Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

by Casey Tefertiller

  A few months later, Earp left town and left behind a mystery. James Cromwell charged that he had paid Wyatt $75 for an execution of the court, and that Wyatt erased the "7" and replaced it with a "5". The implication was that Wyatt pocketed $20, a significant sum in those days. Cromwell brought charges against Wyatt and his bondsman, James Maupin, plus Nicholas Earp and his Methodist minister brother Jonathan. Records do not indicate why Nicholas and Jonathan would be involved in the action. When the court ordered the new constable to find Wyatt and Nicholas for a hearing, they had already sold their property and left Lamar, never to return. Jonathan Earp and Maupin did show up at the hearing, and were found not guilty. The case was appealed and dismissed. It has never been established whether the legendary lawman was guilty or innocent of a $20 fraud, and as with just about everything else in Lamar, details are sparse and rumors rampant.' Wyatt Earp never said much about his Lamar days, going to the extent of writing relatives not to talk to biographer Stuart Lake about the events. He had a secret, and he succeeded in keeping it.

  Wyatt Earp, now 22, left Lamar, either grief-stricken over the loss of his wife or escaping possible prosecution for fraud, and wound up in Indian Territory now eastern Oklahoma. Almost immediately he became entangled in an incident that would trouble generations of researchers with the question of whether or not the future lawman was a horse thief. A warrant was issued on March 28, 1871, charging that Earp, Edward Kennedy, and John Shown had stolen two horses from the Keys family. The three defendants were arraigned April 14. On the same day, Shown's wife, Anna, gave a sworn statement to a U.S. commissioner charging that Earp and Kennedy had gotten her husband drunk near Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, then instructed him to ride ahead while they took two of Jim Keys's horses and hitched them to a wagon. When Earp and Kennedy caught up with John Shown, they exchanged horses, and Earp went toward Kansas. Shown was left with the two Keys horses, as he and his wife stayed behind. Jim Keys caught up to the Showns and reclaimed the horses. Anna Shown claimed that Earp and Kennedy had told Keys that her husband stole the horses. Then, ominously, Anna Shown said that Earp and Kennedy had threatened to kill her husband if he turned state's evidence.7

  Earp and Kennedy were indicted; Kennedy stood trial and was acquitted. Earp never went to trial. Apparently the law lost interest after Kennedy's acquittal. Records of the case are so sketchy it is impossible to determine Earp's exact role and whether an actual crime was committed, although the incident in Lamar with the erased digit, the flight, and the apparent horse theft do create the suspicion that young Wyatt Earp may well have engaged in certain dubious activities after his wife's death. The records are too ambiguous to be conclusive, and Earp never discussed the incidents, but it seems likely that 23-year-old Wyatt Earp nearly found himself bound for a career that would have landed him inside a jail cell instead of guarding one.

  Earp followed his year of misfortune with a period of adventure, serving as a hunter for a government surveying crew one season and a buffalo hunter another. He wintered on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River in 1871, where he met two young brothers, Ed and Bat Masterson, both future lawmen, and began a friendship that would continue for years. While Earp lived the life of a footloose wanderer, a new industry emerged on the frontier, trade in cattle spurring the creation of towns dedicated to cow commerce. As the railroad tracks stretched westward, little towns seemed to burst from the prairie as the meeting points for the cattle trails and the railroads. Longhorns would be driven north from Texas to hit the burgeoning towns, then allowed to graze and fatten up before being loaded on trains bound east or driven to other points for sale. The cattle trade quickly became a high-profit business for merchants with enough foresight and luck to locate their saloon or dry goods store in the town that would become a hub of commerce; it also had its rough side, with dozens of Texas drovers roaring into town after months on the trail, where they were greeted by an element more than eager to take their cash.

  "Saloons, gambling-joints and honkey-tonks of the northern towns had one main purpose in view-the taking of the visiting cattleman's money as quickly as possible," recalled drover Frank Murphy. "The games were crooked; the cowboys, whose wages were but a dollar a day, were charged 50 cents a dance and every dance was short. It needed but a day or two in town and the cowboys would be picked clean by these human vultures. Fed the most horrible whisky ever distilled, cheated at every turn, it is little to be wondered at that the Texans, none too even of temper at best, were now and then prone to be quarrelsome."8 In the infancy of the cattle trade, the toughest, wildest, and most prosperous town at the end of the trail was a little spot in central Kansas named Ellsworth.

  The cow trade happened quickly to Ellsworth. Little more than a trading post in 1868, by 1871 the town had become the primary shipping and receiving point for Texas longhorns, and the home, at least temporarily, of the gamblers, prostitutes, and others who fed off drovers with a few dollars in their pockets. The merchants knew they had to have tough officers to keep order in a town primed for trouble. In June of 1873, a few drovers awakened the town by shooting at a few signs, and the officials beefed up the police force to five officers, all reputedly experienced gun hands, under Marshal John Norton, called Brocky Jack because of his pockmarked face. "Every man on the force was a bribe taker and a villain. Every man on the force would kill on the slightest provocation, if he felt his hide was safe in doing so," Ellsworth lawyer Ira E. Lloyd recalled in his memoir. Norton's oddest deputy was a sour and dangerous drifter named John Morco, nicknamed Happy Jack. He was evading criminal charges in Portland, Oregon, apparently for killing four men who tried to interfere when Jack was beating his wife.9 Morco had been arrested for vagrancy on June 9 in Ellsworth. "Happy Jack was a drunkard, a brawler, and brave where there was no danger," Lloyd said.10 The only officer who developed a rapport with the Texas drovers was John DeLong, whom Norton laid off when he had to cut the force from five to four in July.

