by David Fisher
Tombstone had become much too dangerous for the Earp family. All the women and children were packed up and, along with Morgan Earp’s body, put on a train for California. Doc, Wyatt, and several others rode along to protect them. As the train pulled into Tucson, a lookout spotted Ike Clanton and Frank Stilwell, believed to be lying in wait to finish the job on Virgil. Stilwell had been bragging that he had fired the fatal shot into Morgan Earp’s back, so no one was much surprised the next morning when Stilwell’s thoroughly ventilated body was found lying in the dirt near the tracks. As the newspapers reported, he was buried the next day “unfollowed by a single mourner.” Doc and Wyatt were named as his killers but suffered no repercussions for that act.
The bodies continued to pile up. Deputy Wyatt Earp’s posse heard that some of the Cowboys were in the Dragoon Mountains; they found one of the gang, Florentino Cruz, and dispensed western justice upon him. Two days later, nine Cowboys led by Curly Bill Brocius ambushed the posse. Doc was quoted as telling a newspaperman, “… eight rustlers rose up from behind the bank and poured from thirty-five to forty shots at us. Our escape was miraculous. The shots cut our clothes and saddles and killed one horse, but did not hit us. I think we would have been killed if God Almighty wasn’t on our side. Wyatt Earp turned loose with a shotgun and killed Curley Bill.” After that, it turned out to be open season on the Cowboys: Johnny Barnes, who was also involved in the attack on Virgil, suffered wounds that eventually would kill him. A couple of months later, the body of Johnny Ringo—with a bullet hole in his right temple and his gun dangling from one finger—was found propped up in the trunk of a large tree in West Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona Territory. Local authorities speculated that it might have been suicide, but there were serious hints that it was the work of Wyatt Earp. Within a year after the murder of Morgan Earp, at least five more Cowboys were killed by people unknown. The gang was decimated.
Doc Holliday was arrested in Denver, although once again, no charges stuck. Reporting his arrest, the Denver Republican wrote, “Holliday has a big reputation as a fighter, and has probably put more rustlers and cowboys under the sod than any other one man in the west. He had been the terror of the lawless element in Arizona, and with the Earps was the only man brave enough to face the bloodthirsty crowd which has made the name of Arizona a stench in the nostrils of decent men.”
In 1883, Holliday settled in the mining town of Leadville, Colorado, the highest city above sea level in the country and a questionable place for a man with tuberculosis. The British writer Oscar Wilde had visited it a year earlier on his national lecture tour and remarked that it was there that he saw the only rational method of art criticism he’d ever encountered, on a notice hung in a saloon. It read, “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.” Although some believed Doc Holliday was completely broke and given to borrowing money, he worked as a faro dealer at the Board of Trade Saloon, drawing players from all around who wanted to say that they’d sat at the table with the great Doc Holliday.
Holliday spent a good deal of his time fighting reality with alcohol and the opiate laudanum. In 1884, he was involved in one of the last gunfights of his storied career, when a kid named Johnny Allen challenged him. Apparently Holliday ignored him as long as he could, but when Allen drew on him in Hyman’s Saloon, Doc fired twice, hitting the kid in the arm. The bartender jumped on him to prevent him from shooting again. That was the seventeenth and final arrest of his life. A jury found him not guilty of attempted murder.
In the winter of ’86, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp met for the last time, in the lobby of Denver’s Windsor Hotel. Wyatt’s wife, Josephine, wrote that the two men sat together and laughed and cried, and that she had rarely seen a man as happy as Doc Holliday was that day. She described him as frail, unsteady on his feet with a persistent cough.
Holliday eventually made it to the sulfurous Yampah Hot Springs near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a place that supposedly had healing powers. But the tuberculosis had him wrapped. He spent the last two months of his life in bed, delirious at least some of the time. Doc had always told people that he intended to die with his boots on, the western way of saying he was going to die fighting, but in fact his boots were off as he lay in bed. On November 8, 1887, he supposedly awoke and asked in a clear voice for a glass of whiskey. Like so much else in his life, some reports say the nurse gave it to him; other reports claim she refused. But it is generally believed that he sighed, looked down at his bare feet, and commented, “Damn, this is funny,” and died.
