After the Fact

by Owen J. Hurd

  The Clanton and McLaury brothers were part of a loose network of cowboys—the word carried a pejorative connotation back then—or cattlemen who traded in stock of dubious provenance. They readily conducted business with known cattle rustlers, like Johnny Ringo and Frank Stilwell, who were not above other illicit activities, such as robbery and, on occasion, murder. The cowboys were welcome in town, as long as they spent money and stayed out of trouble. On this occasion, Ike Clanton was having a hard time doing the latter. On a two-day drinking and gambling binge, he had been making threats against not only the Earps but also their friend and associate Doc Holliday. Virgil and Morgan Earp observed Ike carrying a Winchester rifle and a six-shooter, in open violation of a law requiring visitors to check their guns at designated locations. The Earps disarmed Clanton and roughed him up a bit before taking him to the justice of the peace. Ike was fined for the weapons violation and was released on bail.

  In hindsight, the gunfight doesn’t appear to have been a prearranged showdown at high noon or anything like that. In fact, having concluded their business, the Clanton and McLaury boys were in the process of leaving town. Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp along with Doc Holliday confronted them as they were preparing their horses, not too far from the O.K. Corral. Nobody knows for sure what triggered the fight or who shot first, but when the smoke cleared Tom and Frank McLaury and Bill Clanton were dead. Ike had somehow scurried to safety. Virgil and Morgan Earp were shot but survived. Holliday had been grazed by a bullet, and Wyatt Earp was completely unharmed.

  Far from receiving plaudits for their zealous law enforcement, the Earps were accused by many in Tombstone of being the real outlaws. A huge number of local citizens turned out for the cowboys’ funerals, showing their sympathy for the victims of the gun battle. Before long, county sheriff Behan arrested the Earps and Holliday on charges of murder, but the local judge determined that there wasn’t enough evidence to bring them to trial—despite seemingly damning testimony by witnesses. Some testified that the lawmen fired first, without provocation, and that the McLaurys and Clantons had their hands in the air, and that two of the victims were unarmed.

  Ike Clanton wasn’t satisfied with the verdict, and neither were many of his cohorts. The Earps and Doc Holliday had avoided the hangman’s noose, but they now became targets for assassination. No sooner had Virgil Earp, who had since lost his job as town marshal, recovered from his gunshot wound than he was assaulted again. He was walking home one evening about two months after the gunfight when shots rang out from a partially constructed building on the opposite side of the street. Virgil took three shotgun blasts to his back, leg, and arm. He survived but lost most use of his left arm. Wyatt sent him to the family’s California hometown to recover. Nobody witnessed the shooting, but Virgil had seen Frank Stilwell near the empty building just before the shooting, and Ike Clanton’s hat was found near where the shooting took place. Wyatt also suspected several other cowboys of complicity, including “Curly Bill” Brocius, Johnny Ringo, and Pony Deal.

  The suspects turned themselves in but were released due to a lack of evidence. Three months later, Morgan Earp was shooting pool in Tombstone when he was shot in the back and killed by unseen assassins. Wyatt determined that the only way to get his revenge was to take out his brother’s killers personally. He formed a posse and tracked down Frank Stilwell in Tucson, shooting him to death. Next was “Indian Charlie” Cruz.

  By this time, Johnny Behan had formed a posse of his own, this one to track down and arrest Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the rest of Earp’s posse for the murders of Stilwell and Cruz. Remarkably, one of the men that Behan recruited for his posse was none other than “Curly Bill” Brocius. When Behan’s posse caught up with the Earp fugitives, another shootout erupted, leaving Brocius dead. Behan and his men backed off, leaving the fugitives to their remote stronghold.

  Eventually, Johnny Behan lost his job as Cochise County Sheriff, and the political will to bring charges against Wyatt Earp fizzled out. So, too, did Tombstone’s fortunes. Devastating fires and diminishing returns from local mines spelled the slow steady decline of the former boomtown.

