Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  The new century found Wyatt and Sadie in Alaska, lured there by the scent of gold. He established the opulent Dexter Saloon in Nome—entertaining, among others, middleaging John Clum, come to make sense out of the Alaskan postal system—and operated it, with time out to meet Virgil in Arizona and look into Warren’s killing, until the fall of 1901, when he sold it for eighty-five thousand dollars and shipped home. Their next stop was Tonapah, Nevada, another in the string of mining boomtowns that came to an end finally in Goldfield in 1905.

  Bad investments brought Wyatt to a charge of vagrancy in Los Angeles and an arrest for bunco-steering in 1911. He was sixty-three years old.

  In Los Angeles, picture people came to Wyatt and Sadie’s rented bungalow to pump him for information on his frontier past. At first he told it straight, or at least as straight as he had told the reporter from the San Francisco paper before the Sharkey fight, but then he got tired of repeating himself and started making things up. He stretched one for a fellow named Ford about sidewinding his way into the O.K. Corral inside a cloud of dust from a passing stagecoach and told William S. Hart a howler about Frank McLaury putting a ball through a wedding ring at sixty paces that animated the actor’s horse face like his western fans never saw on the screen. When things he said started showing up in theaters he grinned at Sadie and said it was too bad the Nugget wasn’t publishing anymore, with so many potential subscribers around.

  John H. Flood, a family friend and willing pair of hands and legs whenever the aging couple required a service, collaborated with Wyatt at this time on his autobiography, producing by the 1920s a melodramatic and overwritten account that even the endorsement of Hart at the height of his screen fame could not force into print. Because the manuscript was still circulating, Wyatt declined to help Walter Noble Burns with a similar project, published in 1927 under the title Tombstone, which emphasized Wyatt’s skills as a gunman—transmuted into the modern term gunfighter—at the expense of the truth. That, together with rumors of the forthcoming publication of Billy Breakenridge’s hostile Helldorado, persuaded Wyatt and Sadie to cooperate with a man named Stuart Lake in the construction of a fact-based biography. Wyatt and Lake corresponded frequently throughout 1928 with that end in mind.

  Wyatt Earp died at eighty of prostate cancer early on the morning of January 13, 1929, in the rented bungalow he shared with his wife. Sadie had his remains cremated and buried near her parents’ plot in San Francisco. Pallbearers at his funeral included William S. Hart and John Clum.

  As the widow of Wyatt Earp, Josephine Sarah Marcus spent the rest of her life as custodian of his memory. This included backing up Allie’s threats against Frank Waters and The Earp Brothers of Tombstone as well as denouncing the implausible icon erected in Tombstone and Lake’s florid Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, published in 1931. She did succeed in creating a climate sufficiently hostile to persuade Houghton Mifflin to change the subtitle from Gunfighter and in 1934 bullied Twentieth Century Fox into removing her husband’s name from the film version. On two occasions she dictated her memoirs in hopes of publishing a book that would debunk the myth, but they did not see print until 1976, when Earp historian Glenn Boyer edited and consolidated the two manuscripts into I Married Wyatt Earp. She died in Los Angeles on December 19, 1944.

  Kate Fisher, sometimes referred to by her other alias of Kate Elder, christened Maria Katharina Horony, sold the boardinghouse in Globe to be with Doc Holliday when he died in Colorado in 1887. In 1888 she married a blacksmith there, George Cummings, and moved back to Arizona, living with him in Bisbee and other cities struggling to make the transition from boom camp to permanent settlement. But Cummings was nearly as heavy a drinker as Doc, with none of Doc’s superhuman capacity, and she left him to preserve her own sobriety. He expired by his own hand in Courtland, Arizona, in 1915. She worked in a hotel in Cochise until 1900, when she quit to move in with mining executive John J. Howard near Doz Cabezas, where she stayed until his death in January 1930, inheriting the bulk of his estate and administrating the remainder. Later, claiming poverty, she entered the Pioneers’ Home in Prescott and died there at the age of ninety in 1940. Before her death she wrote a long autobiographical letter to a niece that remains the most reliable of the many chronicles of her life. The niece and all the surviving members of the Horony family called her Aunt Mary.

  John Henry Holliday went to Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in the summer of 1883, got in an argument with a bartender there, and put a ball through the man’s wrist as he was reaching in a drawer for a pistol. Returning to Colorado, Doc found celebrity in the aftermath of the business in Tombstone and the extradition battle and was often seen strolling the streets of Silverton and Leadville towing a crowd of boys and would-be gunmen who listened to his stories of fast-shooting prowess and fought one another over his cast-off cigar butts. In Leadville he ran three faro games and shot the city marshal, Bill Allen, over five dollars he owed Allen. The man survived, but when a deputy named Kelly braced him over the incident in a saloon sometime later, Doc shot him twice, mortally wounding him, and was preparing to finish him off when another deputy disarmed him and placed him under arrest. At his hearing the killing was judged justifiable and he was discharged. He had more trouble with the earlier shooting, which went to full trial before he was acquitted on March 30, 1885.

