Before Burns's book reached publication, Hart and Flood realized that the insurmountable problem might be Flood's lack of ability, not Earp's story. As the rejections kept arriving, Hart suggested they meet to reevaluate the situation. Flood responded quickly that he would be willing to turn the book over to a more experienced writer and suggested Burns. "For an amateur writer, I surely got off to a poor start. Phew! didn't the publishers pen me to the queen's taste though! I was lucky to have those things fired at me in printers ink rather than hard, cold steel," Flood wrote to Hart.42
But Burns already had his book. He had visited Tombstone, pulled up the old records, and talked with the survivors. Not only did he not need Earp, Wyatt would have been a hindrance. Burns could tell his story without the hero worship that would be inherent in a biography.
Earp protested mightily, writing to the publisher, Doubleday, Page and Co., to try to stop the book. It was far too late. By December of 1927, Burns's Tombstone began hitting the bookstores. Earp grew increasingly angry. He was an old man, and there would be little to support Sadie when he could no longer work the mines. All that remained of real value was his life story. Now that was being taken away.
CELEBRITY HAD OFTEN FOLLOWED WYATT EARP. Wherever he went, someone recalled the old stories of Tombstone. In the years before movies and television, celebrity meant having your name appear in the papers for simply passing through town. Now, in the 1920s, Wyatt Earp still drew attention. On separate visits to the Bay Area in 1924 and 1926, newspaper reporters interviewed the former marshal, sympathetically telling his story.
"Terror of Evildoers Is Here; Alive Because He Was Quick With Trigger," the Chronicle headlined a 1924 story giving a brief overview of his adventures in the West:
And it was the same old Wyatt Earp-though his hair has silvered-full of life, gay as ever, and with a gait as springy as that of a boy, who, as he puts it, is on hand "to give the old town the once-over."
Despite his 77 years, and the rough times he has had while serving as United States Marshal, when the job was strictly a "straight shooting" proposition, Earp looks much the same as when he acted as the arbiter of that classic bout between Sharkey and Fitzsimmons.43
The stories credited him with cleaning up Wichita and Dodge City before moving on to protect Tombstone. Even after the barrage of bad press in the past, Wyatt seemed disinclined to do interviews. Both papers commented on how reluctant he was to discuss his exploits. C. H. Baily wrote in the Bulletin: "Earp helped a lot to make this great Western empire the place it is. You wouldn't think so, though, to hear him talk, because it's like pulling teeth to get any personal information out of him."44
Jack Armstrong, a young cattleman, recalled sitting in on a meeting with Earp and Bill Tilghman around 1920. Tilghman had come to Los Angeles to try to pump a movie, and met his old friend. After Earp left, Armstrong turned to Tilghman and said, "I sure did like that man Earp." Tilghman responded: "You would. He is the kind of man you would recognize and get along with, but you would hate him as much if you were outside the law. Wyatt is a good man to work with but a hard man to keep up with. His aspirations are of high standard, but his loyalty to mankind keeps him on the front line of trouble. He makes and enacts his own law and rule which I must admit beats all the written code we have or ever will have. Written law is made to serve a general purpose, to be broken, ignored or trifled with. No man can follow the written law with efficiency or safety to himself. I know, I've tried it.... Wyatt is a man that can forget his badge, make his own law and rule and enforce them in justice and fairness to all and defend himself at the same time both physically and socially with the legal factions."45
The Earps continued to winter at the mines, then find a spot at the coast for the summer. After the Welsh family moved to a smaller home, Wyatt and Sadie became regular summer customers at a little court of dingy one-room buildings on 17th Street in Los Angeles. Wyatt spent most of his days alone in the tiny house while Sadie took her trips. Christenne Welsh recalled the tiny apartment as one small room with a small kitchen sink and a stove in one corner, hidden behind a pull curtain. The tiny bathroom had a shower, basin, and toilet jammed closely together. The feel was that of a cheap motel. Always, Sadie searched for ways to raise funds.