  Wyatt Earp never did manage to get revenge on Ike Clanton. Clanton had moved away from the Tombstone area but never gave up his cattle rustling habit. In 1887, deputies shot and killed Clanton when he refused to surrender during a botched arrest. In the same year, Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis in Colorado. He had been sick for some time, subsisting near the end on a bottle of whiskey per day. The youngest Earp brother, Warren, was killed in a saloon argument in 1900. In the years after the famous gunfight in Tombstone, Virgil Earp, the real sheriff of Tombstone, recovered from his gunshot wounds. Without the use of one arm, he still managed to work as the marshal of Colton, California, and briefly ran his own detective agency. He later moved to Goldfield, Nevada, where he was a deputy sheriff for a short time before he died of pneumonia.

  By this time Wyatt had deserted his common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock Earp, and taken up with actress and singer Josephine Marcus. Wyatt and Josephine lived a nomadic lifestyle, traveling from town to town, where the now famed lawman earned a living through gambling, operating saloons, investing in mining and real estate—even refereeing the occasional prizefight. Along the way, he built and lost several small fortunes in San Diego; San Francisco; Nome, Alaska; Goldfield, Nevada; and Los Angeles.

  Late in life Earp embarked on an effort to publish his memoirs. He had seen several other books published about his exploits and longed to set the record straight—and make a little cash while he was at it. But conflicts with his collaborators and ill health got in the way, and he died broke in 1929.

  The process by which Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday became legendary heroes of the Wild West began with a series of articles written by his old friend, the Dodge City marshal turned journalist, Bat Masterson. It continued after Earp’s death, when a biography based on interviews with Wyatt was finally published in 1931. Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal became a bestseller in spite of the Great Depression and in spite of Josephine Earp’s objections. She wanted the book to tell “a nice clean story,” but her publisher finally convinced her that a grittier tale would sell more books. Hollywood movies and television programs took it from there. Played by Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine and Burt Lancaster in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp posthumously earned a reputation that he didn’t quite deserve: as the squeaky-clean marshal who cleaned up Dodge City and Tombstone.

  LOOSE ENDS

  After Wyatt Earp deserted her, Mattie was forced to fend for herself—not an easy task for an aging, single pioneer gal. To make ends meet, she resorted to prostitution and later to booze and laudanum to dull the misery of her new profession. She committed suicide in 1888.

  In 1882 Johnny Ringo was found dead in the Arizona desert, shot in the head either by highwaymen (his boots and horse were missing), a personal enemy, or himself. Ringo was known to be moody and had a perverse obsession with death. Later in his life, Wyatt Earp claimed that he had done the deed himself, but most considered it a tall tale.

  Frank James Goes Straight

  By the end of 1881, after more than a decade of bank robberies, the once-fearsome James-Younger Gang was decimated by six-shooters and jail sentences. Three Younger brothers, Cole, James, and Robert, were serving lengthy jail sentences for their roles in a Northfield, Minnesota, bank robbery. Only Jesse James, who was believed to have murdered one of the bank tellers in Northfield, and Frank James remained living and unincarcerated. The rest were dead.

  Frank had decided to quit the holdup business, but Jesse was planning his next heist with a couple of new gang recruits, Robert and Charlie Ford. On April 3, 1882, Jesse reportedly paused to straighten a crooked wall hanging in his parlor, when Robert Ford shot him in the back of the head. The Fords had schemed with Missouri authorities in order to collect a $5,000 bounty on Jesse’s head.

  Jesse was buried in the yard of the family farm in Kearney, Missouri. The Ford boys,
much to their surprise, were immediately jailed and charged with first-degree murder. Instead of protesting their innocence, they pled guilty to the charges and were sentenced to be “taken to some convenient place and hanged by the neck until…dead.” Hours later, though, they received a full and unconditional pardon from the governor. However, they collected only a small portion of the reward—there was some confusion about whether the bounty would be paid for Jesse dead or alive. The unpopular Fords soon left town.

  Some said that Jesse’s brother Frank was likely to seek revenge against the Fords, but that wasn’t the case. By the time Jesse was killed, Frank was trying to figure out the smartest way to surrender to the authorities. He sought a pardon from the governor but was rebuffed. Basically, the governor told him that he couldn’t be pardoned until after he was found guilty. Without any guarantees of leniency, Frank still decided it was best to face the charges against him and let the chips fall where they may. He was tired of running from the law.

