One at least of the old faces was in Globe. Billy the Kid Claiborne, without his guns and wearing the striped overalls of the men who worked in the local smelter, came to her door one night looking for companionship, unaware that she was no longer in that business. She directed him to a place and he thanked her and left, touching his hat. He had a good set of whiskers now and his jaw was squaring off like a man’s, but his lanky slouch still suggested the young tough who had swaggered into that alley on Fremont Street and beaten leather back out. A week or so after their meeting she saw him on the street, dressed up in a town Suit this time with a cartridge belt showing under the coat, and then she didn’t see him again and decided that he had moved on. This hardly surprised her. Smelting was too much like work for that San Pedro crowd.
In July, before Claiborne’s visit, she read of the mysterious death of Johnny Ringo, who had been found sitting on the ground in Turkey Creek Canyon with his back propped up against a young oak, a pistol in his hand and a bullet hole in his temple. The ball had entered in front of his right ear and come out the top of his head on the left side without disturbing his hat. A coroner’s jury had studied the evidence and ruled in favor of suicide.
Kate had a good long laugh over that one. Ringo’s cartridge belt had been buckled on upside-down and there were no empty casings in the pistol’s cylinder. His rifle had a cartridge in the chamber, which meant that if he had shot himself with it he’d have had to lever in the fresh round afterward. Nor did she waste much time, as many others would do in the years to come, stewing over who had done for him. A man like Ringo had enemies stacked as high as his hat and bought his own chances when he chose to sleep off an all-day drunk within sight of the Galeyville road.
She wasn’t drinking these days. Unlike Doc, who seldom appeared drunk despite a daily intake that would kill a healthy man because it burned itself out fighting the thing that was consuming him, Kate had never had a capacity and was no good for anything after two drinks. The transaction in Tombstone with Johnny Behan and Milt Joyce had disgusted her, and she saw in some of the women who lived under her roof the broken thing she would become if she went back to whiskey, and so when the thirst was upon her she drank gallons of tea strong enough to stand a poker in and read novels late at night about women back East who lived in shelflike structures called apartment houses and rode bicycles in the park and fell in love with engineers. Sometimes, just before going to sleep, she thought of Sister and Mother Superior, would catch herself crossing her torso, and would be very hard to get along with all the next day. Every night without fail she prayed for the soul of her dead child, who had been baptized out of the Faith. Silas could see to himself.
The territorial papers were starting to lose interest in Tombstone. Editors who had filled pages calling for federal intervention to end the lawlessness in Cochise County saw little worth reporting there now that most of the colorfuls had quit the place feet first or on horseback. Days went by with no mention of the city, and when the odd shooting scrape did occur, whole columns gloated over the details. Kate decided that journalists were like sick old women who were only happy when they had some new complaint to chew on. The November election, in which Johnny Behan chose not to run to succeed himself as sheriff, was largely ignored. The subsequent shooting of Billy Claiborne provided fodder for days.
Being the only gunman worth mentioning still in the area, Buckskin Frank Leslie was widely credited with having killed Ringo, a rumor he did nothing to confirm or deny. Claiborne, who was still smarting from remarks directed at his decision to flee the empty lot next to Fly’s when Virgil Earp ordered the cowboys to throw up their hands, had been in Globe at the time the story broke and took a job in the smelter to get enough money to return to Tombstone and kill Leslie. Once there—being Billy Claiborne and so not in possession of enough sense to lower his trousers in an outhouse—he got drunk and started an argument in the rebuilt Oriental, only to be spun and fired out the door by the more powerful Leslie, who was tending bar there. Later Claiborne appeared swaying at the corner of Fifth and Allen with a Winchester in his hands and his eyes on the saloon’s front entrance, calling Leslie a son of a bitch who ought to try killing a man who was wide awake for a change. He was still shouting when Leslie stepped out the side door wearing his apron and shot him through the heart with his Peacemaker.