  Brocky Jack's aggressive crew made violations out of minor infractions and began arresting gamblers with regularity. Among the cardplayers arrested were brothers Ben and Billy Thompson, English by birth and Texans by choice, who were charged with somewhat vague infractions-carrying deadly weapons, being drunk, conducting themselves in a disorderly manner, disturbing the peaceand escorted roughly across the town plaza to draw fines ranging from $15 to $35. This surprised many, since the Thompsons were already notorious as tough gun hands and had tangled with Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene, the first of the cattle towns. The Thompsons were not alone in drawing the wrath of Norton's police force. "Daily from five to thirty men were arrested and brought before the police magistrate," Lloyd said. "Many were fined. Many were discharged. But it is safe to say that perhaps many or most were arrested with an idea of blackmail." The biggest targets seemed to be gamblers who had won money from the officers.

  The other law enforcement officer in Ellsworth was 31-year-old county sheriff Chauncey Beldon Whitney, who enjoyed far more respect among the Texas drovers and upheld the law with a more even hand. Whitney had served as a civilian scout for the army in a celebrated Indian fight at Beecher's Island in eastern Colorado. Since Whitney's primary duty in Ellsworth was to keep order in the outer areas of the county, he played a secondary role to Brocky Jack within the confines of Ellsworth. Whitney had little control over a situation that was daily growing more explosive through the hot summer. One day in August, the anger came to a climax when Billy Thompson had too much to drink.

  The brothers Thompson were gambling in Brennan's saloon with policeman Happy Jack and John Stirling [or Sterling]. Stirling and Ben Thompson had a dispute over the game, and Stirling struck Ben in the face. A voice, probably Happy Jack's, yelled out, "Get your guns, you damned Texas sons of bitches, and fight." Both sides grabbed their iron and started arguing. Outside, they walked the streets, firing a couple of errant shots. The confrontation was about to erupt into a battle when Sheriff Whitney rushed in to defuse the situation. Whitney, along wi
th former policeman John DeLong, approached Ben Thompson and said, "Boys, don't have any row. I will do all I can to protect you. You know John and I are your friends."

  In typical frontier fashion, Whitney invited the Thompsons to join him for a drink at Brennan's to talk out the trouble. According to Ben Thompson's story, Billy kept his shotgun, agreeing to put it up when they reached the saloon. Billy carried it with the hammers up, ready to fire if the need arose. Happy Jack suddenly stepped out, toting a six-shooter in each hand, then ducked behind a building as Ben pulled his gun, fired, and missed. The drunken Billy lifted his shotgun and fired, hitting Whitney in the shoulder.

  "My God, Billy, you have shot me," Whitney yelled.

  Ben Thompson, in shock, looked at his brother and said, "My God, you have shot our best friend." The wound would prove fatal.

  Ben tried to get Billy to leave town quickly. Billy rode out slowly, seemingly inviting a fight. Mayor James Miller ran out and ordered Ben to surrender his arms. Ben kept his guns, and the streets filled with armed Texans ready to defend him. For more than an hour, the band congregated on one side of the street, awaiting a move from the remaining Ellsworth lawmen. Marshal Brocky Jack and policemen Ed Hogue and Happy Jack just stood and watched, and Mayor Miller responded by discharging the entire force.l i

  What happened next is one of the great murky points of frontier history. Stuart Lake, Earp's biographer, told a glorious story of Wyatt accepting the appointment of town marshal on the spot and boldly heading up the street to Thompson, surrounded by a horde of Texas gunslingers. Showing no fear, Wyatt walked forward alone into the nest of gun barrels, threatening yet conciliatory as he talked Thompson into surrendering.

  "Come on," Wyatt ordered. "Throw down your gun or make your fight."

  Ben Thompson grinned.

  Wyatt Earp's guns were still in their holsters. Now, for the first time, his hand went to his right hip.

  "You fellows get back!" he ordered the Texas men. "Move!"

  As they obeyed, Wyatt stepped up to Thompson and unbuckled his prisoner's gunbelts.

  "Come on, Ben," he said. "We'll go over to the calaboose."

  With the famous Thompson six-guns dangling from their belts in his left hand, Wyatt marched his prisoner across the plaza to Judge V. B. Osborne's court. Until he reached the entrance, no onlookers spoke to him, or moved to follow.12

  By Lake's account, Ben Thompson got off with a $25 fine, and a disgusted Wyatt Earp turned back his badge when offered the permanent job of marshal. "Ellsworth figures sheriffs at twenty-five dollars a head. I don't figure the town's my size," he said.

