by Jon E. Lewis
In 1876 Earp moved to Dodge, then at the height of its infamous reputation as the “Gomorrah of the Plains”. Earp served two periods on the town’s police force, 1876–7 and 1878–9, rising to become assistant marshal. It was during his sojourns in Dodge that Earp made friends with lawmen Luke Short and Bat Masterson and joined the “Dodge City Gang”, a cartel which controlled the local liquor, gambling and prostitution business. Another member of the Gang was John Henry “Doc” Holliday, a tubercular sometime dentist turned gambler. The son of a Confederate officer, the sad-faced alcoholic was mercurial in temper but an unrelenting racist. His first victims were two Negro boys who dared share a swimming-hole near his Georgia home. In Dodge he lived with – and was possibly married to – the prostitute Kate Elder, better known as “Big Nose Kate”. According to some accounts, Holliday saved Earp’s life in Dodge by disarming a rowdy cowboy.
Earp’s law-enforcement achievements in Dodge were unremarkable, although on 26 July 1878 he indirectly killed his first man, a “hurrahing” Texas cowboy by the name of George R. Hoyt. Earp, aided by Jim Masterson, shot at Hoyt as the latter rode out of town. Hoyt fell off his horse, injured his arm and died of an infection a month later.
Hoyt was not just the first man Earp killed in Dodge; he was the last. A fracas with a saloon girl, however, did make the local Times:
Miss Frankie Bell who wears the belt for superiority in point of muscular ability, heaped epithets upon the unoffending head of Mr. Wyatt Earp to such an extent as to provoke a slap from the ex-officer, besides creating a disturbance of the quiet and dignity of the city, for which she received a night’s lodging in the dog house and reception at the police court next morning, the expense of which was about $20. Wyatt Earp was assessed the lowest limit of the law, $1.
Earp was less lucky in another fight in Dodge City. A cowboy called Red Sweeney beat him to a pulp in an altercation over a dance-hall girl.
While in Dodge Earp also acted as deacon of the Union Church.
In December 1879 Earp went to the silver camp of Tombstone, Arizona, at the invitation of his brother Virgil, who was deputy US marshal. The town’s funereal name came from prospector Ed Schieffelin, who had once been told that his grave was the only thing he would find in the sun-blasted Dragoon Hills; when, in 1877, he found instead thick veins of silver he decided to name his claim ironically: Tombstone. At the time Earp arrived, Tombstone was one of the most turbulent places in the Southwest, overflowing with miners attracted by the prospect of making $4 a day for a 10-hour shift.
Accompanying Earp to Tombstone was Celia Ann (Mattie) Blaylock, a laudanum addict who lived with him as his wife. Wyatt soon became deputy sheriff of Pima County, and his brothers Jim, Morgan and Warren also settled in the town.
The Earps and their wives formed a notably close-knit entity, all buying frame houses within a block of each other. They were Republican and civic-minded; they ran for public office and founded church congregations; they leaned heavily on each other for their economic advancement. The Earps also formed close associations with the town’s business and upper-class community, including the publisher of the Tombstone Epitaph, mayor John P. Clum, mine magnate E. B. Gage and youthful Episcopalian minister Endicott Peabody (later the White House chaplain of Franklin D. Roosevelt).
Showdown
It was this association, more than anything else, which led to the famous gunfight – not at, but near, the O.K. Corral. The business elite, who were predominantly Republican and Northern, turned to Virgil and Wyatt Earp and their gunfighting talents to pacify Tombstone and end its wild “man for breakfast” image. Most in need of “civilizing” was a miscellaneous, anarchic confederation of Cochise County small ranchers, rustlers and outlaws headed by “Old Man” (N. H.) Clanton and known as “the Cowboys”. Other prominent members of the Cowboys – estimated to number anything between 50 and 300 – were Clanton’s sons, Billy, Ike and Phineas, Curly Bill Brocius (alias William Graham), Pony Deal, John Ringo, and the brothers Frank and Tom McLaury. The Cowboys, who periodically rode into town for a drinking spree, unsettled Tombstone’s elite because they undermined civic efforts to convince mining capitalists that the town was safe for investment. The profits at stake were enormous: $25 million dollars’ worth of silver would be dug out of Tombstone between 1879 and 1883. The Earps – who were themselves speculating in mines and real estate – enthusiastically backed the civilizing mission, with an enthusiasm heightened by a series of personal clashes with the Clantons and McLaurys.