Doc Holliday’s grave in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, has become a popular tourist destination. To his own surprise, and perhaps disappointment, he died in bed, with his boots off.
After years of gunfights in which he was responsible for piling up a slew of bodies, Doc Holliday died with his boots off—but his reputation as a man who had found a friendship worth living and fighting for was intact. A few days after he was buried, the Leadville Carbonate Chronicle printed his obituary, which read in part, “There is scarcely one in the country who had acquired a greater notoriety than Doc Holliday, who enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most fearless men on the frontier, and whose devotion to his friends in the climax of the fiercest ordeal was inextinguishable. It was this, more than any other faculty that secured for him the reverence of a large circle who were prepared on the shortest notice to rally to his relief.”
SHOOTING DOWN A LEGEND
Among the most common icons of the American West is the quick-drawing, sharpshooting sheriff, facing down an outlaw at high noon on a dusty street as the anxious folks take cover. Indeed, most western tales seem to end with guns blazing, and when the smoke clears, only the good guys are left standing.
It is generally believed that six-shooters tamed the West, that a man couldn’t safely walk the streets without his Colt resting easily on his hip, and that the background music in most western towns was church bells and gunshots. The heroes were the men who shot quickest and straightest.
Contrary to the legend, not every man in the West carried a six-gun or was quick to draw. Gunfights were rare and mostly avoided if possible. As Doc Holliday learned, a big reputation was often more valuable than a gunslinger’s skill, because it prevented people from drawing on you—or, just as likely, shooting you in the back. In fact, in most towns, once they had been settled for a few years, it actually was illegal to carry a gun. In most places, people were much more likely to be carrying a shotgun or a rifle than a pistol, because they were much more likely to need a gun for hunting than for protection. The heyday of the gunfighter (or the pistolero, as he was often called) began after the Civil War, when many thousands of men came home with weapons and experience in using them. There actually were very few real showdowns, where two men faced each other a few feet apart and drew; they were so rare, in fact, that killing Davis Tutt on a street in Springfield, Missouri, made Wild Bill Hickok a national celebrity. And even in those few real duels, it rarely mattered who fired the quickest, but rather, whose aim was true. Most times, shooters would just keep firing until—or if—someone got hit. Weapons and bullets at the time were notoriously unreliable. As Buffalo Bill Cody once admitted, “We did the best we could, with the tools we had.”
So, while quick draws were impressive in the movies, in real life, they rarely made any difference in the outcome. In fact, as Wyatt Earp once explained, “The most important lesson I learned … was that the winner of a gunplay usually was the one who took his time.”
The notion of a fair fight was also mostly a Hollywood creation. Because it was a matter of survival rather than honor, in many shootings, the winner was simply the guy who got the drop on his opponent. Some men carried a pistol on their hip, knowing it would attract attention—but when necessary, they’d pull their serious weapon, often a small derringer, from under a coat or shirtsleeve and fire before their startled opponent could respond. It has been estimated that as many three out of four people who died from gunshots were killed by conc
ealed second weapons. When gunfights did take place, they generally happened on the spur of the moment, sometimes breaking out when people were liquored up and angry, and the shooters, rather than standing at a distance from each other, were only a few feet apart.
Charles Marion Russell, “the Cowboy Artist,” tells an Old West story in his oil painting Death of a Gambler: Cards, alcohol, and guns all come together in a saloon and lead to an inevitable result.
Most guns used the “cap and ball” system, exploding black powder-propelled “bullets” little bigger than a marble that were accurate only to about fifty feet. Bat Masterson was quoted as advising, “If you want to hit a man in his chest, aim for his groin.” If more than one person was involved, the situation quickly became chaotic: After the first few shots, the black smoke would have obscured everybody’s vision for several seconds, making it even more difficult to fire rapidly and hit a target with the next shots.
