Clearly, the rumor mill was in high gear. In another story, Virgil Earp supposedly told the press that he had received a letter from “his brothers in Illinois.” The wire service reported, “The boys say they left the country for fear of killing some good men.”64 The rumors provided some cover for the Earp posse as they prepared to leave Albuquerque, in pursuit of an arrangement to provide an unofficial sanctuary in Colorado. The elder Otero was a friend and business associate of Frederick W. Pitkin, the Colorado governor. Pitkin was a pragmatist, but he apparently saw no problem with the Earps taking refuge in the state so long as there was no push for their extradition, which seemed unlikely, given Governor Tritle’s predisposition to favor the Earps.
On May 13, well after the Earp posse had left New Mexico, the Albuquerque Review got around to publishing its account of their sojourn in Albuquerque, which supported the belief that powerful forces were working on behalf of the Earps:
On the morning after their arrival [in Albuquerque], and before more than one or two knew of their presence, Wyatt Earp called at the Review and Journal offices, and had an interview with the reporters of both papers. He stated that they had come to Albuquerque to escape persecution while awaiting the result of an effort by Governor Tritle to secure their pardon from the president; that they were being sought for by their foes; and that they would not give themselves up to the Arizona officers without resistance. In view of these facts, Earp requested of both papers that their temporary sojourn in Albuquerque remain unnoticed until they could be assured that the knowledge of their whereabouts would not bring a party of cow-boy avengers down on them. To back his assertions regarding Governor Tritle’s feeling toward them, Earp presented The Review several convincing documents, and his request was accordingly granted by this paper, as it was by the Journal.65
The Review indicated that about fifty people knew of their presence in Albuquerque. The Journal denied that the “Earp desperadoes” called at its offices, but the Review offered a contrary view of their character, noting, “The party, while in Albuquerque, deported themselves very sensibly, performing no acts of rowdyism, and in this way gained not a few friends for their side of the fight.”66
Doc Holliday would have enjoyed the newspaper dialogue in Arizona had he been able to follow it, but at the very least, he realized that he had become involved in something much larger than revenge for the death of a murdered friend and brother. It was never simply that, and through the early months of 1882, he witnessed the whole process becoming more complicated, involving corporations and government officials as well as his new friends. Doc found himself on the side of the consolidating power of the new industrial order. With six dead Cow-Boys, possibly more never recovered in the brush (as rumor always claimed), and many scattered into Mexico, New Mexico, and other points, the vendetta ride could fairly be called a success.67 There would be political costs, mainly for Wyatt Earp himself, but he knew—and so did his supporters—that he and his riders had given the business development of Arizona a bloody shove toward the stability and order his supporters sought.
The vendetta touched ancient issues about law and justice that resonated with people far beyond Tombstone and Arizona. There was something primal in what became known as the Earp-Clanton feud. Violence is most likely to occur where the authority structure is insufficient, where the authority structure is undermined by inefficiency, corruption, or lack of public support, and where the authority structure itself feels threatened. All three factors played a role in the troubled region of southeastern Arizona. The Cow-Boy troubles originally derived from an insufficient law enforcement presence. Over time, inefficiency, corruption, and a general distrust of both Sheriff Behan and Marshal Earp led to a lack of public support for the legal systems of Tombstone and Cochise County. The authority structure itself—the new order represented by mining, shipping, and banking interests—saw its interests threatened, and it was willing to support a heavy hand to set things right.
The new industrial order was redefining class relations in ways that challenged traditional assumptions and justified violence in defense of the community. The same arguments that played out in Arizona over what Doc and the Earps were doing were part of the debate not only over events like the Lincoln County War and the Johnson County War but also over events like the Great Strike of 1877, the suppression of the Molly Maguires, the Homestead Strike, and the Haymarket Riot, with one side condemning the violence and the other justifying it as necessary for the establishment of order. The managerial philosophy adopted by most business leaders during the Gilded Age encouraged the quick suppression of perceived threats to the new order, while more traditional thinkers worried about the possible abuse of law presented by the resort to force too quickly, which made the cure worse than the disease.68
Few Arizonans doubted that there was trouble in southeastern Arizona; the question was whether the Earps were part of the cause or the cure. Many Arizonans deplored the Earps’ vendetta as ruthless vigilantism of the worst sort for which there was no justification. They believed the Earps posed a serious threat to the rule of law. Many others, including most of the business elite in the territory, pointed to the failure of the law to deal with the Cow-Boy scourge as justification for what the Earps did. What is the relationship of law and justice? At what point, if ever, can men justify going outside the law to achieve justice? This debate was not confined to Arizona in 1882, or in other times before or since.