The first blood between the two factions came on 28 October 1880. In the evening, some of the Cowboy outlaws rode into town and started shooting up Allen Street. Fred White, the city marshal, stepped out to intervene and was shot – probably accidentally – by Curly Bill Brocius. Wyatt Earp pistol-whipped Curly Bill and threw him in jail.
Tension between the two sides increased dramatically. Accusations and threats flew back and forth. Earp telegraphed his Dodge City cronies Doc Holliday and Luke Short to join him, installing them as dealers in the Oriental Saloon and Gambling Hall, in which he had a quarter share. Shortly after, the Tombstone Nugget, a paper which sided with the Clantons, charged that Doc Holliday had led a raid on the Wells Fargo stage, and that the Earps were the masterminds behind it. The clinching piece of evidence seemed to come from Holliday’s partner, Big Nose Kate, who signed an affidavit that Holliday had been involved in the affair. Later, Big Nose Kate withdrew the affidavit, possibly under pressure from Earp.
In June 1881 Old Man Clanton was killed on a rustling foray into Mexico, and his son Ike took over leadership of the Cowboys. Matters now hurtled towards their climax. Wyatt Earp and the teenage Billy Clanton had a heated exchange over the ownership of a horse. In a saloon on 25 October 1881 Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday met, and three times Holliday tried to get Ike Clanton to go for his gun. Ike insisted he was unarmed. The Earps and Clantons left the saloon bellowing threats at each other.
The gunfight came the next day, Wednesday 26 October 1881. Early in the morning the Earps were awakened with the news that the Clanton gang was gathering in town. Virgil Earp – who had recently been appointed city marshal – arrested Ike Clanton for carrying a weapon within city limits. Taken to police court by Virgil and Morgan Earp, Ike was fined 25 dollars. In a rage, Ike started berating Morgan Earp, who offered Ike a gun and suggested that they have it out, there and then. Ike declined. Tom McLaury, meanwhile, had literally collided with Wyatt Earp outside the police court, Earp responding by hitting McLaury over the head with the barrel of his pistol. Later the same morning, Wyatt and Frank McLaury taunted each other in the street.
The Earps held a council-of-war in Hafford’s saloon, and determined on a showdown with the Clanton-McLaurys. Virgil took his brothers Wyatt and Morgan to his office and deputized them. Doc Holliday turned up with a shotgun and was similarly deputized. Realizing that trouble was brewing, John Behan, sheriff of Cochise County, intervened and offered to disarm the Clantons and McLaurys peaceably. The offer was brushed aside, probably because Behan was a friend of the Cowboy outlaws, whose votes he needed for his elected office, so could not be trusted.
The Earps and Holliday then went looking for their enemies. They found them in Fremont Street, next to the O.K. Corral. Lined up were Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and a friend of the Clanton’s, Billy Clairborne. The Earps and Holliday carried on walking until there was a bare eight feet between the two groups. According to Behan, who trailed the Earps, Wyatt Earp started the battle by saying “You sons of bitches, you have been looking for a fight, now you can have one.” The Earps’ version was that Virgil called on the men to surrender, but Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury dropped their hands to their guns.
Neither version is accurate. Almost certainly the gunfight was initiated by the impetuous Doc Holliday, who raised his shotgun and fired at – and narrowly missed – Ike Clanton, Holliday trading on this notorious act for the rest of his life. After Holliday’s shotgun blast, the Earps al
so began shooting. Frank McLaury fell almost immediately, shot in the stomach by Wyatt Earp. Morgan Earp, his coat holed from a bullet from Tom McLaury’s Colt .45, fired at Billy Clanton, hitting him in the right arm, then in the chest, Clanton falling back against the photographic studio of Camillus S. Fly. Although dying, Billy managed to fire his gun twice. These bullets apparently wounded Virgil in the calf, and Morgan in the shoulder. Ike Clanton and Billy Clairborne, meanwhile, had run to the safety of Fly’s doorway. Tom McLaury, who had taken shelter behind a horse, received a mortal blast from Holliday’s shotgun when the horse reared up, exposing him. Seeing this, Tom’s wounded brother Frank fired at Holliday, skinning his hip. Morgan Earp then killed Frank McLaury.
Suddenly, there was silence. The battle of the O.K. Corral was over. It had taken just 30 seconds.
There was considerable controversy afterwards as to whether the Clanton-McLaurys had actually intended to fight. Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury, at least, had been unarmed. Feelings against the Earps and Holliday ran high. The dead men – Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton – were dressed in their finest clothes and placed in the window of a hardware store with a sign stating: MURDER IN THE STREETS OF TOMBSTONE.