The truth is that guns and rifles were common and absolutely necessary in the West, but they were used more for hunting and protection than for two-gun shoot-outs.
BILLY THE KID
Escape Artist
At about nine o’clock on the warm moonlit night of July 14, 1881, the sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, Pat Garrett, rode out to old Fort Sumner with deputies John W. Poe and Kip McKinney. The famous fort had been abandoned by the army after the Civil War, and cattle baron Lucien Maxwell had transformed it into a beautiful hacienda. His family now lived in the officers’ quarters, while Mexicans occupied many of the outer buildings. Lucien himself had died, and his son Pete was now running the compound. Garrett had received some reliable information that the outlaw Billy the Kid had holed up there with his girlfriend. He and his deputies would need to be quiet and careful: Billy the Kid was a cold-blooded killer. Garrett knew that better than most: He had captured the Kid just six months earlier, only to have the outlaw escape the noose by killing two of his deputies—while still wearing chains.
The weather was pleasant as the three lawmen unsaddled their horses outside the compound and entered the peach orchard on foot. They saw people sitting around evening campfires in the yard, conversing mostly in Spanish. Somebody was strumming a guitar. Garrett and his men stayed silently in the shadows, watching, without knowing exactly what they were looking for. The sheriff intended to have a private conversation with Pete Maxwell, who was a law-abiding citizen. As they lingered, a man stood up, hopped over a low fence, and walked directly toward Maxwell’s house. In the firelight, they saw that he was wearing a broad-brimmed sombrero and a dark vest and pants; he was not wearing boots. They couldn’t see his face and didn’t pay him much attention.
To avoid being noticed, just in case the Kid was there, Garrett and his men backed up and took a safer path to the house. Around midnight, the sheriff placed Poe and McKinney on the porch, about twenty feet from the open door, and eased himself into Maxwell’s dark bedroom. Garrett sat down at the head of the bed and shook Maxwell awake. Speaking in a whisper, he asked him if he knew the whereabouts of the Kid. Maxwell was not pleased to have been woken, but he told Garrett that the outlaw had indeed been there for a spell. Whether he was still there, he did not know.
As they conversed, they heard a man’s voice outside demanding, “¿Quien es?” (“Who are you?”) A split second later, a thin figure appeared in the doorway. Looking back outside, the man asked again, “¿Quien es?” Even in the dim light, Garrett could see that the man was holding a revolver in his right hand and a butcher knife in his left.
The man moved cautiously into the bedroom. Garrett guessed he was Pete Maxwell’s brother-in-law, who had probably seen two men on the porch and wanted to know what was going on. The sheriff also knew he had a big advantage: The thin man didn’t know he was there, and it would take a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dark. The man walked toward the bed, leaned down, and asked Maxwell in a soft voice, “¿Quienes so esos hombres afuera, Pedro?” (“Who are those men outside, Peter?”)
It’s impossible to know what Maxwell was thinking at that moment, but just above a whisper, he said to Garrett, “That’s him.”
The thin man stood up and started backing out of the room. He raised his gun and pointed it into the darkness. As Garrett later remembered, “Quickly as possible I drew my revolver and fired, threw my body aside and fired again.” Garrett and Maxwell heard the man fall to the floor. Not knowing how badly he was hit, they scrambled out of the room. The Mexicans had heard the shots and were running toward Maxwell’s place. Safely outside, Garrett waited to see if anyone else came out. No one did. “I think I got him,” Garrett said finally.
They waited a bit longer, then Pete Maxwell put a lit candle in the window. In the flickering light, they saw the lifeless body of Billy the Kid sprawled on the floor. Garrett had shot him dead just above his heart. As Garrett concluded, “[T]he Kid was with his many victims.” The legendary outlaw was twenty-one years old when he was killed that night.
If he actually was killed that night.
No one disagrees that Billy the Kid was one of the most ruthless outlaws to roam the Old West. As the Spartanburg Herald reported, “He was the perfect example of the real bad man, and his memory is respected accordingly by the few surviving friends and foes of his time, who knew the counterfeit bad man from the genuine.” But since that night, when sheriff Pat Garrett fired two shots into the darkness, people have wondered who actually died on Pete Maxwell’s floor.
