Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  Wyatt in Wichita

  Wyatt in Wichita

  A Historical Novel

  John Shirley

  Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  Copyright © 2014 by John Shirley

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

  ISBN 978-1-59780-568-1

  Published by Night Shade Books,

  an imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  Please visit us on the web at

  www.start-media.com

  Cover design by Rain Saukas

  For Micky

  Special thanks to Paula Guran

  Preface: The Legend of Wyatt Earp

  Wyatt in Wichita is a novel about a historic figure: Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp. The work you hold in your hand focuses on the young Wyatt Earp. But it’s still a novel and, inevitably, quite a bit of this tale is fiction, including the murder at the heart of the plot. Even so, many of the events in this novel did happen, and I tried to portray him in a way that seems to me close to the historic young Wyatt Earp. He was capable of doing all he does in this novel. And a number of the remarks he makes in this novel—and those made by certain others—are in fact quotations, statements made in real life.

  The legend of Wyatt Earp has gone through cycles, spinning like a Peacemaker’s cylinder. Early on, the first “popularizer” of the Tombstone story, Walter Noble Burns, called him “the lion of Tombstone,” and Earp’s myth-maker, Stuart Lake, made him the archetypal “Frontier Marshal.” After a spate of overly reverential mid-century Hollywood movies, the 1960s brought a series of biased attacks on Earp’s reputation. The anti-Earp crowd claimed that Lake and Earp made many of his exploits up, or wildly exaggerated them. These writers had a way of quoting Earp’s enemies; they chose their documentation very selectively, and sometimes they made things up themselves—or exaggerated more than Lake did, but in the negative. One of the principal anti-Earp authors is from Texas, where people still grumble about how Wyatt Earp treated some of their grandfathers who were troublesome cowpokes in Dodge City and Wichita. Wyatt had a short way with rowdy drunks and Texas has never forgiven it.

  In recent years, the cylinder has spun again. Serious, deep-delving researchers like Bob Palmquist, Allen Barra, John Gilchriese, Casey Tefertiller, and Glenn Boyer have found evidence strongly supporting Earp. Stuart Lake exaggerated and he certainly cleaned Wyatt up, but he had some of it right. For example, Earp did, after all, ride shotgun out of Deadwood; he did arrest Shanghai Pierce; and Earp’s courtroom testimony concerning the gun-fight not-quite-at-the-OK-Corral has been confirmed by forensic research. The most negative tales about Wyatt S. Earp have been cast into doubt or largely refuted.

  It’s also true that Wyatt Earp was no angel—he was a complex man, and he had his dark side. We see that dark side in this novel: Earp was involved with a prostitution ring, in 1872. But he put this behind him and, despite some very human ethical stumbles, became a good lawman. It turns out that, despite the redundancy, he really was, as the old TV theme song had it, “brave, courageous and bold.”

  Some historians suspect Wyatt Earp killed more men than is generally acknowledged—Johnny Ringo might’ve been one of those men—but Wyatt’s fights in which Wyatt fires his gun, in this novel are fiction. Wyatt in Wichita is about the young Earp, and takes place before Tombstone.

  Many of the men Wyatt faced down in this novel were real, and Wyatt’s basic conflicts with them were much as I describe them. The tale of Bat Masterson and Corporal King is true too.

  While the characters Dandi LeTrouveau, Sanchez, Swin-nington, Johann Burke, Toothless Mike and Montaigne are made up, Bessie Earp was a real person, as were Celia Ann “Mattie” Blaylock, Sallie Earp, Charlie Utter, Dave Leahy; so were Mike Meagher, John Slaughter, Ida May, Dunc Blackburn, Mannen Clements, Thompson’s enemies in Ellsworth, and Isaac Dodge. And of course Bat Masterson was real; so was his close friendship with Wyatt Earp. The novel’s newspaper quotations are also genuine. They are given verbatim.

  The young Henry McCarty (also, William Henry McCarty), who later became well known under a different name, was in Wichita at the time Wyatt was there. No one knows if they met. They could have. Wyatt did have a fight with Doc Black like the one I describe in the novel, and for the reasons I give. Wyatt said he first met Wild Bill Hickok in Kansas City. Opinions vary, but I believe Wyatt could have run into James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok in Deadwood too. And Wyatt’s riding shotgun for Wells Fargo, the subsequent encounter with outlaws on the trail to Cheyenne, and how that wound up, did happen much as I described it, though I have woven the real event into my fictional plot.