A 30-day court hearing finally exonerated the Earps and Doc Holliday. Judge Spicer ruled that they had acted “wisely, discreetly and prudentially to secure their own preservation” and “were fully justified in committing these homicides.” However, Virgil’s deputizing of his brothers and Holliday was frowned upon, and he was relieved of his post as city marshal.
Three months later Virgil was invalided for life in a night-time ambush on Allen Street, and in March 1882 Morgan Earp was assassinated as he played pool at the Campbell & Hatch Billiard Parlor.
An investigation by a coroner’s jury ruled that Morgan had been killed by Frank Stilwell, Pete Spence and Florentino “Indian Charlie” Cruz, a mestizo woodcutter working for Spence. Stilwell and Spence were prominent members of the Cowboy outlaw faction.
The body of Morgan Earp was put aboard a train for burial at the family home in California. Accompanying him were all the Earp men, their families, along with Doc Holliday and three hardcase gunmen friends of Wyatt Earp’s: Sherman McMasters, Texas Jack Vermilion and Turkey Creek Johnson.
The ostentatious departure from town was a ruse. At Tucson, Wyatt and Warren Earp, together with Holliday and the gunmen, detrained and began a campaign of vengeance for the dead Morgan Earp. Frank Stilwell and Florentino Cruz were both shot dead by the gang. Wyatt Earp, along with his cohorts, was indicted for their murder. According to Earp’s later testimony, he also shot Curly Bill Brocius, although this is doubtful. However, the killings effectively broke up the Cowboy-rustler faction in Cochise County. Ike Clanton disappeared into Mexico, later to be killed by a sheriff, while Pete Spence put himself under Behan’s protective custody. Another of the Clanton faction, the Greek-quoting gunman John Ringo, was found dead, a presumed suicide.
After defeating the outlaw faction Earp left Tombstone, the murder indictment still hanging over him, and worked the gold camps as a gambler. His reputation as a card player was that he always had “some dishonest trick”. At various times he was in Cripple Creek, Colorado, in Nevada and Alaska. Journeying with him was “artiste” Josephine Sarah Marcus, daughter of a prosperous German Jewish mercantile family from San Francisco, who had caught Earp’s wandering eye in Tombstone. The couple later married. (The abandoned Mattie Blaylock Earp became a prostitute and died of an overdose in 1883.
An interruption to Earp’s gambling occurred in 1883 when Luke Short asked for his help in Dodge City. A reforming shift in local politics had resulted in Short’s Long Branch saloon being prosecuted for prostitution. Holliday and Bat Masterson were also wired. The arrival of Earp, Holliday and Masterson led to the so-called “Dodge City War” confrontation, though in fact not a shot was fired. The Globe reported, with a tone of civic satisfaction: “A new dancehall was opened on Saturday night where all the warriors met and settled their past differences and everything was made lovely and serene. All opposing factions . . . met and agreed to stand by each other for the good of trade. A not unlooked for result.”
Three years later Doc Holliday died alone of tuberculosis in the sanitarium at Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on 8 November 1887. He was 35. That same year, Ike Clanton was killed by Deputy Sheriff J. V. Brighton while rustling cattle.
Earp himself gave up gambling some time in the 1890s, and retired to Los Angeles having made a small fortune from this career, plus his interests in mining. Shortly before his death, he assisted Stuart N. Lake in his biography, Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. Published in 1931, two years after Earp died, the book providentially appeared at a time when the public was hungry for new Western heroes. It was also almost entirely fabricated. As Lake later admitted, he “put words into Wyatt’s mouth because of the inarticulateness and monosyllabic way he had of talking.” Subsequently, it has been proved that Lake even invented the famous “Buntline Special”, the long-barrelled Colt supposedly given to Earp by admiring dime novelist Ned Buntline.
Texas Rangers, Pinkerton Detectives
Guardians of the Frontier
Something of the stature of the Texas Rangers in frontier mythology is attested to by the apocryphal story of the West Texas mayor who summoned the Rangers to quell a riot. The Rangers sent a single man, a Winchester rifle over his shoulder. The mayor protested that he had requested a company of men. “Why so you did,” replied the Ranger, “but there’s only one riot, ain’t there?”
It was the early Texas colonialist Stephen F. Austin who first organized a body of armed mounted “watchmen”. This was in 1826. The Rangers were more properly constituted in 1835, as 25 men whose task was to “range and guard the frontier between the Brazos and Trinity rivers.” Soon after, their jurisdiction was extended westwards to the Guadalupe. Thus, the first rangers were scouts and fighters against the Indians and Mexicans. They furnished their own horses and saddles, submitted to their own discipline, and subsisted on $1.25 a day.