A hearing absolved Leslie of blame on the grounds of self-defense and Claiborne was buried not far from his friends Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury. Reading of the incident, Kate wondered if Claiborne had had a woman and if there were a Kate Fisher in Tombstone now to see to her needs. Men imagined that facing death made them men, leaving the women behind to face life.
For that matter she might be there in Globe, left to wait while her man tended to business in Tombstone; and because Kate was thinking of that when someone tapped on her front door she half-expected to find Billy Claiborne’s woman there when she opened it.
She didn’t. It was Mattie Blaylock, Wyatt Earp’s woman before Sadie, come back from helping bury Morgan in California to take a room in Kate’s house with the others.
Chapter Twenty
Give the world a flat spin. Grease the axis and start it turning faster, blur the days and nights and the green and umber and gray seasons into a white wipe. Deal out the years like new cards. Our clock is running, there are many players left to throw in, and the only winner is the man who clears the table after everyone has gone.
Johnny Ringo’s killer, whoever he was, never came to justice, and the circumstances of the notorious gunman’s death remains as much a mystery as his life, settling upon him a posthumous legend greatly out of proportion to the events that can be documented. Buckskin Frank Leslie, a shadowy figure in his own right, never discounted the tales linking him to Ringo’s killing, nor did he own to any of them, and when he was sentenced to imprisonment in the territorial penitentiary at Yuma in 1890 for the murder of Molly Bradshaw, a singer at the Bird Cage, many newspapers included Ringo among the notches on Leslie’s custom-designed Peacemaker. Where he went after his release in 1897 is largely conjecture, although Wyatt Earp and others claimed to have encountered him, a pathetic old man, working as a saloon swamper in Oakland, California, in the early years of the twentieth century. Wyatt Earp took Ringo for himself, telling a dramatic story of a clandestine return to Arizona Territory in spite of his wanted status there and a face-to-face duel in the sylvan setting of Turkey Creek Canyon; but the clannish Wyatt was no loner and the details run counter to his partner system of hunting and retribution. Fred Dodge, a well-known gambler around Tombstone, came out from under cover as an investigator for Wells Fargo in later years to name Johnny-behind-the-Deuce as Ringo’s killer, citing Ringo’s attempt to lynch him for the killing of engineer Henry Schneider as a motive. By that time, however, Ringo’s fate was too popularly entrenched as a Mystery that Cannot Be Solved, and so Dodge’s account is generally dismissed as an attempt to protect his friend Wyatt—although why Wyatt should require such protection after having publicly claimed Ringo remains a puzzle.
Ringo’s friend Pony Deal seems to have entertained similar suspicions, for he is believed responsible for the death of Johnny-behind-the-Deuce, right name John O’Rourke, whose bullet-clobbered body was found in the vicinity some days later. Pony Deal himself was killed by persons unknown in either Greenlee County, Arizona, or Sonora, Mexico, depending upon who is telling the story.
Pete Spence, born Peter M. Spencer, considered by many to have been Morgan Earp’s killer, never stood trial for that crime. In 1893 he was convicted of an assault charge knocked down from murder in the death of a Mexican and was sentenced to serve five years in the Yuma penitentiary. He was pardoned unconditionally by Governor L. C. Hughes after three years. Nothing is known of his movements after his release.
In the fight at Iron Springs, outlaw Johnny Barnes received a wound that was improperly cared for and eventually died in Charleston, reeking of gangrene and jabbering in delirium. One
of his listeners was J. B. Ayers, a Charleston saloon keeper and yet another of Wells Fargo’s ubiquitous undercover men, who reported to Fred Dodge that Barnes had confirmed the death of Curly Bill Brocius at Wyatt Earp’s hands. Barnes, Ayers said, went on to admit his part in the midnight attack on Virgil Earp and in the infamous attempt on the Benson stage led by Bill Leonard, Harry Head, and Jim Crane in March 1881. He also implicated Doc Holliday in that botched robbery and accused him of the slaying of driver Bud Philpot. Dodge, who like Bat Masterson held little love for the dying and bitter dentist, pronounced this “sure enough evidence” of Doc’s complicity.
