Telegraph Days: A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

  Both the McLaury brothers attempted to hide behind the horse, but the shooting made the horse restive, so that tactic didn’t work. Suddenly there was a yell from Doc Holliday, who poured both barrels of his shotgun—borrowed from Wells Fargo, I later determined—into Tom McLaury, who soon ceased to inhabit this life.

  Another young man, unknown at least to me, detached himself from the Cowboys and followed Ike Clanton into the photography shop, whose owner, Camillus Fry, stood not ten feet from me, still holding his black cloth.

  What occurred in the middle part of the battle, which I suppose went on for at least ten minutes, is something that has never been satisfactorily explained—not to me, anyway. I was there, but I can’t explain it myself. The horse milled around, dust was kicked up, guns went off with some regularity, and yet, so far, only Tom McLaury had actually fallen. Not to this day would I claim to know with absolute certainty who was shooting at whom, or with what results.

  “I got him!” Morgan Earp called out at some point—but I don’t know who he got, if he got anybody.

  “They got me!” Doc Holliday called out about the same time—but he still seemed to be firing away with his small nickel-plated pistol. If Doc got anybody, other than Tom McLaury, I don’t know who it may have been.

  Then I saw Virgil Earp fall over, followed, a minute or two later, by Morgan, who went down heavily.

  That left only Wyatt and Doc Holliday standing—Frank McLaury having sunk down in the street. He died within the hour, and so, to my sorrow, did handsome young Billy Clanton, who asked to be remembered to his sisters as he lay bleeding in the dust. A doctor got there in time to pump two shots of morphine into young Billy, but it didn’t save him.

  Billy Clanton was a sweet-seeming, curly-haired lad, and polite at the finish. I knew neither of the McLaurys nor young Billy either, but later, thinking back on it, I suppose he had just come to town to help his brother and had no intention of getting into dangerous gunplay with the Earps. With him went whatever promise his short life held.

  The locals later speculated about the O.K. Corral shoot-out quite a bit. Some thought forty shots were fired—others put it at thirty.

  I was not counting gunshots, but I can’t recall that I saw anyone reloading their weapons so I suppose those reports are just exaggerations. When I published my little booklet, Death at the O.K. Corral, I ducked speculation about the number of bullets fired.

  Wyatt Earp walked away from the shoot-out unscathed; not so his brothers. Virgil was shot in the leg and Morgan across the shoulders. Both of them had to be carted back up the street in a wagon. Doc Holliday proved to have only been grazed on one hip.

  The short sheriff with the badge—Johnny Behan, he was called—actually tried to arrest Wyatt Earp for murder, an attempt that Wyatt indignantly rejected, though he did promise not to leave town.

  As for us humble citizens, our reaction was much like the reaction I remember from Rita Blanca, when all the Yazees lay dead—we all just milled around, blank and numb and useless for the rest of the day. Zenas got drunk and I got drunk with him. Copulation was neither suggested nor performed. The hand of death had spared us, but it didn’t spare the McLaury brothers, or sweet young Billy Clanton.

  I felt, for a time, the relief that comes from surviving a catastrophe. I was alive though others were dead. Being alive felt good.

  But I couldn’t sleep a wink that night for thinking about what seemed to have been a pointless slaughter.

  “What kind of community have you brought me to, Zenas?” I recall asking at one point.

  “I expect it will be settling down once the boom’s over,” he said. But I could tell he had been thinking along the same pessimistic lines as I had.

  Probably some kind of arrest had been planned when the Earps set out along that street to face the Cowboys. But the arrest went wrong; three men died and three more were injured. And that was just what could happen on one sunny afternoon in Tombstone, Arizona.

  “It might be that this place has a little too much snap,” I suggested to Zenas, as we were staring at our supper.

  “Maybe it does,” he agreed.

  17

  THE NEXT MORNING I was out early with my reporter’s tablet, trying to track down witnesses to the big shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Actually, the big shoot-out had mostly occurred across the street from the stables, but the combatants had moved around some, and locating the fight at the O.K. Corral was close enough, I figured. Zenas had already cranked out a one-sheet paper in big caps announcing the slaughter, and people were snatching them right off the press as if they were ten-dollar bills—the report was brief and short of details but at least the names of the dead were included.

