by David Fisher
Wyatt Earp was himself an ornery character. He’d been a boxer and a gambler; he’d worked on the railroads, as a constable, and as a horse thief. There were a lot of men like him in the Old West, people who just flowed with the opportunities life presented to them. For the previous few years, he’d been working mostly as a strongman, keeping the peace in brothels. He’d moved to Wichita in ’74 to keep the peace in his brother Virgil’s house of ill repute, while also working as a part-time peace officer for the city. When Earp first crossed paths with Doc Holliday in ’77, he had recently been named Dodge City’s chief deputy marshal.
Presumably, Earp welcomed the Doc and Kate, who found lodging at Deacon Cox’s boardinghouse when they arrived in Dodge. If it wasn’t the roughest town in the West, it definitely was high on the list. As a letter that appeared in the Washington Evening Star complained, “Dodge City is a wicked little town. Its character is so clearly and egregiously bad that one might conclude … that it was marked for special Providential punishment.”
The night on which Holliday and Earp forged the friendship that would last for the rest of their lives began when as many as fifty cowboys just off the trail came galloping down Front Street, raising a holy ruckus. After shooting out most of the shop windows, they ended up at the Long Branch Saloon, where Doc was in the back room, quietly tending to his nightly business. There is no record of how the cards were treating him that night. Soon Deputy Earp walked through the swinging doors, not having the slightest idea what was waiting inside for him. The cowboys were led by Tobe Driskill and Ed Morrison, a man who had been humiliated by Wyatt in Wichita several years earlier and had been itching to get even. Earp pushed open the door and found fifty pistols and rifles pointed at him. As Wyatt Earp told the story years later, Morrison warned him, “Pray and jerk your gun. Your time has come, Earp!”
In 1883, the Dodge City Peace Commission ended the Dodge City War without a shot being fired.
Before anyone could make a move, Holliday got up from his table quickly and quietly, pulled his own gun, and aimed it squarely at the back of Morrison’s head. “No, friend,” he said. “You draw or throw your hands up. Any of you bastards pulls a gun and your leader loses what’s left of his brains.” Fifty guns hit the floor. Earp punctuated the stand-down by slamming Morrison over his head with his Colt before taking him and Driskill to jail. As he later wrote, “The only way anyone could have appreciated the feeling I had for Doc after the Driskill-Morrison business would have been to have stood in my boots at the time Doc came through the Long Branch doorway.”
Word spreads lickety-split when one man stands up to a saloon full of armed cowhands. Doc Holliday earned himself a reputation that night. People might have wondered if he had been drunk or crazy, but after that, no one ever doubted his courage.
Not surprisingly, Doc and Kate had a tumultuous relationship, breaking up and getting back together several times. Neither one of them liked to stay still for too long. When she took off on him in ’78, Doc decided to join the Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil, in Tombstone, Arizona. Tombstone was one of the West’s last mining boomtowns, built on a mesa above the Tough Nut Silver Mine. By the time Doc Holliday rode into Tombstone in 1880, the town already had an estimated 110 saloons, 14 gambling halls, a plentiful number of brothels, and 1 bowling alley.
Supposedly he’d left several bodies along the trail between Dodge and Tombstone. In Las Vegas, then part of the New Mexico Territory, for example, he got into a shoot-out with an old army scout named Mike Gordon. When Gordon’s former girlfriend, one of the saloon girls, refused to leave town with him, he’d started shooting up the place. As Holliday tried to get out of there, Gordon pegged a shot at him. Doc put two shots into his chest. Likely it was considered self-defense, as the coroner’s jury ruled that Gordon’s fatal wounds “had been inflicted by some person unknown to that jury.”
Doc almost settled another score before heading for Tombstone, trading shots with bartender Charlie White in Vegas’s Plaza Hotel saloon. This feud had started in Dodge. According to the future governor of New Mexico, Miguel Antonio Otero, who was a witness to this duel, “The two men faced each other and began shooting. They shoot and shoot with no one scoring a hit. Finally, Charlie White is down!” A scalp wound had stunned him senseless, but he recovered and left town.