Joseph Isaac Clanton and his dull-witted younger brother Phineas shifted their rustling operations north to escape the increasing efficiency of law enforcement in Cochise County after John Behan’s retirement from office. In 1887, during the so-called Pleasant Valley War, deputies of the famous Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens of Navajo County shot Ike out from under his hat on the Blue River as he was fleeing an indictment. He was killed instantly, but his brother Phin surrendered and served ten years in Yuma. There he, Pete Spence, and Buckskin Frank Leslie found themselves in the charge of deputy superintendent John Harris Behan. The former sheriff had been appointed by the territorial government for meritorious service to the Democratic Party. Freed in 1897, Phin took up stock raising in legal fashion near Globe, proved adept at a pursuit that involved little guile and less risk, and in 1902 was honored by the Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons for a five-year record of perfect attendance.
Following his deputy superintendency at Yuma, John Behan served as a United States Customs officer at El Paso, then became a commissary officer for the army with good-conduct citations in the Spanish-American War and Boxer Rebellion. He died of natural causes at the age of sixty-six in Tucson on June 7, 1912, while his application for the superintendent’s post at the soldiers’ home in Prescott was under favorable consideration.
William Milton Breakenndge left the sheriff’s office at the end of Behan’ s term in early 1883 and was later elected Cochise County surveyor, a position he left to become special officer for the Southern Pacific Railroad between Yuma and El Paso. In that capacity he investigated train robberies by such noted desperadoes as Grant Wheeler, Jack Dunlap, and Black Jack Ketchum. He retired from the S.P.R.R. as claim agent at the age of seventy and wrote a rip-roaring book, Helldorado, that established his reputation as the only honest law in Tombstone and environs. He died in Tucson at the end of January 1931, a fixture at the Old Pueblo Club and the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society. He never married.
Warren Baxter Earp, the youngest of the five full Earp brothers, drifted with Wyatt and Sadie from one boom camp to another after the three left Arizona, returning there alone in 1891 to work as a hand on Colonel Hooker’s Sierra Bonita ranch. Later he tended bar in nearby Wilcox, where at one o’clock on the morning of July 6, 1900, John N. Boyett shot him to death in Brown’s Saloon after an argument in which Warren accused Boyett of accepting money to kill him. No warrants were issued for Boyett’s arrest, despite testimony at the coroner’s inquest that Warren was unarmed at the time of the shooting. Virgil and Wyatt investigated, but no evidence has surfaced to confirm Sadie Earp’s dark implication in her autobiography, I Married Wyatt Earp, that Boyett was made to answer for his act.
Wyatt and Virgil saw each other one more time before death separated them as well, in Goldfield, Arizona, in 1905.
Virgil Walter Earp never regained full use of his shattered left arm, and although he could chop wood with his right hand and eat with both he had to support the bad arm with his right hand during the latter operation because there was no bone at the elbow, only gristle and sinew holding the arm together. The handicap did not prevent him from opening a detective agency near his parents’ home in Colton, California, or from securing election later as Colton’s first city marshal. By this time his involvement in the troubles in Tombstone in 1881 was a matter of some legend, outshining that of Wyatt, whose fame would take root in the new century with the publication of a number of popular fictionalized histories and the spread of flickering pictures on bedsheet screens across the country. From there Virgil and his common-law wife Allie went back to Arizona to prospect for gold, and in one of those tent cities a letter caught up with Virgil from a grown daughter he didn’t know he had, from an early annulled marriage in Iowa. Later she came to visit him from her home in Oregon. During the rich strikes in Goldfield, Wyatt and Sadie and Virgil and Allie worked neighboring claims. What the brothers talked about during that last time together is not recorded. When Virgil died of pneumonia that same year Allie shipped his body back for burial in his daughter’s family plot in Portland, Oregon.