  Of course, in the age of vigilante justice, a prisoner’s safety was never certain. One newspaper dared to wonder in print why Frank James, “the most hardened criminal in the United States,” was not “taken out of the jail in Independence and lynched.” But no noose was ever placed on Frank’s neck, not by vigilantes, nor by the government. Frank was acquitted of murder and robbery for holdups in Missouri and Alabama but wasn’t even tried by Minnesota authorities. Never convicted of any crime, Frank was released from jail in 1885.

  The James Gang reportedly stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. Whatever happened to all that money, Frank’s share was not enough to sustain him and his family. After prison, his first honest job was as a farmer. Tracked down by a newspaper reporter at his farm outside of Independence, Iowa, Frank claimed that he was “quite poor” and not sure “just how he would get through the long winter.” He adamantly refused, he said, to attempt to profit from his notoriety as a bandit.

  “I have received a bushel of letters from managers of first-class theatres who wanted to get blood and thunder plays written for me, and from managers of dime museums who wanted to place me on exhibition, but I have paid no attention to their offers.” James flatly refused “to become an actor” or to be reduced to a sideshow “curiosity.”

  Asked if he ever intended to write his memoirs, James again demurred, asserting that the true story of his and Jesse’s life was far tamer than the exploits depicted by dime novelists of the day. Any accurate account of his life would show “how little we did and how entirely lawful our acts were” and therefore sell poorly. Nope, James said, “I have chosen a farm life and I’m going to stick to it through all the rest of my days.”

  Whether James himself believed these statements, not one of them turned out to be true. When farming proved unprofitable, he became a salesman at a shoe store in town. He later applied his sales skills to a dry goods store. Other jobs included working as a starter for horse races at county fairs, as a traveling agent in the employ of a horse importer, and most demeaning of all, as a doorman at a St. Louis theater specializing in girlie shows. At one point, Frank attempted to transfer his doorkeeping skills to the Missouri legislature, but the Democratic leadership wisely voted against him.

  The Ford Boys, on the other hand, had no scruples preventing them from trying to profit from their role as the killers of Jesse James. Unfortunately for them, their stage production dramatizing the event couldn’t sugarcoat the fact that they shot an unarmed man in the back. Beset by depression, a case of tuberculosis, and a morphine addiction, Charlie Ford committed suicide in 1884.

  Bob worked for a brief time as a police officer, of all things, in Las Vegas, New Mexico. But he could not escape his reputation as a coward. “If any citizen of the meadow town hereafter disobeys the law,” one newspaper quipped, “Bob will bring him a sense of his duty to good government when said citizen may be hanging a picture.” Challenged to a duel by an old accomplice of Billy the Kid, Bob did the sensible thing and skipped town. He turned to the tavern business but that proved equally perilous. A customer seeking his own notoriety blasted him with a sawed-off shotgun, killing him.

  Frank James’s career scruples receded with age. Faced with diminishing opportunities, he actually took to the stage but shunned plays about bank robbers and train holdups. He even sued the producers of “The James Boys of Missouri” because it “glorifies these outlaws and makes heroes of them.”

  Nevertheless, by 1903, James gave in to the inevitable and teamed back up with the last surviving member of the Younger gang, Cole, fresh from serving twenty-five years in prison for his part in the Northfield, Minnesota, robbery. Together the former outlaws staged “The Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West Show.” Reviews were mixed and the production was plagued by criminal parasites common to road shows of the age: pickpockets, sharpers, loose women, and con men. The show was a sensation in the District of Columbia but it didn’t go over so well in Huntington, West Virginia, where the gang had robbed a bank twenty-eight years earlier.