A bad situation was already brewing in Tombstone when Holliday rode into town. Until the Earps arrived there, Tombstone had pretty much been run by a loosely knit gang known as the Cowboys. Mostly ranchers and cowboys who had been living there before the big mining companies came in and staked their claims, the Cowboys consisted of men like the Clantons, the McLaury brothers, Curly Bill Brocius, and Johnny Ringo, all of them known to be handy with a six-shooter. As long as they limited their activities to running across the border into Sonora and rustling Mexican cattle, nobody paid them too much mind, but after the Mexican government had gotten involved, making that too risky, the gang began stealing US cavalry beef. The Earps had been brought in to tame the town and had done a pretty good job of it. As the Tombstone Daily Epitaph reported, “Since the retirement of Ben Sippy as marshal and the appointment of V.W. Earp to fill the vacancy the town has been noted for its quietness and good order. The fractious and much dreaded cowboys when they came to town were upon their good behavior and no unseemly brawls were indulged in, and it was hoped by our citizens that no more such deeds would occur as led to the killing of Marshal White one year ago.”
Hostility simmered between the lawmen and the Cowboys. The county sheriff, John Behan, stood between them, although he tended to lean toward the gang. Doc made his presence known soon after arriving, getting into a drunken brawl with another gambler in the Oriental Saloon. Milt Joyce, the saloon’s owner, had disarmed Doc, and when he refused to return his gun, Holliday got himself another weapon and walked in shooting. Joyce raised his gun to shoot back, and Holliday shot the weapon out of his hand, then shot the bartender in the toe. When Doc’s attention was diverted, Joyce picked up his gun and whomped Holliday over the head with it, knocking him out cold. Holliday was arrested. He was found guilty of assault and battery and fined $20, plus $11.25 in court costs.
Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881 had a population of 4,000, 600 dwellings—and 2 churches. The large building in the foreground (opposite) is the Tough Nut mine hoisting works.
By this time, Doc’s consumption had taken hold and was beginning to affect him. He’d lost considerable weight and ended most nights drunk. He was on a sure path to a sorry end. It turned out, though, that the Cowboys thought they might help that along just a bit. On the Ides of March (March 15) 1881, four masked bandits held up the Kinnear & Company stagecoach. The driver and one passenger were killed during the robbery. The Cowboys claimed Doc Holliday had been one of the bandits, and as evidence, they offered an affidavit that had been signed by a very drunk Big Nose Kate during one of their fights. On July 5, Doc Holliday was arrested and charged with murder and stage robbery; Wyatt Earp and a local saloon keeper put up his five-thousand-dollar bail, then set out to prove his innocence. When Kate sobered up, she insisted that Sheriff Behan and Milt Joyce had supplied the drink as well as the pen and paper and that she hadn’t known what she was signing. Other people testified that they had been with Holliday at the time of the robbery. After hearing all the evidence, the district attorney called the charges “ridiculous,” and Holliday was released from bond. It didn’t take Doc long to find out that Cowboy Ike Clanton was behind the ruse. He knew that one day soon, they would be settling up.
Ike Clanton knew that the real killers were some of the boys he was riding with. Wyatt Earp was especially interested in putting the cuffs on them; the election for sheriff was coming up, and he intended to replace the slippery Behan in that job, which paid a handsome sum. The story is that Wyatt made a deal with Clanton: If Clanton told him where the robbers were hiding out, Wyatt would let him keep the whole $3,600 reward, content in the knowledge that capturing those killers would
just about guarantee his election. Ike Clanton agreed and provided the information, but before Earp could act, three of those men were caught rustling cattle and killed. That set Ike on edge; he began getting paranoid that Earp might reveal his double-dealing, which for him would be a death sentence.
In July, several Mexican smugglers were attacked and killed in Skeleton Canyon, and the silver they were carrying was stolen. The perpetrators were never identified, but Mexicans living near the border felt sure this was the work of the Cowboys.
A month later, the head of the Cowboys and Ike’s father, Newman Haynes Clanton, better known as Old Man Clanton, and six of his men were driving a herd to market in Tombstone through Guadalupe Canyon, the main smuggling route over the border. After making camp, they were ambushed; five men died, including Old Man Clanton. Although the evidence pointed to Mexicans seeking retribution for the Skeleton Canyon attack, the Cowboys believed the Earps and Doc Holliday were somehow involved. It was not an unreasonable assumption: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday eventually showed up in town wounded, Doc using a cane.
