Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

by Casey Tefertiller

  With German immigrant support, George Hoover won the mayoral election in April of '76 and immediately appointed the gigantic Deger as marshal in the town where law enforcement had become a "terrible hoax." Hoover apparently had another plan to strengthen the police force. In May he sent out the call for the well-known deputy who had just been fired in Wichita. Earp said he had been recruited to take the marshalship, not the deputy job.30 However, the only surviving issue of the Dodge City Tunes for 1876 lists Deger as marshal and Earp as "assistant marshal." Lake's version would say that the mayor had appointed Jack Allen to serve as Deger's assistant, but Allen was run off quickly by Texans hurrahing (shooting up) the town. Lake said Earp then received the offer to become marshal, but Hoover wanted Deger to finish the term for political reasons while Earp served as top enforcer. No other substantiation or explanation survives, but there is probably some truth to this story. The mayor, not the marshal, appointed the assistant marshal; and Deger apparently held the post more as a political plum than out of respect for his crime-fighting competence.

  Earp said he insisted on the right to name deputies for the first big cattle season in Dodge, and he chose to retain Joe Mason and added Jim Masterson, one of Bat's brothers. About a week later Bat Masterson came into town, still limping from a bullet he took in a gun battle when he killed Corporal Melvin King, a U.S. Cavalry soldier and noted troublemaker. Bat Masterson had already received some degree of fame for his role in the 1874 Indian battle at Adobe Walls, where about twenty-eight buffalo hunters and traders held off the onslaught of a combined force of Kiowas, Cheyenne, and Comanches at a small trading post about 150 miles from Dodge City on the Texas Panhandle. Master son was a native of the Canadian province of Quebec, born in 1853 and christened Bartholomew, later shortened to Bat. As a young man he changed his name to William Barclay Masterson.31

  The spring and summer of 1876 would be Dodge's first major cattle season. No records remain to tell the story or to show Earp's exact role in Dodge City law enforcement. He is listed as assistant marshal in the October 14, 1876, Dodge City Timed. He shows up again as assistant marshal in the next existing copy on March 24, 1877, and again on March 31 before his name is dropped from the directory of city officers. This all becomes confusing because Earp told Lake that he left the force on September 9, 1876, and traveled to Deadwood with his brother Morgan.32 Wyatt said he spent the winter selling firewood, at a good profit, and was hired to ride guard on an ore shipment coming from the Black Hills in June.33 The Timed may just have left Earp in its directory after the cattle season, or Earp could have been granted the equivalent of a leave to go off cutting firewood. By June, Dodge had a new assistant marshal-Ed Masterson, another of Bat's brothers, had accepted the post as Deger's enforcer. Earp returned to Dodge City in July of '77 to an endorsement by the Timed:

  Wyatt Earp, who was on our city police force last summer, is in town again. We hope he will accept a position on the force once more. He had a quiet way of taking the most desperate characters into custody which invariably gave one the impression that the city was able to enforce her mandates and preserve her dignity. It wasn't considered policy to draw a gun on Wyatt unless you got the drop and meant to burn powder without any preliminary talk.34

  There is no official indication that Earp was either offered a job on the police force or served during the cattle season, although he may have been asked to help with the festivities during the Fourth of July celebration. The only other mention during the summer came later that month when Earp had a row with a noted local woman of the demimonde. "Miss Frankie Bell, who wears the belt for superiority in point of muscular ability, heaped epithets upon the unoffending head of Mr. Earp to such an extent as to provide 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 a reception at the police court next morning, the expense of which was about $20.00. Wyatt Earp was assessed the lowest limit of the law, one dollar."35 While the cause of the incident remains a mystery, the sight of Wyatt Earp slapping ever-feisty Frankie Bell must have set the local tongues wagging.

  By October, Earp was gone from Dodge, apparently to chase train robbers Mike Roarke and Dave Rudabaugh, perhaps as a freelance bounty hunter, perhaps at the behest of the Santa Fe Railroad. His exact role during this period is unclear, but he seems to have engaged in hunting fugitives, a lonely and dangerous way to make a living.36 The chase took Earp through Indian Territory and into a little Texas town called Fort Griffin, where he ran into a saloonkeeper named John Shanssey, an old acquaintance from Cheyenne, Wyoming. Apparently Earp asked Shanssey about Rudabaugh and was directed to a slender man, a dentist who spent more time at the card table than over a dental chair.