"I think her two nieces sent her boxes of clothes," Hildreth Halliwell recalled. "They were beautiful clothes. And she used to sell them, to people she knew and people in the court. I know they had a hard time scratching out a living the last few years. It was hard for him. He lived a glorious life in his earlier days, then to have to come down to just sitting and living really off of Sadie's folks. It was a pretty bitter pill for him, and it made him a bitter man."46
Wyatt Earp grew quiet in his later years, generally declining to discuss the old days. Peggy Combs Greenberg, Sadie's niece, said: "He [Wyatt] was a very kind man ... very generous to my family ... very soft-spoken, a very gentle sort of man. You'd never think of him shooting anyone. But ah, he had to be gentle. Josie [Sadie] was a bit of a demon. Very suspicious of everyone. She was quite a character ... a very strange woman."47
There were few amenities in the one-room apartment. The Welsh family moved within sight of the bungalows, and for a summer Christenne Welsh delivered Wyatt his lunch every day as he sat alone while Sadie played poker. Christenne recalled, "He was a very mannerly man. Even ... [though I was just] a little girl, he always took his hat off when I came in."
From the porch of the small apartment he greeted Hollywood celebrities and writers coming to try to learn the real story of Tombstone. The publication of Burns's Tombstone brought the story back to America and christened Earp as "The Lion of Tombstone," partly for his blond hair and graceful, feline movements; partly for the courage he displayed. The book caught the public's attention and made Wyatt more of a celebrity without increasing his wealth or satisfactorily telling his version of the story.
Stuart Lake began writing to Wyatt Earp on Christmas Day in 1927, half a year after it had become painfully clear that Crack Crack, Zing Zing John Flood could not be the man to put Earp's story into words. Lake had a varied background, working for papers in New York shortly after the turn of the century, promoting a professional wrestling tour, serving as a press aide to Theodore Roosevelt during the Bull Moose campaign of 1912, then receiving a wound and being run over by a truck during the war. After a long recovery, he became a magazine writer, with credits in the top publications of the day. He would often say that he first conceived the idea of writing Earp's biography during his talks with Bat Masterson in New York, and that Masterson had told him many stories about his old friend. Lake eventually moved to San Diego and started tracking Earp. When he contacted Wyatt Earp, he was the right man in the right place at the right time.
Wyatt and Sadie began a series of meetings with Lake, starting in June of 1928. In all, Lake probably met personally with Earp about half a dozen times, though the author would later claim a much longer acquaintance. For the next six months they also exchanged letters in which Earp filled in details of his complex adventures. During the meetings, Lake carefully plumbed the old lawman's mind, bringing out some of the old stories and struggling to piece together very complicated details. It was, indeed, a task. Lake explained his travails in a 1941 letter to writer Burton Rascoe:
As a matter of cold fact, Wyatt never "dictated" a word to me. I spent hours and days and weeks with him -and I wish you could see my notes! They consist entirely of the barest facts. First, I got from Wyatt what might be called a summary of his years, which I put down in chronological order. Then, I tackled this year-by-year, and finally month-by-month and day-by-day. In certain instances I worked on an hour-by-hour basis-in the case of the OK Corral fight, minute-by-minute. I was pumping, pumping, pumping, for names and incidents and sidelights; all of which Wyatt could supply but none of which he handed out in any sort of narrative form. It was question and answer, question and answer all the way through.
Do not misconstrue this. Wyatt had an e
xcellent background, was much better educated and read than most men of his time and place. He and I got on beautifully. He talked freely to me, that is answered my questions fully and freely, but it just wasn't in the nature of the man to speak at any length. He was delightfully laconic, or exasperatingly so.
During all of the months in which I was talking with Wyatt, I was checking and re-checking against what he told me-with some other oldtimers, old newspapers and documents. From such explorations I'd come up with long-forgotten names and incidents which I'd employ to stimulate Wyatt's memory. So it went.... Mrs. Earp contributed nothing.48
Earp's health failed during the later months of 1928, as he and Lake continued their discussions and correspondence. Earp kept talking of a trip to the mines as soon as he felt well enough; the trip continued to be delayed. Lake corresponded with Earp's old acquaintances from Arizona, Kansas, and Alaska and worked hard on the details. Lake located several of Earp's old friends, including George Parsons and Fred Dodge, and put them back in touch with Earp during the last months.