By the fall, the relationship between the law and the Cowboys was about as dangerous as tinder in a drought, just waiting for a spark. The Cowboys were openly threatening to “clean out the Earps,” along with Holliday, if they didn’t clear out of town. Ironically, in his friendship with the Earps—especially with Wyatt and Morgan—Doc Holliday had finally found the thing worth living for, and for which he was willing to put his life on the line.
The gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place on October 26, 1881. It took about thirty seconds to write a chapter in American history that will never be forgotten. As the Epitaph reported the next day, “Stormy as were the early days of Tombstone nothing ever occurred equal to the event of yesterday.”
The stage had been set the night before outside the Alhambra Saloon, when Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday, both having far exceeded their alcohol limit, staggered around threatening to kill each other. Clanton supposedly promised that he was going to kill an Earp, and allegedly Doc responded by claiming to have killed Old Man Clanton and to be looking forward to adding Ike to his count. Virgil Earp had broken up the fight.
The thirty-second-long gunfight at the O.K. Corral has been the subject of numerous books, pieces of art, television shows, and Hollywood films in which Doc Holliday was played by Walter Huston, Stacy Keach, Victor Mature, Kirk Douglas, Jason Robards, Val Kilmer, and Dennis Quaid.
Meanwhile, Clanton had met up with Wyatt and supposedly told him flat out, “Your consumptive friend … he’s a dead man tomorrow.”
To which Earp responded, “Don’t you tangle with Doc Holliday. He’ll kill you before you’ve begun.”
The morning of the twenty-sixth was gray and windy. Ike Clanton showed up early at Fly’s Boardinghouse, demanding to see Holliday. Doc wasn’t there, but later, when Big Nose Kate told him about Clanton’s visit, he responded, “If God will let me live long enough, he will see me.”
About one o’clock in the afternoon, tired of his threats, Virgil and Morgan Earp went looking for Ike Clanton. They found him walking on Fourth Street, carrying a Winchester rifle with a revolver on his hip. Virgil Earp approached him cautiously, then banged him on his head, taking both his weapons. He hauled him off to Judge Albert O. Wallace’s courtroom. Wyatt found Clanton there and warned him: “You damn dirty cow thief. You have been threatening our lives, and I know it. I think I would be justified in shooting you down any place I would meet you. But if you are anxious to make a fight, I will go anywhere on earth to make a fight with you.”
“Fight is my racket, and all I want is four feet of ground,” Clanton supposedly replied. But he backed down from a fight right there, making it clear he didn’t like the odds. Instead he was fined $27.50 and released.
As Wyatt Earp was leaving the courtroom, he bumped right into one of the Cowboys, Tom McLaury, at the front door. Earp apologized, but when McLaury bad-mouthed him, Earp smashed him in the head with his pistol.
With trouble brewing, marshal Virgil Earp swore in Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday, giving them the legal authority granted to all US deputy marshals: They could shoot to kill.
Almost two hours later, a local man named R. F. Coleman saw Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury in Dunbar’s corral. At some point, they were joined by another one of the Cowboys, Billy Claibourne. The speculation is that they were planning to ambush Doc Holliday, who normally passed that way each morning. Coleman claimed that he found Sheriff Behan, warning him that those boys were looking for trouble and that it was his duty to disarm them.
Everybody in town knew what was coming: a showdown. Apparently several members of Tombstone’s Citizens Committee volunteered to walk with the Earps. Wyatt turned them down, explaining that it was his responsibility to enforce the law and that’s what he intended to do. But he did allow Doc Holliday to join him. The long trail Doc had been traveling for so many years had led him to this point. There is some evidence that at first Wyatt told Holliday that this wasn’t his affair. But the result of that conversation was that Virgil Earp gave Holliday a ten-gauge shotgun, the type of double-barreled gun carried by coachmen, which he secreted under his greatcoat. In return, Doc handed Virgil his cane. Virgil planned to carry it as a way of making clear to the Cowboys that he wasn’t armed and, if possible, of preventing bloodshed.