  Early on, I had to skip ahead in time a bit—and over some mighty eventful times. A few events in Wyatt’s real history, depicted here, have been chronologically shifted for dramatic purposes. But a great many incidents in the novel really happened, as for instance the Ida May’s piano story, the confrontation on the bridge over the Arkansas River, Smith’s calumnies, Wyatt’s thumping of him, and Abel Pierce’s arrest in Wichita.

  When I could, I stuck to facts.

  Two Real-Life Testimonials About the Historic Wyatt Earp

  “Earp is a man who never smiled or laughed. He was the most fearless man I ever saw. He is an honest man. All officers here who were associated with him declare that he was honest, and would have decided according to his belief in the face of an arsenal.”

  —Dick Codgell, Wichita Police Chief, 1896

  “Wyatt Earp was a wonderful officer. He was game to the last ditch and apparently afraid of nothing.”

  —Jimmy Cairns, former Wichita Deputy, in a 1929 interview

  PROLOGUE

  Missouri, 1870

  In the wet early morning, as the wind from the plains searched between the frame houses of Lamar, Missouri, Urilla Sutherland Earp followed her baby to the great beyond. The wind had risen all night, while Urilla lay there shivering and sweating, and then she took a final shuddering breath and was gone—as if the wind had blown her soul clean out of her weakened body.

  Urilla’s doctor, name of Chas Hackett, was a round-faced, snub-nosed man in a mud-speckled frock coat, his face set permanently in an expression of sympathetic resignation. He smelled of drink and shoe polish. The doctor set the stillborn child in a wicker basket, to await burial. To Wyatt, the mottled infant curled in the basket looked like a dead baby bird in a nest. Then Doctor Hackett drew the sheet over Urilla’s white face, covering her sinking eyes; he patted Wyatt on the shoulder and went his way …

  “Was it the fever or the child-bearing, took her?” Wyatt asked, his voice sounding toneless in his own ears. He sat in a straight-backed chair beside the bed; he’d built the bed-frame himself.

  “Hard to tell, Mr. Earp,” said the doctor gently. “Could have been the typhoid or the loss of blood in childbirth, or both.”

  Wyatt sat a while longer with Urilla, getting his weeping done—the last he would ever do for Urilla.

  Then he stood stiffly up, and walked slowly out of the little house they’d shared for so short a time, feeling half along to dead himself after sitting up with Urilla for four days. Coming into the blowing damp he took dull note of Urilla’s two brothers muttering to one another outside the front gate—the gate Wyatt had built and white washed himself. It wasn’t a bad effort, that gate, but never did hang quite right.

  The Sutherland boys were a couple of corn-fed, stocky, dark-eyed young men; the older one, ham-fisted Rafe, had the scraggy beginnin
gs of a black beard; the younger, Caleb, was clean-shaven and pimply, wore a straw skimmer starting to sag in the thin, intermittent rain. Some of his acne was bleeding where he’d scraped it with a razor.

  “She’s dead ain’t she?” Rafe said.

  But Wyatt didn’t answer, seeing his older brother Virgil riding up saddleless on one of his father’s plow horses; the hooves of his pale, bulky horse splashing in the muddy road as the rain slackened off, its mane streaming in the wind.

  “How’s Urilla?” Virgil asked.

  “She’s gone,” Wyatt said, his voice cracking. “And the baby.”

  “Dead!” Rafe exclaimed. “You are the son of a poxed whore, Wyatt Earp.”

  “A steaming mule dropping is what he is,” said Caleb, clutching his hat to keep it in the wind.

  Wyatt only watched the top of the poplars toss; the receding rain scratching the sky. Urilla was gone. The baby …

  They had talked for a whole evening of that baby’s future, just a month ago; if a girl, how she would have great learning and gentility, and—this was Urilla’s notion—and perhaps she would write stories, like Miss Louisa May Alcott; Wyatt had allowed that it was perfectly all right with him if the girl wrote tales, so long as she did her chores for her family and her husband. If they had a boy, they decided, after much grave discussion, he would go to Harvard College, which was rumored to be on its way to becoming an institution of merit, back East. After university, the boy would return to Lamar and become mayor.