  But I wanted to dig a little deeper for a follow-up story, which is why I was out early, but gathering solid information about the combat did not turn out to be easy. The fact was that I had arrived in Tombstone only hours before the crisis. Many of the citizens turned out to be dried-up, taciturn types who had no interest in talking to a yappy young woman they had barely met.

  I was scarcely out the door before here came Jakey and grumbling Sam, both obviously the worse for a night of hard drinking—both had already concluded that Tombstone was no place for honest cowboys.

  “I guess this is gamblers’ heaven, but we ain’t gamblers,” Jakey said. “It’s wilder than Dodge ever was.”

  I gave them their wages and a bonus and a hug apiece, plus a little cocaine for their headaches. I felt a pang of sorrow when those fine boys rode off. If I had had any sense I’m sure I would have been going with them, out of this violent desert and back to the calm of the plains.

  But I had Zenas to think of, and our newspaper, and am anyway just too stubborn to give up on something without giving it a big try.

  I worked my way down the street, asking questions, but solid information was hard to obtain. One old miner, with a foot-long beard and a pick over his shoulder, gave it as his opinion that the Earps were to blame for it all.

  “You can’t go far wrong blaming an Earp,” the old fellow avowed. “I suppose before they quit they’ll kill us all.”

  Then I had what I suppose was a piece of luck—I spotted Doc Holliday sitting by himself in a rather spindly chair outside the Cosmopolitan Hotel. He still wore his dingy black coat but had not bothered to don a shirt. He was smoking a cigar and coughing after every puff—but he kept on puffing. If he was much worse for the shoot-out it didn’t show.

  “Mr. Holliday, could I speak to you for a moment?” I asked politely.

  From inside the hotel I heard the loud voice of an angry woman—I have no idea what she was mad about but she was loud. The sound caused Doc Holliday to bunch his shoulders slightly.

  “Hell, yes, I’ll talk to you, miss,” he said. “I guess I’d rather be shot for adultery than for missing my aim at a goddamn spittoon, which is what Kate’s so mad about.”

  “I don’t consider this quite adultery,” I told him, rather taken aback.

  “You don’t, but Katie will if she sees us chatting,” he assured me.

  “Oh, is Katie your wife?” I asked.

  “More or less,” he said. “The damned woman has ragged me about enough—and it’s barely sunup,” he continued. “If she assaults us I may just shoot her.”

  “No, don’t do that,” I urged. “It seems like the community absorbed quite a bit of shooting yesterday, which is what I want to ask you about,” I told him.

  Doc Holliday favored me with a rather thin smile.

  “Shooting’s an everyday occurrence in this part of the country,” he said. “Just because there was an excess yesterday don’t mean there won’t be a healthy sprinkling today.”

  I felt sure the man knew what he was talking about.

  “I’m the new reporter for the Tombstone Turret,” I informed him. “I’m trying to get a clear perspective on that shoot-out yesterday up by the O.K. Corral.”

  Doc looked at me with real amusement for the first time.


  “You want to get a what?” he asked.

  “A clear perspective,” I said. “What I can’t understand is how such a terrible set-to occurred right in the middle of a settled community.”

  “Where might you be from, miss?” Doc asked.

  “Waynesboro, Virginia, originally,” I told him. “More recently I’ve resided in North Platte, Nebraska, and Rita Blanca, which is a town in No Man’s Land.”

  “Oh, dern!” Doc said. He stood up and firmly shook my hand.

  “You’re that gal who keeps books for Bill Cody, I believe,” he said. “And didn’t your brother mow down the Yazees?”

  “Correct,” I said. “What about assisting me with my perspective?”

  Doc gave a hearty laugh followed by a cough. He coughed so hard the blood rushed to his cheeks.

  “Oh well,” he said, when he stopped coughing. “I suppose it was a fairly lively fracas. Virg and Morgan got pretty shot up but I escaped with a grazed hip.”

  “And three men got killed—let’s not forget them,” I reminded him.

  “Only three—are you sure? I had it in mind that it was four—are you sure it was only three?”