Parsons spent an October afternoon in 1928 renewing acquaintances. "I was very pleased to see the physical condition and the mental condition also, of Wyatt Earp," the longtime diarist wrote to Lake. "He certainly has the same old charm that he had years ago. And certainly anybody who is a judge of human nature and human characteristics could not call him a 'bad man,' and certainly he proved to be quite the opposite in his maintenance of the law and order in the old days."49
As the project progressed, something unexpected occurred. Houghton Mifflin published the autobiography of Billy Breakenridge, Johnny Behan's old deputy in Tombstone. While Burns's work had been mostly flattering, Breakenridge sympathized with Behan and painted a far less heroic portrait of Earp.
The book angered Wyatt and maddened his friends. It had the air of authenticity that comes from first-person narratives, and a professional approach added by William MacLeod Raine, who did the writing. Raine made Breakenridge the hero of Tombstone, the man who delivered law to a lawless country. It sounded good, except to the folks who had actually survived Tombstone.
"Poor Billy is now 84 years of age and has only a little time left in which to enjoy his imaginary glory," Clum wrote to Fred Dodge.50
Perhaps most infuriating to Earp was Breakenridge's claim that Wyatt had worn a "steel vest"-a bulletproof vest-in the fight with Curley Bill, when he walked alone into the gunfire from the outlaws' camp and emerged without taking a bullet.
"I never wore a steel vest, and never had such a thing in my possession," Earp wrote to Lake. "Another one of his damn lies. I can't just understand him. As he has always of late years seemed friendly towards me ... he is a sly fox of the worst kind, and naturally feels sore because I told Behan and his so-called brave men which were his deputies and Breakenridge being one of them. And when they came to arrest me, I just laughed at them and told them to just run away. And he holds that up against me. If there ever was a mean contemptible person he certainly is the man.... A man like him needs to be called down just by a bad man as he paints me to be and make him show what a lowdown coward he is. I am not through with him you may rest assured in that point."51
Earp took such exception to Breakenridge's book that he wrote ghostwriter Raine. According to Sadie, Raine responded that he had just taken Breakenridge's word for the story.
A bout with the flu sickened Lake through much of December 1928. By the time his health returned, Wyatt Earp had begun fading. The old marshal died on January 13, 1929, a victim of chronic cystitis, a prostate problem.
Lake wrote of the scene in a letter to Dodge, saying Wyatt had been optimistic to the end, planning another trip to the desert. He fell sick on the 12th, and Sadie called a doctor. Lake wrote that Sadie Earp, with a doctor and a nurse, stayed by Earp's bedside through the night. Wyatt awoke about five in the morning and asked for a glass of water, then went back to sleep. Sometime between seven and eight he said clearly, "Suppose, suppose." Sadie Earp leaned over and asked what Wyatt had said. He did not answer. A moment later he ceased breathing.52
Wyatt Earp, whose life had been scarred by controversies, died two months short of his 81st birthday in a cheap Los Angeles bungalow. The Lion of Tombstone left roaring at Breakenridge and Burns, uncertain whether his legacy would be that of hero or villain. He would have preferred not to be remembered at all. Wyatt Earp never really understood his own story. In life, he had been mostly a gambler, saloon man, and wanderer, always chasing a new opportunity. He was a man defined less by his character than by his courage. He had been reckless in his youth, but he seemed to find honor in the cowtowns. He had been honest and dependable, a standout among the unusual breed of frontier lawmen. He moved to Tombstone to make money, not to follow some higher calling. When the situation around him became desperate, he responded with unrelenting courage to avenge his brother's death and protect the lives of his townspeople. Through the years that he wandered the West, he could never really leave Tombstone behind. He was not a man of esteemed character or dedication to a noble cause. He was not a better man than those around him; he was a braver one.