  The baby was now a tiny blue-skinned corpse in a basket.

  “I knowed you was a son of a poxed whore,” Rafe was saying musingly. “I knowed it when you busted up our still—acting the Constable only to protect that Nicholas Earp’s whiskey makings. Your paps can make whiskey but not us. And now you’ve let our sister die. You overworked her and you let her die.”

  Virgil got down off the horse, his boots squelching in the mud as he approached the Sutherland brothers. “That is every bit of it a lie,” Virgil declared. His voice was calm but decisive. “There’s not a particle of truth in it. Our father only made whiskey for himself, and the family—a few friends—and outside town limits. Your still was inside town limits and you were selling them spirits and that’s against the law. Wyatt did right to fine you. And he never overworked Urilla. Now you two go home and let the man grieve for his wife.”

  But a keening fury was rising in Wyatt now, as the rising wind shrieked furiously between the fence posts. He wanted to rage at the dirty world, a world crawling with sickness like a stray dog with fleas. He was more furious with the treacherous world that had taken his Urilla than he was with the Sutherland brothers—Urilla, a trusting, doe-eyed slip of a thing who’d never done a wrong. Now she was dead with his child … and perhaps some of the fault was his.

  And he knew he would be punished, if he got in a fight with the Sutherland boys. It seemed right that he should be punished. Because he’d gone on that trip to Kansas City, when she’d asked him not to, and he’d fallen into the cards again, and delayed. And while he was gone she’d taken sick. But the Sutherland boys acted like he’d wanted her to get sick. Like he’d known she was poorly. It was not so. And to say he’d overworked her—as scurrilous a lie as ever man spoke.

  “I do not care what these jug-headed idiots suppose,” Wyatt said, his voice so measured and hollow that Virgil looked at him with surprise. “But I will not have it said I worked my wife to death. It is a wicked falsehood.”

  And with that he strode down the walk—it was made of flat pieces of tree-trunk he had set into the ground himself—and pushed through the picket gate with his left hand; the other, fisted, caught Rafe smartly with an uppercut. Rafe pitched backwards, to sit blinking and mud-splashed in the mucky road.

  “Oh, hellfire,” Virgil said, resignedly, and swung at Caleb, as the younger Sutherland started toward Wyatt; Virgil fetched him an audible thump on the side of his head, so that his hat flew off into the mud and Caleb staggered to keep from falling.

  Rafe was on his feet again, and the Sutherland boys were quickly swinging back at the Earps. Two sets of brothers flailed across the mud, with Wyatt concentrating on Rafe. Swinging in wordless anger, Wyatt took blows to his face and ribs without feeling them. Mud splashed with their staggering and falls till the brown-black Missouri ooze made it impossible to tell one man from another.

  Scrambling to his feet, sliding in the mud, Wyatt was dimly aware that his half-brother Newton was riding up on his tall black horse. Wearing an oiled leather coat against the rain, Newton was bearded, with tufted eyebrows and piercing blue eyes. He was known to everyone as a Civil War hero and a deadly shot. His arrival—and the shotgun cradled in his right arm—made them pause and back off a few steps. He was sure to have a pistol under his coat.

  “I have it from the doctor that we have lost Urilla,” Newton said, in his gravelly voice. “I presume this skirmish is the consequence.”

  “He … he let my sister die!” Caleb said, pointing at Wyatt.

  “And the baby!” Rafe added, spitting out a broken tooth.

  Those words penetrated to Wyatt’s heart as if they were bullets fired from Caleb’s pointed finger.

  “You given vent to your feelings,” Newton said. “At this time, you will get yourself off to that fleabag your father calls a hotel where you will pray for your sister, and the child, and send the undertaker. We ourselves will pay the undertaker. And I will hear no more of this nonsense. Or your folks will have more grieving to do.”

  He set the shotgun emphatically on his knee, pointing at the sky, but ready to drop and fire in an instant.

  The Sutherland boys considered Newton, and his reputation. Then, pausing only to hock bloody sputum at Wyatt’s feet, they turned and struggled up the street toward the center of town.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Soon after losing Urilla, Wyatt S. Earp sells the house and rides to Fort Gibson, Arkansas. It seems far enough away from Missouri. He is thinking of starting afresh, but the ache in him will not let him find his way. Instead, for a time, he spirals downward.