  “Quite sure,” I said.

  “I told Katie it was four, now she’ll rag me for bragging, I suppose,” Doc said. He obviously was more worried about the reaction of the woman called Katie than he was about what happened at the O.K. Corral.

  “I had a toddy or two before Virgil Earp asked me to participate,” he mentioned. “I am only a fair pistol shot when I’m drunk, so I told Virgil I’d go if he could loan me a shotgun.”

  “Which he loaned you?” I said.

  “No, Wells Fargo loaned it to me,” he said. “I suppose they hoped I’d shoot a few stage robbers and make life easier for the men who carry their payroll.

  “It’s damned dangerous work, carrying payrolls,” Doc told me, undoubtedly a solid opinion, because the driver of the Bisbee stage was killed that afternoon.

  “I thank you for that information,” I told him, “but what I’m most anxious to know is why the fight started in the first place.”

  Doc Holliday looked plainly disconcerted.

  “What started it—now that stumps me,” he admitted.

  Then he thought for a while, even going so far as to furrow his brow.

  “I guess we expected to run a bluff on them, like the Earp boys generally do,” he said. “I suppose the bluff didn’t take, this time. I know we were all mad as hell at Ike Clanton.”

  “Why? What did Ike do to get everyone so mad?”

  “Have you ever met him, miss?” Doc asked.

  “Just briefly.”

  “He chatters, you know,” Doc said. “I’ve told him to shut up fifty times and yet the man still chatters. Wyatt told him to shut up just yesterday, but it’s like telling the damn sun not to shine. Ike will hold it in for a few minutes and then the damn fool will start chattering again.”

  “So three men are dead because Ike Clanton is a blabbermouth?” I asked.

  Doc shrugged.

  “I imagine he was the first killed,” he said.

  “Why, no—he wasn’t killed at all,” I informed him. “He left the scene early, on Wyatt Earp’s advice.”

  “Good God, now that is a disgrace,” Doc said. “You mean we shot up all that ammunition and didn’t even kill Ike?”

  “You didn’t kill him—I suppose he left town,” I said.

  “I feel rather foolish,” Doc said—and he did look rather abashed. “I suppose I was more drunk than I thought. The least we ought to have accomplished is to have killed Ike.”

  He sighed.

  “I guess it will have to wait till next time,” he said, standing up. He flipped his cigar into the street and turned to go inside, putting a finger to his lips as he went.

  “Katie’s quieted down,” he whispered—“maybe I can slip inside and get a shave.”

  18

  LATER IN THE DAY I was lucky enough to meet Kate Holliday, better known as Big-Nosed Kate, and I’m glad to say that she was perfectly pleasant to me. It’s true that her most prominent feature was her nose, but we can’t all be born beauties. Katie Holliday was a generous woman who was mainly doing her best to keep her sick husband alive.

  I think Katie liked me, but she had slept through the whole O.K. Corral affair and had nothing to contribute to the record.

  In fact, though yesterday’s fusillade of shots may have caused everyone in earshot to conclude that all hell was breaking loose, it was strictly a one-day ruckus so far as daily life in Tombstone went. Ruckuses involving guns were just part of civic life in Arizona’s great boomtown.

  The one person who might have given me a clue as to what set the Earps off—my young friend Warren Earp—had been helping drive a herd of cattle to Tucson that day. When he finally returned, a week later, other problems had arisen. Warren had so much to do that I doubt he ever wasted a thought on the O.K. Corral combat.

  None of the older Earps would talk to me—as a clan they were still furious I had rejected Virgil’s proposal of marriage. Wyatt himself was rude as rude on the few occasions when I ran into him. The only time he ever came into the newspaper office was to place an ad to assist the recovery of a mule he claimed had been stolen from him. He offered the not exactly princely sum of five dollars for information leading to the return of the mule.

  “Only five dollars, Mr. Earp?” I said, as I took down the information. “Do you think anyone’s likely to trouble themselves about a mule for such a modest sum?”

