Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha

by Harvey Rachlin

  Artifacts of momentous chapters of history are often simple, seemingly innocuous, everyday sorts of things. But of course it is the actions behind them that turn them into the special objects they are, extraordinary emblems of past events. In this sense, the countless human dramas, the remarkable heroism and untold suffering of a global catastrophe the likes of which had never been seen before, are invisibly woven into the extant piece of the truce flag that ended World War I.

  LOCATION: The Woodrow Wilson House, Washington, D.C.

  Footnotes

  *Estimates of fatal casualties range from a few million less to a few million more.

  *Cavalier of the Legion of Honor, a military award reserved for exceptional service in the armed forces, as well as for dignitaries and political figures.

  **“Poilu” literally means “hairy man”; it was a term for French soldiers of World War I.

  *Edith Wilson miscalculated the actual size of the small piece of cloth. She also wrote that “the French premier wrote a few lines on a sheet of paper,” when Clemenceau, in fact, wrote a brief inscription on the first page of the letter written by Chuillier.

  WYATT EARP’S DRAWING OF THE

  O.K. CORRAL GUNFIGHT

  DATE: 1926.

  WHAT IT IS: A sketch made by the legendary marshal of one of the most famous shoot-outs of the Old West.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The drawing is made in pencil on thin typing paper; on the reverse side is another drawing showing the location in Sulphur Springs Valley of the ranch owned by the McLaurys, who fought in the O.K. Corral gun-fight. The paper measures 8½ inches wide by 11 inches long.

  In the twilight of his years, Wyatt Earp determined to preserve for posterity the story of his adventurous days as a lawman on the American frontier. At this time, 1926, with automobiles, airplanes, motion pictures, and radio common fixtures in the tapestry of everyday life, the world was a vastly different place from the Old West he had known. An old-time frontier officer about whom there was increasing nostalgic curiosity, Earp undertook this task not to exalt himself and his exploits, but from a sense of responsibility: he thought he should record for history an eyewitness account of the heroics of a colorful bygone era.

  To help any potential biographer—and he was courted by many—Wyatt Earp sometimes drew illustrations of gunfights to explain how they had played themselves out. On a September day at his Los Angeles home, the elderly law officer collaborated with his secretary, J. H. Flood, Jr., in casually sketching out a diagram of his most famous fight, the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. As Earp sifted through his memory to bring into focus that crucial day forty-five years earlier, he undoubtedly conjured up vivid images of bitter adversaries tensely arrayed against each other, ready for a showdown—in which, in the space of a few seconds, a blaze of gunshots would give birth to one of the most provocative and stirring legends of the Old West.

  Through the popular media of books, film, and television, the story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is well known. It took place in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881. Trouble between the Earps and Clantons had been brewing for about a year, ever since the Earp brothers had arrived in Tombstone, a mining boomtown that was attracting gamblers and thieves in addition to common folk eager to hit paydirt with the area’s resources. The Earp family was an itinerant clan, the father, Nicholas Earp, having moved back and forth between the Midwest and California in the 1860s and 1870s, and some of the children having settled and worked in various locations in between.

  Wyatt Earp had four brothers—James, Virgil, Morgan, and Warren; a sister, Adelia; and a half brother, Newton. Through the end of the 1860s and 1870s, Wyatt, born in 1848, was a gambler and horse thief who had taken assorted legitimate jobs such as railroad construction before becoming a policeman in Wichita in 1875 and thereafter continuing work as a peace officer. His brothers also worked as lawmen, as well as in other jobs. Settling in Tombstone around 1880, Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Warren tried to establish themselves politically, Virgil becoming city marshal and Wyatt running, albeit unsuccessfully, for sheriff of the newly formed Cochise County.

  Ever since Virgil’s predecessor, Marshal Fred White, had been killed in October 1880 by a friend of the Clantons (a family of local ranchers), whom he was trying to arrest, the Earps and the Clantons had loathed each other. But in March 1881 an incident happened that would really set Ike Clanton off.