Violence attended growth, and the right or wrong of it depended on whether it was perceived as a necessary agent of change or a needless usurpation of law. The Citizen offered one view: “The only way to make the country safe and secure for immigration and capital is to wipe out the lawless element by any means possible.”69 The Star offered another: “The question is law or no law; which shall prevail? The people say the former must.”70 And while that debate went on, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the rest were simply pawns in the larger game. They had served their purpose, and now they withdrew as heroes or villains (depending on the point of view) to await the vindication they had already been promised.
Chapter 10
A HOLLIDAY IN DENVER
Doc Holliday, I have you now!
—Perry Mallon, Denver Tribune, May 16, 1882
Trinidad was southern Colorado’s door to New Mexico through Raton Pass. In 1882, it boasted a population of sixty-five hundred. Its businessmen, ranchers, and miners were ambitious, calling their town “the Pittsburg of the West,” but like many such places in the West, the real mother lode for some was found in the gambling halls and saloons rather than in the mine shafts. On April 17, 1882, about the time that Wyatt Earp’s posse reached Albuquerque, Bat Masterson became the marshal of Trinidad. Only a day before, the former Dodge City policeman John Allen mortally wounded Cockeyed Frank Loving, John Henry Holliday’s old buddy from Dodge, who had also “killed his man,” as the expression went. Masterson calmed things down and soon won the praise of the town fathers and a skeptical press.1 He had just begun to settle in when Doc and Dan G. Tipton arrived from Albuquerque amid the press speculations that Tipton had been killed.2 Bat doubtless got his first real accounts of the past weeks from them, but shortly thereafter the rest of Wyatt Earp’s posse slipped off the train at El Moro just outside of Trinidad for a brief reunion before disbanding.
It was the end of the vendetta trail. Wyatt, Warren, Doc, Texas Jack Vermillion, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, Tipton, and Sherman McMaster said their good-byes, and by May 3 most of them had departed.3 Wyatt enjoyed his reunion with Bat, recounting the bitter months just past, and Doc found congenial company in smoky, more familiar climes free of trail dust and Cow-Boy posses. The town had more than a dozen gambling halls and saloons and a number of familiar faces from his earlier days at Trinidad in 1878 and from Dodge City, Las Vegas, and other points in his past, which made the experience something of a reunion for him as well.
Doc and Wyatt parted company there. Perhaps the strain on their friendship fr
om the incident at Albuquerque was still fresh; perhaps Doc had already made his plans to visit the silver mining camps in the Wood River country in northern Colorado. More likely, the deal struck at Albuquerque simply meant that Wyatt did not need him anymore, and they parted company at Trinidad on good terms. Wyatt, Warren, and Tipton left about May 4, bound for Gunnison in the mountains, but not before the Trinidad News reported, “Messrs. Wyatt and Warren Earp are still with us. Their brothers went south Wednesday morning. Again the News takes great pleasure in saying they are all ‘way up’ boys—gentlemen of the first water.”4
Bat probably accompanied the Earps as far as Pueblo to attend the prize fight scheduled there on May 5 between the pugilists Thomas B. Walling and Bryan Campbell.5 Despite reports that both fighters were “in good trim,” the match turned into a debacle when the only man the principals could agree on as referee refused to take the job. A riot seemed imminent until some promoter cooked up an impromptu dog fight that lasted until one of the dogs’ backers “threw up his tail for lack of a sponge.”6
The affair was the occasion for an editorial on the brutality of prize fighting, and to add to the sporting men’s woes, “the police made a raid upon all classes of gambling and houses of prostitution in South Pueblo” that night and “pulled all the inmates, between forty and fifty all told.” Said the Pueblo Chieftain, “It is very evident that the South Pueblo authorities mean to root out the evil which has been let alone so long, and in this the best class of citizens back them up. Nearly all parties arrested put up for their appearances this morning.”7
In this righteous atmosphere, Bat said good-bye to Wyatt and returned to Trinidad and his duties. The Earps stayed in Pueblo a day or two longer, minding their manners, before catching the train to Gunnison with Tipton.