  This would be the first meeting between Wyatt Earp and Dr. John Henry Holliday, one of the most unusual characters of the frontier. This frail, tubercular man with ash-blond hair and deep-set blue eyes would emerge as a legendary figure even in his own lifetime. He was a peculiar combination of ruthlessness, loyalty, and good humor, jovial one minute, morose the next. Educated, intelligent, and gentlemanly, he could fly off into rages that climaxed with gunfire. No one really quite knew what to make of Doc Holliday.

  "Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man," Bat Masterson wrote in 1907. "Physically, Doc Holliday was a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fist fight, and no one knew this better than himself, and the knowledge of this fact was perhaps why he was so ready to resort to a weapon of some kind whenever he got himself into difficulty. He was hot-headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling, and, among men who did not fear him, was very much disliked. He possessed none of the qualities of leadership that distinguished such men as ... Wyatt Earp, Billy Tilghman and other famous western characters. Holliday seemed to be absolutely unable to keep out of trouble for any great length of time. He would no sooner be out of one scrape before he was in another, and the strange part of it is he was more often in the right than in the wrong, which has rarely ever been the case with a man who is continually getting himself into trouble."37

  San Francisco Examiner correspondent Ridgely Tilden, writing in 1882, called Holliday "as quarrelsome a man as God ever allowed to live on this earth."38

  Life had always been one rough deal after another for Doc Holliday. Born in 1851, he grew up in Valdosta, Georgia, during the Civil War. Rumors survive of a troubled adolescence-that he shot his pistol over the heads of several former slaves swimming in a waterhole and that he participated in an aborted plan to bomb the local courthouse-but these stories cannot be documented. When he was about 18 he went off to dental college in Philadelphia, then began the practice of dentistry in Atlanta. Soon after, he moved to Texas, where he was diagnosed with consumption, the deadly disease now known as tuberculosis. The rest of his life became a race against death.

  "I settled in Dallas and followed the dentistry for about five years," Holliday later said. "I attended the Methodist Church regularly. I was a member of the Methodist Church there and also a prominent member of a temperance organization till I deviated from the path of rectitude."39

  Doc deviated about as far from rectitude as a man can go. By the time he met Wyatt Earp in Fort Griffin, he had a nasty drinking habit and a disposition that varied from playful to just plain mean. He may also have had a killing or two on his hands by the time he arrived in Fort Griffin. Holliday said he "fixed one or two" drunken Mexicans with whom he had scrapes. Holliday had also picked up with a prostitute going by the name of Kate Elder, later called "BigNose Kate" by Earp and his friends, most likely because she nosed into areas that were none of her business. She was actually a native Hungarian named Mary Katherine Harony who moved to Iowa before seeking a life of adventure on the frontier.

  Holliday asked Earp many questions about Dodge and seemed to consider moving to the ga
mbling mecca on the prairie. Soon after Earp left, a series of incidents would make it necessary for the dentist to find a new home. According to Earp, Holliday sat in at a faro game with a gambler named Ed Bailey, who was "monkeying with the deadwood, or what people who live in the cities call discards. Doc Holliday admonished him once or twice to 'play poker' which is your seasoned gambler's method of cautioning a friend to stop cheating-but the misguided Bailey persisted in his furtive attentions to the deadwood. Finally, having detected him again, Holliday pulled down a pot without showing his hand, which he had the perfect right to do. Thereupon Bailey started to throw his gun around on Holliday, as might have been expected. But before he could pull the trigger, Doc Holliday had jerked a knife out of his breast pocket and with one sideways sweep had caught Bailey just below the brisket."40

  According to Earp, Holliday waited under guard in the hotel as a crowd of gamblers approached. When Big-Nose Kate learned that a lynch party was gathering, she procured two pistols, led two horses into the alley, then set a shed afire to divert attention. The plan worked perfectly. The crowd raced to douse the fire, leaving only the small guard on Holliday. Kate boldly walked in and tossed a six-shooter to Doc so they could escape with guns pointed at the constables. Doc never hesitated, and the couple rode off for Dodge City. There is no other report of this story, and Kate flatly denied it: "Just think of it! A woman weighing only one hundred and sixteen pounds standing off a deputy, ordering him to throw up his hands, disarming him, rescuing her lover and hustling him to waiting ponies. It reads fine, makes me a regular heroine, but there is not a word of truth in that fairy story."41 The tale probably grew with the retelling as Earp or writers provided dramatic enhancements years later. There were no newspapers in Fort Griffin or records of warrants for a fleeing dentist and his paramour. But Doc and Kate were soon headed for Dodge City, where they would meet again the man who would so affect their lives.