  There had been a stagecoach robbery in which two men were killed, and Wyatt Earp, as a Wells Fargo detective, investigated the crime. Wyatt deduced that three men—Harry Head, James Crane, and Billy Leonard—had committed the robbery and murder, but a diligent search for them was unsuccessful. One day when Ike Clanton and Frank McLaury were in Tombstone, Wyatt, knowing the wanted men were associates of Clanton and McLaury, tried to entice them with the reward money, $3,600, for the apprehension of the outlaws, if they would tell him where to find them. Earp’s aim was purely political—if he could capture the wanted men he would be a hero, and the people of Cochise County would elect him to the coveted office of sheriff.

  Wyatt and Clanton secretly devised a plan whereby Joe Hill, an associate of Clanton’s, would draw the outlaws out of hiding by enlisting their help in robbing a (fictitious) miners’ paymaster purportedly traveling from Tombstone to Bisbee. Earp would have a posse waiting to apprehend the wanted men at the McLaurys’ ranch near Soldier’s Holes. But the plan fell through when Hill discovered that Head and Leonard had been murdered before he could meet them, supposedly by horse thieves (Earp would later learn that Clanton-McLaury gang members, unaware of Clanton’s collusion with Earp, had murdered the wanted men).

  Then Wyatt’s close friend, Doc Holliday, an erstwhile dentist turned gambler and drifter, was arrested for playing a role in the fatal March 1881 stagecoach robbery, and Tombstone residents began publicly to question the integrity of the Earps and their associates. The Earp faction responded by drawing attention to the criminal activities of the Clanton-McLaury gang.

  The imbroglio was gathering momentum like a tornado, and as each side was making nasty claims about the other, an Earp acquaintance told Ike Clanton that he knew Ike had agreed to give up Harry Head, James Crane, and Billy Leonard for the reward money. Feeling betrayed, Ike Clanton and Frank McLaury accused Earp of having divulged their secret plan to Doc Holliday and to Marshall Williams, the Tombstone agent for Wells Fargo, which had put up the reward money. Ike Clanton and his gang members began to make threats against the Earp brothers, who stayed on their guard, knowing their adversaries were cold-blooded killers.

  On October 26, on the streets of Tombstone, Ike Clanton had an altercation with Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp. Clanton swung his rifle at Virgil, but the marshal seized it and smacked Clanton with the side of his revolver. The Earps escorted Clanton to the Grand Hotel for a search, then Wyatt and Morgan took their prisoner to the courtroom of Justice Walker. There Clanton and the Earps exchanged more threats. Later Wyatt ran into Tom McLaury outside the courtroom, where they had an exchange of words and Wyatt slapped McLaury in the face, challenging him to draw his gun. McLaury didn’t respond, and Wyatt, who didn’t appreciate the threats made on his life by McLaury, whacked him on the head with his gun, then ambled off to go buy a cigar.

  Soon Ike Clanton was released from custody and went to join his brother, Billy, and friends Tom and Frank McLaury at a gunsmith shop on Fourth Street, where a watchful Wyatt observed them inserting cartridges into their belts. Then they left the shop and strolled along Fourth Street to the corner of Allen. Wyatt stopped following them as they continued down Allen toward Dunbar’s Corral. The men would have to be disarmed given their openly murderous intentions, but Virgil, whose job as city marshal it was to do so, would need assistance.

  On September 15, 1926, Wyatt Earp recalled his famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and with the help of his secretary, J.H. Flood, Jr., recorded on paper the positions of the gunmen.

  Ten minutes later, Wyatt Earp joined his brothers Morgan and Virgil and
their friend Doc Holliday on the corner of Fourth and Allen. Aware of the building tension between the Earps and the Clantons, a small crowd had gathered. One man warned, “There’s going to be trouble with those fellows.” Another announced that the Clantons and McLaurys had “just gone from Dunbar’s Corral to the O.K. Corral, all armed,” adding, “I think you had better go and disarm them.”

  City marshal Virgil Earp adjusted his gunbelt and told his comrades to follow him.

  The three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday cautiously made their way down Fourth to Fremont. At the corner they glimpsed Billy Clanton, the McLaurys, and Sheriff Beehan—who was known to consort with the Clantons—standing in the space between Fly’s photograph gallery and the adjacent building to the west. The Earps and Holliday headed toward them, walking on the left side of Fremont.