Doc lingered in Trinidad a few days longer than the others, gambling and renewing acquaintances with companions from his past. Relying on the arrangements made at Albuquerque, he gave little thought to danger arising from the vengeance trail he had recently traveled, although he knew that warrants had been sworn out for him in the Frank Stilwell and Florentino Cruz killings.
William B. “Bat” Masterson, marshal of Trinidad in 1882. He took an active role in the effort to prevent Doc Holliday from being extradited back to Arizona.
On May 8, 1882, in Tombstone, the old case against him in the matter of his fight with Milt Joyce was called before Judge William H. Stilwell, and when Doc did not appear, Stilwell declared his bond forfeited and closed the books on that matter.8
About May 10, John Henry moved on to Pueblo. He continued his gambling in South Pueblo, where things were back to normal after the short-lived crackdown on the sins of the flesh. There, too, he introduced himself to local authorities and spent considerable time with Pat Desmond, a constable, former Pueblo chief of police, and acquaintance of Doc’s from the days of the Royal Gorge affair.9 He behaved himself and made sure that everyone knew that he had been acting as a peace officer during the vendetta ride. As in Trinidad, “He made no effort to conceal his identity, and when questioned as to his doings in Arizona, said he had nothing to fear from that quarter, as he had received full pardon from the governor for his bloody work, in consideration of the effective services he had rendered to the authorities.”10
Doc would have had no reason to notice the brief item in the Chieftain of May 11, which noted simply, “Perry Mallen [sic], Esq., of Ogden, Utah, is in the city on his return from Los Angeles, California, and autographed at the Lindell,” but it was a name he would soon be unable to forget. On the night of May 12, a “small man, with reddish face and bearing, with small ferrety eyes, and not an inviting cast of features” approached him in Tom Kemp’s variety theater. The man introduced himself as Perry Mallon and thanked Doc for once saving his life in Santa Fe. Doc replied that he must be mistaken because he had never been in Santa Fe, but the little stranger persisted with his story and warned Doc that he had seen “Josh” Stilwell, the brother of Frank Stilwell, on the train and that Stilwell was gunning for him. Mallon then curiously threatened to kill Doc if he said anything and capped off the encounter by taking down his clothes to show Doc what he claimed were scars from gunshot wounds. Doc laughed, shrugged Mallon off as an eccentric of some sort, and promptly forgot the incident.11
On Sunday, March 14, in company with Texas George Robinson and Sam Osgood, two gambler friends, Doc departed Pueblo for Denver. The Chieftain announced why: “The races began in Denver yesterday and there was quite an emigration of sporting men from this point, who hope to see some of the proceeds of the pool box.”12 On the train Doc and his friends ran into Bat Masterson, who was also on his way to the races. Arriving in Denver on May 15, Doc checked into the Windsor Hotel and, as he had done in Trinidad and Pueblo, announced his presence to the authorities. He spent the day at the fairgrounds, in company with Masterson and his gambler friends, but he also talked with David J. Cook, the head of the Rocky Mountain Detective Agency, and Chief James Lomery of the Denver police department, among others. He certainly did not act the part of a fugitive, and, in fact, was not even armed.13
That evening he planned to meet John N. Vimont, the superintendent of the Big Pittsburg mine in Leadville, at the Windsor Hotel. Vimont was a friend from Tombstone, a mining speculator who had pulled out in 1881 before the troubles started and had gone to work for Horace A. W. Tabor, the father of the Leadville boom, lieutenant governor of Colorado, and brother of Maxie Tabor, whom Doc had met during the Royal Gorge War. Vimont had apparently agreed to loan Doc money for his planned trip to the Wood River country. Why he was willing to finance Doc was a question never answered, but he and Tabor may have expected Doc to investigate investment opportunities in the north.14 At any rate, Doc never kept the appointment.