  Wyatt Earp rode on to continue his hunt for the robbers, stopping in various Texas villages before apparently trailing Mike Roarke to his hometown in Joplin, Missouri. Earp said he found a telegram waiting for him there, asking him to again pin on a badge.

  JOHN BENDER, A CONDUCTOR ON THE SANTA FE RAILROAD, walked down the aisle of the train taking tickets when he came upon two toughs. Bender looked down and asked for the tickets.

  "Ain't got no tickets," one of the toughs said.

  "Where are you goin'?" Bender responded.

  "Goin' to hell," came the insolent reply.

  Unfazed, Bender had his retort ready: "Give me a dollar, cash, and get off at Dodge."

  By the spring of 1878, Dodge City had matured into what a Chicago editor called "The beautiful, Bibulous Babylon of the West," a cowtown with an attitude. The village on the bluff above the Arkansas had grown to become the central shipping point for nearly all the Texas cattle coming north, which brought more business and more entertainment to the wickedest little town in the West. The railroad tracks ran down Front Street, dividing the town into two almost separate villages. To the north were the dry goods stores, boot shops, markets, and haberdasheries, the places of commerce where residents and drovers alike could find the makings of a good dinner or the clothing that would keep them warm for the winter. To the south, on a little patch of land between the tracks and the Arkansas River, a few buildings housed the entertainment trade, keeping the saloons, brothels, bawdy theaters, and dance halls separate from the more orderly sections of town and giving the Texans a place to circulate the silver dollars they had earned for two or three months in the saddle. A ramshackle wooden bridge at the end of town crossed the Arkansas to provide the route of departure for the Texas men who had spent their money and quenched their thirsts.

  Comedian Eddie Foy, later to become one of America's premier vaudeville entertainers, arrived in Dodge in '78 and told of "an ugly but fascinating little town.... One of the most vivid of my first impressions of Dodge yet remaining is that of dust; heat, wind, and flat prairie, too, but above all dust! It had been dry for some time when we arrived, and the wind was driving clouds of yellow dust along the main street; the buildings, the horses, people's hats and clothing were covered with it."42

  Foy settled into a cattle-season-long engagement at Ben Springer's Comique Theatre, called the "Commy-Kew" by the Texans south of the tracks. He grew to know the saloon men and the women of the brothels and dance halls, almost always dressed in ginghams and cheap prints rather than the silks and satins of big-city courtesans. Bat Masterson bought a share of the Lone Star Dance Hall, where the herders could pay outrageously for a dance with a woman who might, or occasionally might not, be doing a little body work on the side. Many of the businesses took on Texas-style names, a blatant lure for the cattle drovers coming north.

  Drover William Box Hancock made his way to Dodge in the late 70s and recalled the sight: "Dodge City ... was a wild frontier town of about thirty-five hundred people; probably the roughest little city in the United States. It was the terminus of the trail and was full of tin horn gamblers and wild women. Almost every house on the south side of the railroad was a saloon or house of ill-fame."43

  The Gang regained control of Dodge City politics in April of 1877 when Dog Kelley won the mayor's race. He then pulled something of a surprise by reappointing Deger as marshal despite his loyalty to the Hoover faction. This may well have been a political concession to the fast-growing German population, which had become a significant voting block in rural Ford County. Kelley made sure a Gang member would be prominent in the marshal's office by appointing Ed Masterson assistant marshal. The Masterson brothers had emerged as the Gang's enforcement arm, efficiently keeping the peace and boosting the Gang's politics at the same time.