  When they were about fifty yards from their adversaries, a short distance from the O.K. Corral, Wyatt could see that the group included Ike Clanton, Billy Claiborne, and another man Earp didn’t recognize. As Wyatt’s group took a few steps farther, Sheriff Beehan stepped away from the Clanton group and approached Earp’s men, nervously glancing back over his shoulder.

  “For God’s sake,” Beehan begged Virgil Earp, “don’t go down there. You’ll get murdered!”

  “I’m going to disarm them,” the Tombstone marshal responded, unperturbed. Beehan—whose lady friend, Josephine Marcus, was the object of romantic affection by Wyatt Earp—stared at Earp for a moment, then moved off apprehensively down the street. The Earps and Doc Holliday continued their guarded advance.

  When the groups were in close range Virgil Earp called out, “Throw up your hands. I have come to disarm you.”

  Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury placed their hands over their pistols.

  Virgil shouted to his partners to hold their fire, but suddenly shots were exploding from both sides. Wyatt Earp saw Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury both aiming at him, but knowing McLaury was the better shot, Wyatt fired at McLaury. Billy Clanton’s shot missed its mark, and McLaury went down with a bullet in the stomach, having failed to hit Earp with his own shot. Tom McLaury scrambled behind a horse but was hit and also fell to the ground. Billy Clanton took a bullet in the chest. At this point Ike Clanton turned and ran down an alleyway, out of sight; Billy Claiborne and the sixth man also took off, disappearing in different directions.

  There was a heavy silence as the Earps and Doc Holliday surveyed the field. Before them were sprawled the casualties of their gunfight, three lifeless bodies.

  If the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral wasn’t enough by itself to give rise to Wild West folklore, in its aftermath the confrontation acquired a vastly expanded mystique. The gunfight became the focal point of intense controversy: Sheriff Beehan tried to arrest the Earps, and many people claimed that the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday had shot at unwilling combatants, although it never was determined which side had fired first. An inquest followed on November 16, 1881, and the defendants were cleared, but acts of vengeance followed: Virgil was shot (but survived); Morgan was shot to death in a saloon, and Wyatt took off after their attackers, killing several people, including Frank Stilwell, a law officer Earp believed had participated in Morgan’s murder.

  Wyatt hid out for a time, then became a drifter and gambler. His partners in the gunfight likewise led itinerant lives involving gambling and even murder. Wyatt finally settled in Los Angeles, where at the age of seventy-eight on September 15, 1926, he assisted his secretary, J. H. Flood, Jr., in making a drawing of the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

  Soon Wyatt’s tale would begin to ignite the public imagination, thanks in part to Walter Noble Burns’s 1927 book, Tombstone (Wyatt’s legend would be launched to greater heights with Stuart Lake’s posthumous biography of him, Frontier Marshal). But for now, in this era not too far removed from nineteenth-century cowboy days, he was a celebrated relic of the Old West whom Western movie actors such as Tom Mix and William Hart, who got a kick out of hanging around real veterans, would portray on the screen.

  But several authors, including Lake, had communicated with Wyatt about collaborating on his autobiography, and he did dictate portions of his autobiography to Flood. The infamous O.K. Corral shoot-out was of prime fascination, and Wyatt probably made the drawing of it to set the record straight rather than to exonerate himself, his brothers, and Doc Holliday. As John D. Gilchriese, a noted Earp authority and collector involved in an Earp museum in Tombstone, later wrote:

  During the time Wyatt & John Flood were jointly writing a book [which was never finished or published] explaining Wyatt’s lively career, they met frequently in order that Wyatt could read Flood’s weekly efforts. Wyatt suggested to Flood that he would draw several sketches & diagrams that would explain his various gunfights, and locate the ranches of those killed during the gunfight of October 26, 1881. … Often in an animated way he would remember some detail, once taking his ten gauge shotgun & demonstrating to Flood how he shot Frank Stilwell, in the Tucson trainyard. Naturally, Wyatt discussed how the adversaries stood, placing dots to show their location. … Often latent bitterness crept into his voice when he described how they shot Morgan in the back. … The historical value of these diagrams is obvious, for it clearly illustrates what Wyatt Earp remembered & also what he wished to reveal. These two diagrams handed to me by Flood are to the best of my knowledge exactly what he said they were.