LONG MAY HIS
STORY BE TOLD
M ILL HART CAME TO HELP TOTE WYATT EARP'S CASKET. So did diarist Parsons and John Clum. Cowboy star Tom Mix attended the service. The Lod Angeles Timed headlined the story of the funeral: "Earp Buried By Old West; Pioneer Folk Gather at Rites of Peace Officer Whose Life Molded Frontier History." Even the New York Tuned ran his obituary, calling him a "Noted Gunfighter of Old West." Notably missing from the mourners was Sadie Earp. She said she had taken ill after Wyatt's death and could not go to Pierce Brothers' chapel in Los Angeles for the services. Grace Spolidoro and her mother served as witnesses of the cremation; Sadie, again, did not attend. "She wasn't sick, she was grief-stricken," Spolidoro said.
Sadie would soon grow very busy, watching over Lake and needling him to complete the book. And Lake would grow to mightily resent her interference. Lake and Wyatt had been partners in the book deal, and Sadie inherited the partnership, Wyatt's most valuable bequest. Sadie soon began shepherding the project, telling Lake how she wanted the book done. She wrote to Lake: "Several of our friends Mr. Lake tell us it will go big, but it must be a nice clean story, and we leave the rest to you." Sadie did not want to be mentioned-it could not have been a "nice clean story" if it had to detail her shifting affections between Behan and Earp, and of Wyatt's decision to abandon Mattie.1
Lake began discussions with Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin in March and completed the sale in September. During that period, Lake's relationship with Sadie went from friendly to quite sour. Lake attempted to broker a deal to sell her mining properties, but the effort fell through as the value of copper dropped. Sadie seemed to blame him for the failure and continued to complain about delays in the manuscript. She needed the money, she said, and she could not understand what was taking him so long.
Lake left for Tombstone in April and made remarkable discoveries. In the clerk of court's office he found the long-forgotten transcript of the Spicer hearing; he talked with old-timers and dug through the few remaining editions of the Nugget and the Epitaph that had survived Tombstone's various fires. The hearing transcript would provide the basis for much of his section on the gunfight.
Lake continued his correspondence with people in Kansas, building up a file on events. Unfortunately, some of the Kansas sources were far too generous in recalling Earp's deeds. In the days before copy machines, researchers had to copy stories from old newspapers by hand. On several occasions, the stories mailed to Lake were slightly different from the stories that appeared in the papers, and the shift of a few words turned Wyatt from a competent lawman to the great crimefighter of the plains. Lake would often marvel at Earp's modesty, unaware that for years Earp's old friends had inflated his legend.
In September, Lake came to an agreement with the Saturday Evening Poet, then one of the most prestigious magazines in the land, for a three-part serie
s on Earp's Kansas years. Lake quickly headed for an old-timers' reunion in Dodge City, where he picked up even more inflated tales. Earp had always been popular in Kansas; he had truly been one of the most respected peace officers in the wild cowtowns. It would have been a natural reaction to enhance the stories after his recent death.
"In Dodge, from more than 500 oldtimers who gathered for the reunion I learned much about Wyatt's days on the buffalo range, in Ellsworth, and as marshal in Wichita and Dodge," Lake wrote to Sadie Earp. "[Lake picked up] from many men who had known him many stories of his courage and his resourcefulness in the performance of his duty, not the least of which was the repeated assertion that 'Wyatt Earp was one peace officer who could not be swayed from any course he thought was right.' It would have done your heart good to have listened to the praise of him and the recollections of him by his loyal friends.' 12
After returning, Lake and Houghton Mifflin came to an interesting and curious decision. The saga of Wyatt Earp has two concurrent and complementary themes. First, it is the story of a man whose life encompasses the frontier experience-wagon trains, buffalo hunts, law in the cowtowns-and he is the central figure in the frontier's most storied event. Second is the lasting story of Tombstone, an event of biting importance that questions the foundations and fallacies of the American system of justice. Lake wrote to Sadie that he and Houghton Mifflin agreed that the early days on the plains were even more important than Tombstone.
Walter Noble Burns understood that Tomstone encapsulated far more significant basic truths than all the headbanging in all the cowtowns on the frontier. Lake would fall into it by good fortune.
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend Page 53