Alvira Sullivan Earp outlived all of the other principals connected with the early days in Tombstone, dying in Los Angeles in 1947, three weeks short of her one hundredth birthday. Before her death she entrusted her recollections to a nephew, Frank Waters, who used them to write a revisionist history of the events surrounding the so-called “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” which she read, pronounced a pack of lies, and threatened to kill him if he published. Whether or not Waters took the threat seriously, it is a matter of record that The Earp Brothers of Tombstone did not see print until thirteen years after her death.
James Cooksey Earp, eldest of the fraternal clan, buried his wife Nellie in San Bernardino, California, in 1887, and died in Los Angeles in 1926, aged eighty-four. Although he turned up as a saloon keeper, gambler, and whoremaster in most of the towns visited by Wyatt and the other Earps during the peak days of the circuit, the wound he had sustained in his left shoulder fighting in Fredericktown in 1861 prevented him from taking an active part in the violent episodes.
For a little over a year after her return to Arizona, Celia Ann Blaylock, known during her time in Tombstone and from then on as Mattie Earp, lived in Kate Fisher’s boardinghouse in Globe, then moved on to Pinal, a town that owed its existence to the Silver King Mine eight miles to the north. There she lived as a prostitute, complaining in the saloons by day of her husband’s desertion, and mixing laudanum with her whiskey in her shack at night so she could sleep. She spent the night of July 2, 1888, with a miner, discovered some cheap jewelry missing the next day, and drank an entire bottle of laudanum. On the Fourth of July she was buried in the desert north of town and a trunk containing her effects was sent to relatives in Iowa. Among these were some Earp family tintypes and a Bible that had been presented to Wyatt by a law firm in Dodge City when he was a deacon.
When the extradition threat against Doc Holliday was lifted, Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp and Warren traveled by train from Colorado to Colton, California, to visit their parents and Virgil, collected Sadie from her parents in San Francisco, and returned to Denver, where Wyatt and Doc gathered crowds in the gambling halls in the wake of the Tombstone legend. In Gunnison Wyatt’s prospecting turned up only dirt and he and the clan left Doc riding a tiger in town to seek their elusive fortune on a dwindling frontier. Wyatt and Doc never saw each other again. In June 1883 Wyatt responded to a summons from Luke Short in Dodge City and founded the Dodge City Peace Commission with Short, Bat Masterson, and six other gunmen to help establish Short’s right to run a saloon there. The spectacle of so many determined-looking dandies with pistols on under their coats won the point without bloodshed and the commission was dissolved amicably.
In Idaho, Wyatt and brother James were reunited, running a saloon in Eagle City in the Coeur d’Alene District and working a few claims, including two that were not their own, for which they paid heavy fines that forced them to close the saloon in 1884. After that the three Earps and their families wandered through Texas, gambling, pimping, and working confidence games in cowtowns and mining camps from Fort Worth to old Mexico. But the circuit was drying up. Money was no longer quickly come by and slower spent, the law was everywhere, and Cochise County had spoiled Wyatt’s appetite for politics. They returned to California.
In San Diego, Wyatt invested funds
borrowed from Sadie’s parents in real estate and horses, buying interests in racing stock. Wyatt often raced them in person, and his lanky figure in cap and goggles with linen duster flying behind his sulky became a familiar sight on the California dirt tracks. One of his horses, Lottie Mills, took the seven furlong running away at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where Wyatt introduced his commonlaw wife to red-faced, white-whiskered Will Cody, an acquaintance from his Kansas buffalo-hunting days. As Buffalo Bill the flamboyant old frontiersman was hosting his Wild West exhibition across the street from the fair entrance.
At the end of 1896, Wyatt reluctantly agreed to referee the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons World Heavyweight Championship fight at Mechanics Pavilion in San Francisco. Amid shrill claims that the match was fixed, he awarded it to Tom Sharkey on a foul. The tempo was set before the opening bell, when Wyatt stripped off his coat in the ring and forgot that he was wearing a pistol underneath. He was fined fifty dollars for carrying a concealed weapon and the charge of corruption would follow him the rest of his life.
Bloody Season Page 22