The four lawmen started walking shoulder-to-shoulder down the center of Fremont Street. Officially, they intended to enforce the law prohibiting people from carrying guns within Tombstone, but in fact they were going to get this thing settled. The Earps were dressed all in black; Doc Holliday was wearing gray. Sheriff Behan tried to derail them, apparently telling them that the Cowboys weren’t armed. In response, Wyatt suggested that Behan go with him to talk to the boys. Supposedly Behan laughed and told him, “Hell, this is your fight, not mine.”
Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers confronted the Clantons and McLaurys in a narrow fifteen-foot-wide space behind the O.K. Corral, between Fly’s Photograph Gallery and Jersey’s Livery Stable. For some reason, Claibourne had left the gang. The men faced one another for a few long seconds, then Virgil Earp shouted, “Give up your arms or throw up your arms!”
Another second passed; then it started. Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury went for their guns. Virgil warned them, “Hold on, I don’t want that.” But it was too late.
As eyewitness R. F. Coleman described it to a reporter the next day,
There was some reply made by Frank McLaury, when firing became general, over thirty shots being fired. Tom McLaury fell first, but raised and fired again before he died. Bill Clanton fell next, and raised to fire again when Mr. Fly took his revolver from him. Frank McLaury ran a few rods and fell. Morgan Earp was shot through and fell. Doc Holliday was hit in the left hip but kept on firing. Virgil Earp was hit in the third or fourth fire, in the leg which staggered him but he kept up his effective work. Wyatt Earp stood up and fired in rapid succession, as cool as a cucumber, and was not hit.
Doc Holliday was as calm as though at target practice and fired rapidly.
Thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds; then it was over. Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Billy Clanton were dead. Doc Holliday was credited by the Tombstone Nugget with killing both McLaurys—he blew Tom McLaury away with both barrels at close range—and possibly wounding Billy Clanton. Ike Clanton, who took off running when the shooting started, survived. Morgan Earp was seriously wounded, but he would survive. And, as the Epitaph concluded, “Doc Holliday was hit upon the scabbard of his pistol, the leather breaking the force of the ball so that no material damage was done other than to make him limp a little in his walk.”
When the smoke cleared, the mine whistles started whining. The miners rose to the surface, armed themselves, and raced into town to preserve law and order. Armed guards surrounded the jail and would remain there throughout the night. Sheriff Behan approached Wyatt Earp and told him boldly, “I’ll have to arrest you.”
E
arp shook his head. “I won’t be arrested today,” he said. “I am right here and am not going away. You have deceived me. You told me these men were disarmed; I went to disarm them.”
Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton were buried in the same grave. The Tombstone Epitaph reported, “The funeral … procession headed by the Tombstone band, moved down Allen street and thence to the cemetery. The sidewalks were densely packed for three or four blocks. It was a most impressive and saddening sight and such a one as it is to be hoped may never occur again in this community.”
Big Nose Kate said later that Doc Holliday returned to their room, sat on the bed, and wept. “That was awful,” he said. “Awful.”
Three days later, Ike Clanton filed charges, and Wyatt and Doc were arrested. An inquest into the shootings lasting almost a month concluded, “The defendants were fully justified in committing these homicides, that it was a necessary act done in the discharge of official duty.”
The gunfight turned out to be only the beginning of the bloodletting. Two months later, marshal Virgil Earp was ambushed by three men with shotguns on his way to the Crystal Palace. He was hit twice and suffered permanent injury. The Cowboys believed to be responsible were arrested, but other members of the gang swore that these men were with them at the time of the attack, and they were acquitted.
In March of the following year, Morgan Earp was shot and killed while playing pool at Hatch’s Saloon and Billiard Parlor. When Doc learned that the cowards had shot Morgan in the back, he apparently went ripping through the town, kicking open locked doors, hunting the killers. But they’d gotten away. Morgan was laid to rest wearing one of Doc’s finest blue suits. The Doc and the Earps now understood that they could not depend on the law to protect them. That was the beginning of what has become known as “the Vendetta Ride.”