Few names are better known in American folklore than Billy the Kid. Although his life as an outlaw lasted only four or five years, he accomplished enough during that brief span to ensure that he would be remembered forever. The only authentic photograph of the Kid, a two-by-three-inch ferrotype, was sold at auction in 2011 for $2.3 million, at that time making it the fourth most valuable photograph in the world. It was a tribute to his notoriety.
Perhaps surprising for someone so well known, there are very few verifiable facts about his life. It’s generally believed that his name was William Henry McCarty Jr.—or, as he called himself, William H. Bonney—and that he was born about 1859, probably in New York City. He was the son of Irish immigrants who came to America to escape the Potato Famine. His father was long gone by the time his mother and stepfather opened a boardinghouse in Silver City, New Mexico. His mother, Catherine, tried to raise him right: He could read well and write in a legible hand; he was known to be polite and well mannered. But the New Mexico Territory was a hard place to grow up; gunplay was common, and the murder rate was high. The people who stayed at the family boardinghouse were on the move: miners, gamblers, merchants, women of pleasure, teamsters, and toughs. From these people, the impressionable boy learned the skills of survival. His proudest possession was a deck of Mexican cards; by the time he was eight, he could deal monte, and within a few years, he was said to be as skillful with cards as any of the gamblers in the local saloons.
Whatever chance Billy Bonney might have had for a decent life ended when he was fourteen years old and his mother died of tuberculosis. He stayed in Silver City for a short time after that, cleaning and washing dishes for neighbors who owned a hotel. His life was pretty much a scuffle; he didn’t appear to have any particular destination. Although he didn’t show much promise, he also didn’t appear to be a bad sort. He fell in with the Mexican community and fully embraced its vibrant culture. Like most young men, he loved to dance and party. On occasion, he displayed a temper. The Mexicans called him El Chivato, “the Rascal.” He committed the sort of minor offenses that have long been associated with teenagers: Once he was caught stealing cheese; another time, he was arrested for holding shirts a friend of his known as “Sombrero Jack” had stolen from the Chinese laundry run by Charley Sun and Sam Chung. Sheriff Harvey Whitehill put him in jail for that, figuring he’d give him a good scare, but instead he shimmied up and out of the jailhouse chimney and took off for a sorry future.
He kicked around the area, finding work as a ranch hand and shephe
rd until he fell in with John R. Mackie, a small-time criminal whose gang consisted mostly of teenage boys. Mackie might have recognized the possibilities in the young man: Billy Bonney had a slight build and a winning way about him. People took to him easily; his smallish stature was nonthreatening, and his easy smile was reassuring. But when it was necessary, he was quick on the draw and known to be an accurate shot. The gang stole horses and cattle from the government in Arizona and sold it to the government in New Mexico; then they would steal stock in New Mexico and take it to Arizona. However, on the night of August 17, 1877, seventeen-year-old Billy Bonney’s life of crime took a more dangerous turn.
He was playing cards in George Atkin’s cantina in Camp Grant, Arizona, with a blacksmith named Frank Cahill. Cahill’s big mouth, which had earned him the nickname Windy, was working hard that night, throwing a string of insults at Bonney. Cahill was a small man with blacksmith’s muscles and a mean temper. In some stories, the fight started because of a gambling disagreement; in others, as the result of drink; and in still others, Cahill called Billy a pimp, and Bonney responded by calling him a son of a bitch. Whatever the cause, suddenly Windy Cahill grabbed Bonney and threw him hard to the floor. The Kid got up, and Cahill pushed him down again. Billy got up once more, and Cahill shoved him a third time, but this time Cahill jumped on top of him and pinned his shoulders to the floor. Then he started punching him, again and again. The Kid had no chance of winning this fistfight, but somehow he managed to pull out the peacemaker he carried, a Colt .45, and fired one shot into Cahill’s chest. Cahill slumped over and died the next day. Billy was locked up in the camp’s guardhouse.