  Of all his scrapes with the law, it was the first to get past the preliminary hearing stage. The circuit was dying, and with it public tolerance of the actions of gunmen. The strike towns were drying up and blowing away or else had grown too big to tree. They were connected by the railroad and telegraph and a man had to run farther and faster if he wanted to keep buckshot out of his coattails. Doc sold his horse for a stake and commuted between games by day coach.

  He drank much, ate little, and his sleep was so close to waking that he gave up trying. He was a scarecrow in the smoke-clogged tents and adobe huts where games of chance were played, a marble face with coal eyes and protruding ears, broken-straw wrists in cuffs that flapped as he shuffled cards and clacked faro counters with a noise of old bones rattling. The cough was constant; he was no longer aware of it, and indeed in his more feverish moments considered that he had beaten it. His conversation rambled, he lost track of bets. His business fell off.

  In May 1887 he went to Glenwood Springs, and he had to be helped down from the train. Sulfur was the universal curative, but it only gagged him and brought up the rest of his lungs and he was carried to a bed in a ward where on good days he sat up and played patience or wrote letters addressed to a convent in Atlanta, and on bad days vomited his meals into the bedpan. He got up for the last time late in October. After that he lay tossing, accusing Wyatt of having panther guts for brains and telling Mexican whores in Spanish to rinse and spit. Kate came to visit. Sometimes he recognized her and spoke of Fort Griffin and Dodge. His smile had become ghastly, full of long teeth like a horse’s. Mostly he raised bets and asked Morgan if he had time for another snort before heading over to the Bird Cage.

  Coming on ten o’clock on the morning of November 8 he opened clear gray eyes for the first time in twelve hours and asked the sanitarium attendant for a tumbler of whiskey. When it was brought, he drank it off in two slow draughts, returned the empty vessel, looked around at the people gathered at his bedside, and smiled.

  “This is funny.”

  He was thirty-five.

  The drastic drop in the price of silver after 1883 and the flooding by underground springs of the richest of the mines around Tombstone in succeeding years reduced the city’s population from its peak-production high of fifteen thousand to a tenth of that number by the turn of the century. For a time after that the city subsisted on its distinction as county seat, and when that was taken away, rather than going the way of neighboring Charleston and Galeyville and other frontier metropolises that are now only foundations overgrown by grass, it assumed its new legend as “the town too tough to die.” Somehow it survived long enough to enter its present incarnation;
the reasons are likely more social than historical and are not for discussion here.

  Today Tombstone is a detour off U.S. Highway 80 between Tucson and Bisbee, three rows of brick and frame buildings on broken pavement, the latter earmarked for destruction in the pursuit of the settlement’s authentic past. Mexican crafts and turquoise jewelry are sold in the Oriental Saloon and James Earp’s Sampling Room, the Bird Cage still stands in shabby grandeur on the east end of Allen Street, and the Crystal Palace, originally the Eagle Brewery Saloon, has had its late-Victorian furnishings restored, with the addition of a large oil painting of Wyatt Earp on the wall next to the rest rooms. The Epitaph, shrewdly transformed by its owners from a newspaper to a historical journal, boasts an international circulation many times greater than John Clum’s. Books and pamphlets on the violent days may be purchased in the gift shop at Boot Hill Cemetery, where the markers on the graves of Billy Clanton and the McLaurys are kept up, including the legend: MURDERED IN THE STREETS OF TOMBSTONE. Every year around the anniversary of the gun battle on Fremont Street the city celebrates Helldorado Days, welcoming thousands of tourists who come to see dramatic re-creations of the more famous killings and to have their tintypes taken in rented costumes. The city that cried out for law and order now thrives on its lawless past.

  The high point of any tour, of course, is the O.K. Corral, rebuilt like the rest of the town after the 1883 fire, where for a dollar—fifty cents for children—the visitor may enter and follow a deviously designed passage to the spot where the famous battle actually took place, ninety feet west of the original corral. Crude Cellotex representations of the combatants have been erected there for those whose imaginations are not equal to the task. C. S. Fly’s boardinghouse and photograph gallery have been restored, and inside the boardinghouse a picture of a woman who is not Big Nose Kate marks the spot where she is said to have witnessed the fight through the window in the room she shared with Doc Holliday. Elsewhere in town, plaques identify the locations where Virgil Earp was ambushed, Morgan Earp was killed, and Curly Bill Brocius shot Marshal Fred White. The hardware store where the bodies of Billy Clanton and the McLaurys were laid out before burial sells T-shirts with Wyatt Earp’s likeness silk-screened on the front. It is possible to eat a plate of chicken-fried steak on the site where Johnny Ringo, Frank Stilwell, and others crouched waiting to empty their shotguns at Virgil Earp as he crossed Fifth Street from the Oriental toward the Eagle Brewery, but it is not recommended. Tombstone cuisine is not what it was in 1881.

  On noncelebration days the town closes at five, a far cry from early days of all-night revels and piano music spilling over every batwing door from dusk until daybreak. When the sun goes down the ghosts that walk the machine-cut boardwalks must wonder if they are not haunting the wrong place. Yet it is only then, when the daytime dandies who clomp around in Tony Lama boots and Calgary Stampede Stetsons are drinking Coors in nearby Sierra Vista, and shadows have enveloped the gaudy facade of Big Nose Kate’s Saloon, that one can feel the ghosts’ presence.