  However, law enforcement became a mess during the summer of 1877. Deger ran afoul of Kelley in July, when the mayor ordered the marshal to release a prisoner. When Deger refused, Kelley immediately fired him. Deger arrested Kelley for interfering with an officer, and the two wound up in police court. The situation was smoothed over, but Deger found himself in an uncomfortable position as marshal without the support of the mayor. Ford County sheriff Charlie Bassett's term expired in November, and he could not seek reelection because of term limits. Deger and Bat Masterson emerged as the two top candidates for the job, and Bat, not quite 24, won by a 166-163 margin to take control of the most important enforcement office in the county. Bat always had an air about him, a blend of cockiness and charisma that charmed just about everyone he met, and a style that seemed to invite good times. Burly and strong, with a mustache that always appeared barber-trimmed, he usually wore citified duds topped with a derby hat.

  Kelley and the council officially fired Deger in December and replaced him with Ed Masterson, then hired former sheriff Charlie Bassett as assistant marshal. Marshal Ed Masterson apparently had a difficult time preserving order. The Ford County Globe, which had supported Deger, wrote:

  We have heard more complaint during the past few days about parties being "held up" and robbed on our streets than ever before. How long is this thing to continue? We have one more policeman on the force now than ever before at this season of the year. It therefore seems strange that midnight robberies should be more prevalent than ever before. There is something wrong somewhere, and the people are beginning to feel that there is no legal remedy. We would like to see the town smell worse of dead highway robbers than hell does of sinners.44

  The carrying of firearms had been banned in Dodge, and it was the marshal's duty to enforce the rule. The drovers seemed to flagrantly ignore the law in the early weeks of the 1878 cattle season. Try as he might, control of the rowdy elements seemed to slip away from Ed Masterson. His loss of control would prove fatal.

  As Ed went about his usual rounds on the night of April 9, 1878, he came upon two drunken drovers named Jack Wagner and Alf Walker outside the Lady Gay dance hall on the south side of Front Street. Ed began struggling with the drunken Wagner, and from the darkness came the yell, "Ed, shove him
away from you." It was Bat Masterson, off in the distance. Wagner managed to unload one shot, dead into Ed Masterson's stomach, the flash of the gun setting Ed's shirt afire. Walker, Wagner's boss, joined the fight, and five more shots quickly sounded. Onlookers dived for safety as Ed Masterson staggered through the streets. Attorney Henry Gryden stepped out of George Hoover's saloon on the north side of Front Street and saw a light flickering through the dark. He remarked, "That cigar he's smoking is burning remarkably lively." As the light grew closer, Gryden could see it was no cigar. Ed Masterson staggered, his clothes ablaze, and brushed past the attorney. Unsteadily, he stumbled into Hoover's and said to bartender George Hinkle, "George, I'm shot," then slowly dropped to the floor.

  Back on the street, Wagner and Walker lay badly wounded. Wagner had taken shots to the chest and arm; Walker had a ball penetrate his lung and took several hits in his right arm. Wagner would die the next day, while Walker survived his injury. Newspapers would erroneously report that Ed Masterson had recovered to shoot his own killers. But Bat Masterson and other Dodge citizens knew Bat had entered the gunfight. In an 1885 court hearing, Bat would testify: "I shot those parties who killed my brother there in 1878-in the spring of 1878. "45

  Kelley and the town council quickly appointed Charlie Bassett to take over the marshal's office. While there is no confirmation of Earp's report that he arrived in Joplin to find a telegram from Kelley asking him to return to Dodge, calling for tough enforcer Wyatt Earp to help quiet the town follows the logic of the situation. Earp returned immediately to some public notice. "Wyatt Earp, one of the most efficient officers Dodge ever had, has just returned from Fort Worth, Texas. He was immediately appointed Asst. Marshal, by our city dads, much to their credit," the Fora County Globe wrote on May 14. The news spread to Wichita, where his position became exaggerated by the Wichita Eagle. "Wyatt Earp, well known in this city and for a long time connected with our police force, received an offer of $200 per month to take the Marshalship at Dodge City, which he went up to accept, with all its dangers and responsibilities last week."46 Both marshals and deputies were commonly referred to simply as "marshal," which has led to general confusion. He did not receive $200 a month; he started at $75 and moved up to $100. But there were bonuses that made the job more lucrative.