  The O.K. Corral gunfight possessed the ingredients of a timeless fable: bold outlaws, fearless protagonists of dubious rectitude, a bitter feud, and, of course, the romantic Old West setting. But with scholarly interpretation over the years, the Earps would be perceived by some as antiheroes, scurrilous and malevolent, as corrupt as the criminals they had gunned down.

  After Wyatt Earp died in 1929, books appeared that celebrated his career, followed later by television shows and movies that permanently inscribed the Earp brothers into the folklore of the Old West. The magnitude of that fame was elusive to the Earps in their own lifetimes, as legends are frequently born after death, but Wyatt Earp in his simple drawing of the O.K. Corral gunfight left a legacy that endures for posterity as the firsthand account of an unforgettable day in the annals of the Wild West.

  LOCATION: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles, California.

  THE MALTESE FALCON

  DATE: 1941.

  WHAT IT IS: A prop from the eponymous motion picture.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The prop (which exists in two versions) is a statuette of a falcon. One is made of lead and bronze, weighs 50 pounds, is nearly 12 inches high, and has slash marks on the head. The other statuette is also made of lead and has a bent tail feather.

  Few pieces of movie memorabilia have captured the public imagination like the Maltese falcon, the prop from the film The Maltese Falcon. And real life has mirrored movie fiction. As in the movie, the prop has been both shrouded in intrigue and the object of relentless desire.

  In the 1920s, Dashiell Hammett’s tale of the search for a bejeweled statue of a bird of prey ran in serial form in a magazine. Hammett’s story was inspired by a falcon legend derived from real-life history, which records that the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also the king of Spain, granted the island of Malta in 1530 to the Knights of St. John, who had been driven from the Aegean island of Rhodes by the Turks. There were two conditions: should the knights ever abandon Malta, the Mediterranean island would become imperial property again; and as recognition that the island was still under Spanish dominion, once a year on All Saints’ Day, the knights would send a falcon to Charles.

  The legend picks up some years later with one of the annual falcon levies. Sometimes, instead of providing a live falcon, the knights sent falcon statues bedecked with precious gems. In the late 1530s, a bejeweled falcon statue was shipped to King Charles but during its voyage was snatched by marauders. It was discovered hundreds of years later, in the early 1900s, in a Parisian antique shop, from which it was again stolen, thus setting in motion the drama of
a suspenseful hunt.

  Hammett’s fictional story of the hunt for the fabulous historical artifact was so popular that it was published in book form in 1930. The following year, The Maltese Falcon, the first of three film adaptations, was released, starring Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels.

  Five years later, the next film adaptation was playing in movie theaters. Called Satan Met a Lady and starring Bette Davis, Warren William, and Arthur Treacher, the priceless object of pursuit in this movie was a ram’s horn.

  In 1941 the third adaptation, also titled The Maltese Falcon, was released, with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet. The movie was not expected to be successful for several reasons: the story had been done twice before; John Huston had never directed a movie before; and the actors were not then stars. But Huston, who felt that the earlier films had not captured Dashiell Hammett’s wonderful dialogue, wrote a script that was faithful to Hammett’s fast-paced, suspenseful prose and gave the film a dark and edgy feel. Huston’s Maltese Falcon, costing less than $400,000, was a low-budget production that became a huge success, launching Humphrey Bogart, who played Detective Sam Spade, and director John Huston into instant stardom. In the Huston production, the statue of the Maltese falcon has a long history of intrigue as shady people take huge risks to find the figurine. Sydney Greenstreet’s con-artist character, Kasper Gutman, finally acquires it, but it turns out to be a worthless carving of lead.

  The Maltese falcon movie prop that has a bent tail feather.

  Two lead statues were made to represent the Maltese falcon in the movie. The future value and importance of these props probably wasn’t recognized during the filming, as one of the prop men reported they used the fifty-pound statues as weights on the movie set.