  The show closed down a year later and Frank returned to farming, inheriting the family farm in 1911 after his mother’s death. For “two bits,” Frank James would give curiosity seekers a tour of the family farm, regaling them with tales of daring robberies and shoot-outs. When Frank James died, his old comrade in arms, fellow gang member and business partner Cole Younger cleared up what had been a mystery for years. He told reporters that it was Frank, not Jesse, who had shot and killed the teller in the disastrous Northfield, Minnesota, bank robbery. Unarmed, the teller posed no threat to the bandits. Frank shot him on their way out of the bank, in spite for not opening the safe. So much for scruples.

  LOOSE ENDS

  Jesse James Jr. found himself making headlines on both sides of the law. For a time he fell in with an aspiring outlaw who idolized the young man’s namesake father. In 1898 young Jesse was even implicated in a train robbery but was later acquitted for a lack of evidence. In 1900 Jesse Jr. married a descendant of Daniel Boone. The couple had a tumultuous marriage, but they ultimately stayed together, raising four children. Jesse Jr. graduated from law school with honors and sometimes distinguished himself in his legal career, taking one case all the way to the Supreme Court. He also suffered from a nervous condition and experienced serious financial setbacks, including a poorly received silent film, which he produced and acted in, starring as his father. In his later years he was dogged by impostors claiming to be his father. Jesse James Jr. died in 1951.

  Zerelda James Samuel, Jesse and Frank’s mother, was the first family member to turn the family farm into a tourist attraction, which one newspaper reporter described as “the strangest of summer parks and the weirdest of freak shows.” The freak show reference probably had to do with Mrs. Samuel’s readiness to show visitors the remaining stub of her right arm, the other half having been blown off by a bomb tossed into the house in 1875 by Pinkerton agents attempting to smoke out Jesse and Frank James. The bomb also killed the James’s boys’ younger half brother, Archie.

  CHAPTER NINE

  INVENTORS

  WHAT is it about geniuses that makes them so inadequate in other areas of life? Several of America’s most prominent nineteenth-century inventors displayed a pronounced lack of business acumen. Maybe those who trade in the lofty currencies of intellectualism are loath to wallow in the gutters of capitalism. Regardless, the inventors of the modern world’s premier technological advances—the telegraph, telephone, and airplane—showed varying levels of incompetence in or indifference toward the business side of their inventions.

  Telegraph Connects Baltimore

  and Washington, DC

  On May 24, 1844, a tall wiry man, aging but still possessing the intensity of a Romantic painter, sat in a basement room of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, tapping out a seemingly random series of clicks on a strange little machine. At the same moment, the man’s assistant was stationed in Baltimore, Maryland, monitoring the automated mo
tions of an odd-looking contraption of his own, a device spitting out a thin stream of paper displaying a series of dots and dashes. Translating the code, the assistant announced the message instantaneously transmitted over the forty miles of telegraph wires: “What hath God Wrought!”

  Indeed.

  The occasion marked the official opening of the first long-distance telegraph line in the United States. Inventors in England had previously experimented with telegraph systems of their own, sending messages up to thirteen miles. The difference with the American system, developed by Samuel F. B. Morse, was that the message was recorded on paper. Messages sent using the English system developed by Charles Wheatsone and William Cooke were transient. If not for an operator standing by, the message would be lost forever.

  The historic moment in the history of telecommunications was celebrated far and wide. As one newspaper put it, the telegraph was “the greatest revolution of modern times and indeed of all time, for the amelioration of Society.” Some prophesied that Morse’s invention would mysteriously reduce crime and even produce unprecedented levels of immediate and easy understanding, thereby reducing the likelihood of future wars. Perhaps it never occurred to any of these people that this amazing new technology could just as easily be used for less dignified and even suspect purposes. But the telegraph did in fact revolutionize communications. By making long-distance communication immediate, it had an enormous impact on all areas of modern life.

  Morse had every reason to believe that his invention would make him a rich and famous man. It did eventually, but at an immense cost. Morse never could have predicted the scope and intensity of the problems caused by his subsequent attempts to profit from his intellectual property and secure his place in history. Actually, his troubles had started earlier, back in 1837, when he first registered his new invention with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. From that moment on, for the rest of his life, Morse was besieged by challenges to his patent from rivals who claimed to have beaten Morse to the punch or who subsequently developed unique variations on telegraph technology.