  In Fort Gibson, bitter as the dregs of a vinegar barrel, he takes to drinking. Though Nicholas Porter Earp liked to make his own corn whiskey, Wyatt’s father didn’t approve of drunkenness, never commencing before the supper bell rang, and he had warned his sons, “A man whose head is spinning with spirits cannot make a wise judgment. He will find himself trusting the wrong men, and he may fight with men who should be his friends.”

  Wyatt discovers, not for the last time, that his father is right. Half starved and fully drunk in Arkansas, Wyatt falls in with a couple of shady characters, Ed Kennedy and John Shown, who bilk a man of his horses. Wyatt is arrested with Kennedy and Shown—Wyatt once a Constable, arrested!—and his father has to bail him out. The evidence is shaky, and the authorities never get around to pursuing the case. But Wyatt knows… Riding way from Fort Gibson, Wyatt knows what he’s done.

  For lack of another direction, he rides to Henry, Illinois, to see his Uncle Lorenzo. Any destination is better than returning to his father’s chilly supervision; his silent disapproval.

  Illinois is no better. Still troubled by drink, and twisting inside over Urilla, Wyatt falls out with his uncle—and in with a procurer named Walton who watches as Wyatt gets into a fist-fight with a train’s brakeman; the fistfight flares into gun play, Wyatt wounds the brakeman with a cavalry pistol Newton has given him …

  Walton, a pimp, is impressed with young Earp’s nerve and invites him into his business, offering a cut of the proceeds, culled on what were called “gunboats” on the Illinois River…

  1872

  “I don’t know why they call them gunboats,” Cudgin said, not long before the ruckus. “I was in many boats, and this here’s a ketch, and not far from a yawl, neither. ’Round forty foot, with yon fore and aft masts, d’ye’see?”

  Wyatt Earp nodded, looking at the Illinois River in the moonlight. Mist curled along the surface, lit up by the moon, whi
ch seem to roost in the thinning branches of the trees on the far bank. The gunboat was tied up at a dock, not so far from Peoria, that’d been used by a lumber camp, now abandoned; but there was still a road to the dock, and the customers came, now and then, in their buggies and on horseback. Wyatt was sitting on a deck chair—anyway, it was a chair on the deck, though it was more like something found in a kitchen—and he was looking over the side, into the syrup-slow Illinois River. They’d had a fortnight of rains, with little respite, and the river was up high, embracing now the gray-white trunks of beeches, and lapping around the darker, muscular trunks of hickory trees. Fallen hickory leaves dimpled the water, barely moving in a current that could scarce be seen close to the banks. Wyatt thought it looked more like a pond than a river. But it was plenty deep here, deep enough for drowning.

  “Walton says they were gunboats in the Civil War,” Wyatt remarked. “There’s a piece of iron on the deck up front where a cannon was—”

  “Up forward, boy! Not front!” Cudgin interrupted, with exaggerated disdain, and slapped at a mosquito on his neck. He was a narrow shouldered, big-bellied man in a tattered, floppy hat, a matted beard; a man with blackening teeth and yellowing eyes, Cudgin believed that bathing more than once a year endangered the vital humors. Wyatt relished neither the man’s conversation nor his proximity. Theoretically Amos Cudgin was the boat’s pilot, though his being a near-sighted drunk seemed to suggest he wasn’t right for the job. The boat’s rightful pilot, a man named O’Herlihy—who’d performed a kind of marriage ceremony for Wyatt and Sarah—had been tossed in jail, a fortnight earlier, for shooting a deputy in the leg.

  Sarah’s voice fluted from below decks, dutifully crying: “Yes sir, that’s what I call lovin’! Go and get what you’re a-for, it’s all yours!” There were three closet-like chambers below decks, two of them cabins, the third containing liquor and coils of rope and about six inches of sloshing dirty water, kept from the rest of the boat by a dike of oily rags; Sarah was in the nearest “business cabin” with a sheep-breeder from the outskirts of Hennepin; the new girl, Prudence, was in the farther cabin with a man who seemed too tall and wide to fit back there, but somehow they managed. As Wyatt listened—while trying not to listen—there came a certain thumping against a bulkhead, probably the belt on the back of someone’s open trousers, that confirmed a customer getting what he was a-for.