Wyatt exchanged letters throughout 1928, until Wyatt was too unwell to continue.

  When 1929 began, Wyatt was very ill. He had prostate cancer, and whatever treatment existed at the time would have been too late anyway given his late-stage condition. He would not see his eighty-first birthday two months later. One day, the ex-lawman, who had made buffaloing an art form, could not get out of bed, and that is where he remained, with his wife of forty-seven years (give or take a few) at his side.

  Sadie continued her vigil day after day. At one point, Wyatt woke up. He appeared thoughtful and said, “Supposing … supposing.…” He was quiet for a few moments then added, “Oh, well,” and fell back asleep. He died on January 13, 1929.

  The services were held at the Pierce Brothers chapel in Los Angeles. Sadie was too overcome with grief to attend. Among those who did attend were John Clum from Tombstone and the cowboy stars William S. Hart and Tom Mix. Wyatt’s body was cremated. Six months later, Sadie brought the ashes to the Marcus family plot at Hills of Eternity, a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California.

  Wyatt’s reputation as one of the greatest gunslinging marshals of the American West, even though a lot of it was not true, was safe with Sadie. As Stuart Lake and others published material about him, or tried to, she was quick to attempt to correct and refute anything negative and approve anything positive. This was the approach to her own, mostly fabricated, book titled I Married Wyatt Earp. However, she was not interested in discussing her own life before Wyatt, letting people think what they wanted to.

  Josephine remained in Los Angeles and would never allow herself to be called Sadie again. She was close to being penniless when World War II began. On December 19, 1944, she died of a heart attack, at eighty-three. She was buried next to Wyatt and they share a headstone. (It was stolen in 1957 but recovered.) William S. Hart and Sid Grauman of Grauman’s Chinese Theater paid for the funeral.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Every dog has his day, unless there are more dogs than days.

  —BAT MASTERSON

  Wyatt Earp may have outlived Bat Masterson in years but perhaps not in life experiences. For Bat, the Dodge City years were a first act, and his life was a three-act play.

  His departure from Dodge City after the “war” there led to years of itinerant travel. He turned thirty in November 1883 but was not the least bit inclined to settle down somewhere. Though occasionally swinging through Dodge City—such as an 1884 visit to organize a baseball team and a short stint as Patrick Sughrue’s deputy in 1886—Bat traveled from boomtown to boomtown, wherever the gambling was reasonably honest and profitable. For the adventure as well as the money, he occasionally worked as a hired gun. One job had him and twenty men—one of them his old friend Bill Tilghman—guarding polling places as a hotly contested campaign concluded in Kansas.

  From time to time, Bat would spend time in Kansas, not just on a job but to visit with family near Wichita
and look up old acquaintances in Dodge City. In 1884, he became a newspaper publisher. Vox Populi was the publication’s name, but it didn’t last the year. Still, Bat retained an abiding interest in newspapers, which he would be able to put to better use later. In 1885, he was listed as a Dodge City farmer, though it’s very unlikely he spent any time trudging behind a plow. That summer, as part of the Fourth of July celebration, Bat was given a gold watch and a gold-topped cane upon being voted the “most popular man in Dodge City.” Then he was on his way again.

  From Kansas, Bat went west to Denver. For several months he served as a deputy sheriff of Arapahoe County, and then he traded that in for a much more lucrative job as a faro dealer at the high-tone Arcade gambling house. If he and Wyatt had been concerned about never crossing trails again, that evaporated when Bat learned that his friend was dealing faro at another of Denver’s top sporting establishments, the Central. Wyatt and Sadie and Bat found rooms in the same boardinghouse, and during off-hours they reminisced about the Dodge City days. It was after Wyatt moved on, he and his wife always chasing that elusive fortune, that for the first time in many years, Bat Masterson fell in love.

  Her name was Emma Walters. As with his first romance a good fifteen years earlier, she was a showgirl. Unlike the ill-fated Mollie Brennan, Emma did not also double as a prostitute. The blond singer and dancer must have been quite the knockout because Bat’s occupation at the time was managing the burlesque troupe that performed at the Palace Variety Theater in Denver (booked regularly there was his old pal Eddie Foy), and thus he had access to plenty of pretty women.