The Rangers, their numbers increased to 150, played a key role in the 1835–6 Texan Revolution and the ensuing defence of the Republic. Patrolling the vast frontier in small detachments of around 20 men (a company), some of which used German rather than English, Rangers intercepted Mexican raiders in the Southwest and Indian hostiles in the West with notable success. A company of Rangers led by Colonel Henry Karnes forced 200 Comanche to withdraw at Arroyo Seco in August 1837, and Rangers were heavily involved in the victories over the Comanche at Council House and Plum Creek in 1840.
This Indian-fighting period saw the rise of such legendary Ranger figures as Captain Samuel Walker – who gave Samuel Colt’s .45 revolver its field trial – and Captain John (“Jack”) Coffee Hays. As everyone allowed, Hays was recklessly brave. A Lipan chief described him as a man “not afraid to go to hell by himself.” He was also capable of phenomenal endurance. On one notable occasion he joined a party of Delawares running (literally) after a band of Comanche who had stolen their horses. The foot chase was kept up for three days. It was Hays who commanded the regiment of Rangers who served under Zachary Taylor in the war with Mexico which erupted after Texas’s 1845 entry into the Union.
After the Mexican war, the Rangers were officially disbanded, the Army insisting that it take over the role of protecting settlements in Texas against the Indians. Unofficially, the Rangers continued to exist under such men as William A. (“Big Foot”) Wallace. A book about Wallace by Texas author John C. Duval, Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter, was so popular in the East that it was reprinted six times. Under public pressure, the governor of Texas reorganized the Rangers as a state Indian-fighting force, and they carried the war against the Native Americans deep into the southern plains. At the climax of the Rangers’ 1860 campaign, Captain Sul Ross engaged the Comanche band of Peta Nocona, and rescued the White captive Cynthia Ann Parker. The reformed Rangers were also active against Mexican
bandits, who raided north of the border, a detachment under Rip Ford killing the famed Juan Cortina at Rio Grande City on 26 December 1860. Additional duties included the pursuit, capture and return of runaway slaves.
For their part in the cause of the Confederacy, the Rangers were disbanded by the Union at the close of the Civil War. Death and disorder were so rife in the state, however, that the Rangers were once again revived. In 1874 a Frontier Battalion was raised under Major John B. Jones to fight Indians, while a “Special Force of Rangers” under Captain Leander H. McNelly was detailed to suppress lawlessness along the border with Mexico. Since the Indians of the southern plains were all but defeated, and Mexican banditry on the decline, the new Rangers became an organization that dealt almost exclusively with erring Anglo-Americans, whether rustler, robber, thief or murderer. Badmen brought to justice included the racist gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, captured by Ranger Captain John Armstrong (“McNelly’s Bulldog”) at the train station at Pensacola, Florida. Lame from having once shot himself in the leg, Armstrong eased into Hardin’s coach, drew out a .45 pistol and ordered Hardin and his companions to surrender. Hardin pulled a pistol, which became trapped in his suspenders. One of Hardin’s friends, 19-year-old Jim Mann, got off a shot at Armstrong, but it only holed his hat. Armstrong shot Mann through the chest. Hardin then started kicking the Ranger, who finally pistol-whipped him into submission. Armstrong afterwards set up as a rancher on the $4,000 reward he got for delivering Hardin up to justice.
Another prominent outlaw tracked down by the Rangers was Sam Bass. Orphaned at 15, Bass drifted west from his Indiana home to become a cowboy at Denton, Texas. In 1875 Bass and a colleague, Joel Collins, drove a herd up the trail to Kansas, where – probably at Collins’s instigation – they absconded with the owner’s money. When this was lost in the gambling dens of Deadwood, Bass held up the Union Pacific train at Big Springs, Nebraska, taking $60,000 in gold. Later, he returned to Texas as a highway robber. Though only moderately successful at this, he was notably successful at eluding arrest. Efforts to storm his Cove Hollow hide-out were driven back by bullets. Eventually, he was betrayed by a henchman, Jim Murphy, who alerted the Rangers to a planned robbery by Bass of the bank at Round Rock. Five Rangers, led by Captain Lee Hall, ambushed Bass as he reconnoitred the town on 19 July 1878. Though shot in the spine, the outlaw was scooped to safety by fellow bandit Frank Jackson, and the two escaped into the evening. However, Bass proved unable to ride, and Jackson had to set him down just outside town. He was found next morning and taken into Round Rock, where he died the next day, his 27th birthday.