  A pair of stately oaks standing near the corner of Third and Fremont, where Billy Clanton and Tom McLaury died, are the only living witnesses to the fight that did not start or end anything, but that was merely one skirmish in what some experts have termed the first true gang war in American history. Next to these, separated from the scene of the battle by a flimsy clapboard fence, is a playground. The children who play there are tired of hearing about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and want only to use the swings and the slide. Of all of Tombstone’s many friendly citizens, they are the only ones consistently living in the present.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Tombstone was yesterday. When this book first appeared, the minister who officiated at Big Nose Kate’s funeral was still living, and many who knew Wyatt Earp personally were in good health. For this reason the history of the events that took place in Cochise County between March 1881 and July 1882 is constantly in flux, and as old-timers die and discolored letters and diaries surface from trunks stored in attics and basements, forgotten facts continue to come to light and discredit long-held assumptions with the inevitability of changing seasons.

  Bloody Season, therefore, is not, nor is it intended to be, the last word on the circumstances surrounding the thirty second-long engagement that has come down to us as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. In the interest of clarity, some of the complexities of regional politics in the 1880s have been toned down, and some of the peripheral figures, such as Wyatt Earp’s gunman friend Texas Jack Vermillion, have been eliminated because their participation was minor and ephemeral and would only snarl further an already tangled skein. Much of the dialogue is the author’s invention. Personal memoirs seldom recall the exact words spoken by a given person at a given time, only their drift, and in all cases where the conversations have not been taken from existing quotes they have been constructed upon these summaries and crafted after the fashion of the individuals’ speech patterns as recorded elsewhere.

  The author offers no apologies for these and other presumptions, because the book is fiction based on fact and is not intended as pure history. At the same time he has attempted to tell the story of the Earp-Holliday-Clanton-McLaury feud with as much accuracy and objectivity as is possible after all this time. It should be noted that the issues were as confused when the smoke was still turning in the lot next to Fly’s boardinghouse as they are now after a century of tampering by dime novelists, Hollywood directors, and self-styled revisionists who imagine that by making a hero of Ike Clanton and a villain of Wyatt Earp they have done something different and startling. Everyone involved lied about the events; the challenge now is to decide who was lying about what, piece together the few points of agreement, and apply common sense to the others to form a logical picture. This task, performed for the first time by Justice Wells Spicer a month after the fight and by hundreds of others many times since, can only increase one’s respect for the pressures faced by that jurist when lives, including his own, depended upon his verdict.

  Some cherished icons have fallen in the course of this assembly. Gone from the fight are the romantic funeral-black skirted coats of the Earps and Holliday, often seen in movies and book jacket illustrations—Wyatt and his brothers had on mackinaws that brisk day, and Doc wore gray—and firearms enthusiasts will search in vain for Wyatt’s storied long-barreled Buntline Special; the best research indicates that the gun never existed. The Earps’s whorehouse interests on the circuit should shock no one in these exposé-conscious times; perhaps more disturbing is the lack of evidence to dispute Big Nose Kate’s assertion that Doc Holliday had never killed anyone before the Tombstone fight. It is a hard thing to give up a hero, harder still to relinquish a scoundrel.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable assistance of Earp historian Alford E. Turner, editor of The Earps Talk (Creative Publishing Co., College Station, Texas, 1980) and The OX Corral Inquest (Creative Publishing Co., 1981), who took an hour out of his busy schedule in Tombstone to clear up the mystery of when Big Nose Kate left that city.

  Words are not adequate to thank Richard S. Wheeler, to whom this volume is dedicated, for suggesting the book and for providing much helpful information to get the project started. He is, in addition to being one of our finest historical novelists, a living muse.

  When Bloody Season first appeared in 1987, another Tombstone historian, Glenn G. Boyer, was mentioned for his contribution to the author’s research. Because of this, as well as Boyer’s expressed enthusiasm for the project, the author was surprised when Boyer led an attack against the novel, disputing some of the very points that he himself had contributed. Later it became apparent that this particular historian was in the habit of defaming any work involving the events surrounding the O.K. Corral that did not carry his byline. Recently, Boyer’s own methods and practices have come under attack by other historians who allege that his entire body of work may be spurious. (Certainly Boyer’ s statements on public record of laying “traps” in his b
ooks to “snare” other researchers raise questions about his reliability as a source.) This kind of wrangling is by no means rare in academia, but is especially personal among Earp specialists.

  For Wyatt Earp is not dead. Like Custer on his hill, he stands tall and terrible in that dusty lot on Fremont Street, and no amount of unwanted truth or iconoclastic rhetoric will topple him. “Not a bullet touched me,” he wrote of his myth-enshrouded shoot-out with Curley Bill’s gang at Iron Springs, and he might have been speaking of all the fictions to come. Bloody Season is not history. It is an attempt to touch Earp, his friends, his enemies, their women, their time, and their place.

  LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  Whitmore Lake, Michigan,

  January 17, 1999