  “Do I look like a spendthrift?” he said. Then he walked out. Those were the last words Wyatt Earp said to me for something like thirty-five years, until I happened to encounter him on a movie lot in Hollywood. Mr. D. W. Griffith was making one of his Westerns—I had done the scenario and Wyatt was there as a firearms consultant or something. When I went up to him and introduced myself he looked blank. I tried a few sallies: mentioned Dodge City, Rita Blanca, Virgil Earp, Warren Earp, Bill Cody, Tombstone, Ike Clanton, and the O.K. Corral, but it was only the mention of Ike Clanton that caused his eyes to light up with a dark light.

  “The damned rascal, he got away from us that day!” he said, echoing Doc Holliday’s sentiments.

  Of course, Ike Clanton did a good deal more than get away from the ruckus at the O.K. Corral. The next day he charged Wyatt and Doc with first-degree murder. They were jailed for a while, but they had a smart lawyer who soon got them off. But Ike and the Cowboys refused to leave it be. A few weeks after the O.K. Corral, Virgil Earp was shot down while crossing the street. He lived, but lost the use of his left arm. A sensible family would have left for safer climes at that point, but not the Earps. Morgan made the elementary mistake of playing billiards with his back to a glass door, through which he was efficiently shot and killed.

  Wyatt, with the help of Doc Holliday, swore vengeance and got vengeance. Various of the Earps’ sworn enemies soon bit the dust—so many that even Wyatt soon realized he had overplayed his hand, as far as Arizona went. The only thing for him to do was leave, so he left. He and Doc were soon established in Colorado—efforts to bring them before the bar of justice did not succeed.

  Meanwhile killings in and around Tombstone continued at a steady pace. The Earps, or for that matter, the Earps and the Cowboys, contributed only a modest element to the general lawlessness that prevailed in the area. The deadly Apache leader Geronimo was still out at this time, but folks in Tombstone didn’t even have time to worry about Geronimo. It got so bad that Zenas wouldn’t even hear of me riding a stagecoach to Benson or Bisbee, much less Tucson, to do a little shopping or buy a load of newsprint or anything.

  The truth is, I was just as anxious about him. Rita Blanca, day to day, had never been as dangerous as Tombstone was.

  I wrote up my little booklet about the shootout at the O.K.Corral, expecting it to fly out of the office, as my little Banditti book had. Now, of course, it’s just as great a rarity as the Banditti, but at the tim
e it hardly sold at all. People were moving into Tombstone or hurrying out at such a rapid rate that the O.K. gunfight was soon mostly forgotten. I stacked the unsold copies of my booklet in a shed—the next time I went to look, the pack rats had got most of them, which accounts for the rarity. The Earps eventually drifted off to other parts of the West—Virgil became a peace officer in California, Wyatt ran a saloon up in Alaska, and I soon completely lost track of sweet young Warren.

  When the chatterer Ike Clanton was shot dead while rustling cattle a few years later, Big-Nosed Kate, whose name by then was Katie Elder, sent me an obituary from the Tucson paper that didn’t even mention that Ike had been the cause of a big shoot-out in Tombstone when it was at the height of the boom.

  Zenas and I ran the Tombstone Turret for two more years, by which time the mines were beginning to flood and the boom was ending. The big hotels were empty and the tent dwellers were gone. Geronimo finally came in, with his little straggle of warriors. The gunfire petered out, but so did customers for the Tombstone Turret. Our thoughts were turned more and more to California, where the air was said to be so soft.

  One day out of the blue a telegram came offering to sell us a magazine called California Skies, whose mission was to extol the beauty of everything under those balmy skies, from the tall timbers to the border with Mexico.

  I had inherited some money by that time, and Zenas had one or two rich aunts to call on. Without thinking twice we bought the magazine, moved to Santa Monica, and so far as Tombstone went, felt lucky to have escaped with our lives.

  BOOK V

  California Days

  1

  IT WAS ODD that my lovely, snaggle-toothed Zenas Clark had cared to start up a newspaper in a desert—odd, because the great waters of the world were his first love. Born in Chicago, he grew up on Lake Michigan, he used to say. No sooner had we taken possession of our offices in Santa Monica than Zenas had bought a boat. The offices of California Skies were on Ocean Avenue, so that day in and day out, year in and year out, Zenas could look at the water.