Instead, near nine o’clock in the evening, as Holliday walked along Fifteenth Street toward the Windsor, a small, strange-looking man stepped up to him, pointed two revolvers at him, and shouted dramatically, “Throw up your hands. Doc Holliday, I have you now!” as two deputy sheriffs, Charles T. Linton and Barney Cutler, took Doc into custody and hustled him off to the sheriff’s office a short distance away. Only after arriving at the sheriff’s office did Doc recognize the man who had accosted him as Perry Mallon, the eccentric he had encountered in Pueblo.15
Perry Mallon, the confidence man whose melodramatic arrest of Doc Holliday and tale of a seven-year manhunt in pursuit of Doc led Denver authorities to hold Doc until Arizona authorities could process extradition papers to have him returned to face charges.
The scene in the sheriff’s office was chaos multiplied. Even there Mallon continued to nervously point his revolvers at Holliday, causing Doc to remark, “Oh you can drop that. Nobody is trying to get away from you. I have no weapons.”
This set off a heated verbal exchange between the two. Mallon dramatically declared, “No, you won’t get away from me again. You killed my partner, you blood-thirsty coward, and I would have taken you at Pueblo if the men I had with me had stood with me.”
Disgusted, Doc made it clear that he did not intend to be abused and appealed to a growing number of men gathering in the room that he be allowed to make a statement.
The officers were visibly nervous about the crowd, and Deputy Linton impatiently reminded Doc, “This is not a court or jury.”
Doc persisted, demanding to know “[i]f it is customary in this country to deny a citizen the right of speech? Is it right? Is it justice?” The melodrama continued as Doc told the onlookers he could expose Mallon as a fraud, and Mallon flourished his pistols again. “I can show you his reason for bringing me here,” Doc exclaimed. “I can show—”16
At that point, Linton cut him off, but Mallon rambled on about Doc having killed his partner, until Holliday was hustled into a hack and taken to the county jail. As the officers started out the door with their prisoner, a Tribune reporter asked Doc if he could come along. Doc responded, “Come on; you are just the man I want to see.”17 The news of the arres
t had spread quickly because the Tribune reporter was only one of several reporters there, along with a number of citizens including what the Tribune described as “rough looking characters” from out of town whom no one seemed to know. Once he arrived at the jail, Doc grew more reticent, declaring that he wanted to speak with Bat Masterson and an attorney before he said any more. Not until Doc was pushed into a cell did the reporter hear someone call him “Doc” and realize who the prisoner was and why the sheriff’s department was so officiously nervous.18
Bat Masterson must have caught wind of what was happening early on. Doc had hardly been lodged at the jail before Bat and Frank A. Naylor, a prominent Denver attorney, moved to secure a writ of habeas corpus. En route to see the judge, they encountered the Tribune reporter. Bat told him “that Holliday was a responsible man, a Deputy United States Marshal, and for a time Deputy Marshal of Tombstone, and that the cowboys only wanted to assassinate him as they had Virg and Morgan Earp.”19
Bat also told the Denver Republican’s reporter, “I tell you that all this talk is wrong about Holliday. I know him well. He is a dentist and a good one. He was with me in Dodge City where he was known to be an enemy of the lawless element.”20 By 3:30 A.M., Bat and Naylor delivered papers signed by Judge Victor A. Elliott to the sheriff’s office ordering Sheriff Michael Spangler to have Doc in court later that very morning. Clearly, Bat was prepared for action and already acting as manager of the situation on Doc’s behalf.
Denver residents awoke to a flurry of reports about the “celebrated” prisoner and Perry Mallon’s “manhunt.” Over breakfast and throughout the day, Doc Holliday was the main topic of conversation. At the outset, most of Denver’s papers took Mallon’s story at face value, and it was a dramatic one at that. Mallon claimed to be the sheriff of Los Angeles County, California, and said that the story had begun seven years earlier when Doc Holliday murdered his partner, Harry White, in St. George, Utah. Mallon laid it on thick. At his hands, Doc became “one of the most noted desperadoes in the West.” The Denver Republican declared:
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