  Almost immediately after Lake's book appeared in 1931, this incident began troubling researchers. Floyd B. Streeter, the dean of Kansas historians, began checking and found the newspaper records and all the trial data when Billy Thompson was arrested three years after the shooting. The name of Wyatt Earp never appears. In 1950, Streeter made his feelings clear in a letter to University of Oklahoma professor Walter S. Campbell, who wrote under the name Stanley Vestal: "I question the accuracy of Lake's book, so do not use it to any extent. I checked up on his Ellsworth and Wichita stories and found a considerable portion of the narrative was fiction.""

  While Lake probably embroidered the episode in Ellsworth, there are reasons to believe that Wyatt Earp did step in and mollify a tense situation. William Box Hancock, who helped drive herds to Kansas, said he had heard the story that Earp "was appointed city marshal by the mayor of Ellsworth, Kansas, when the notorious Ben Thompson had threatened to kill everybody in town. [Earp] arrested him and put him in jail.""

  There are other clues of Earp's involvement in Ellsworth: Wichita deputy Dick Cogdell would say in a story picked up nationally in 1896 that Earp had been marshal in Ellsworth, and Earp would make reference to arresting Ben Thompson in a 1928 letter to Lake. Earp's pattern was to cover up his misdeeds, not to create false glory. And, before Earp's death, Lake wrote letters to Kansas to try to find details on the Ellsworth affair.

  When Sadie Earp, Wyatt's third wife, was consulted on her biography in the late 1930s, she said she asked her husband about his encounter with Ben Thompson. "Well," she quotes Wyatt as saying, "I thought he would shoot me. I really expected to be killed unless I could see his wrist move in time to draw and fire before he would pull the trigger. But that's the chance any officer has to take, and for the time being I was taking the place of an officer. But I wouldn't stop for that because I couldn't bear to see him get away with what he was doing. People have a right to live in peace and he was protecting the getaway of his brother who for pure meanness had killed a good man."15

  When Sadie asked him for further details, he said only, "Oh, I just kept looking him in the eye as I walked toward him. And when he started talking to me I was pretty sure I had him. I tried to talk in as pleasant a voice as I could manage and I told him to throw his gun in the road. He did and that's all there was to it."

  Sadie Earp said she heard the story from Bat Masterson, who talked with Thompson and said the English gambler never held a grudge against Wyatt. Sadie also described a cordial meeting years later when Wyatt and Ben Thompson exchanged friendly words in Texas.

  While the exact story is unclear, it seems likely Wyatt Earp did in some way intercede to prevent a showdown between Ben Thompson and the citizens of Ellsworth, and the newspaper failed to accurately report the story, possibly because in the frenzy of activity the details never came clear or because the editors were intimidated by the police force. Earp is not mentioned in the court documents of Billy Thompson's trial, but prosecutors did not concern themselves with the events after the shooting of Whitney: the details of Ben Thompson's arrest were not relevant to the trial and were not discussed in court.

  The disarming probably was not nearly as dramatic as Lake's version of the story. Perhaps Earp simply walked over to talk with Ben Thompson, telling him the only thing that made sense was to surrender and avoid bloodshed. Thompson obviously did not want problems and probably just sought a face-saving way out of the mess. Wyatt Earp likely gave him one. Thompson came out the big winner, having to pay only a small fine for standing off the town.

  The story apparently circulated among the drovers so that young William Box Hancock would hear it from other Texans and repeat it as fact a halfcentury later. While the details and absolute authentication still lurk in the mists of history, it seems Wyatt Earp's reputation began as a peacemaker in Ellsworth.

  TEXAS CATTLE COULD TURN TO GOLD along the railroad lines of western Kansas, and cowtown entrepreneurs wanted their share of the business. Every herd that graced their town meant more dollars flowing into the dry goods stores and restaurants, the saloons and brothels. Every herd delivered helped make the cowtown grow as a center of commerce rather than remain a little prairie hamlet selling seed to farmers. Growth would bring business, business would bring prosperity. By the mid-1870s the trade became so lucrative that towns began competing, sending out salesmen to lure the cattle bosses with promises or payments.

  First Abilene, then Ellsworth boomed and faded as the rail lines cut across Kansas. By 1872 another dusty little town emerged with aspirations of grandeur. From the horizon, Wichita seemed to rise from a sea of grass on the prairie, a collection of buildings straddling the banks of the Arkansas River. Wichita proper sat on the east bank; across the river was Delano, with a cluster of saloons, gambling dens, brothels, and dance halls to attract the drovers looking for a way to rid themselves of the money they earned on the trip north. For a town to become a cattle hub, it needed entertainments to amuse the boys, and Wichita's suburb had its share of vice, technically beyond the control of town police. The St. Louie Republican described the scene: "Wichita resembles a brevet hell after sundown. Brass bands whooping it up, harlots and hack drivers yelling and cursing; dogs yelping, pistols going off; bull-whackers cracking their whips; saloons open wide their doors, and gayly attired females thump and drum up pianos, and in dulcet tones and mocking smiles invite th
e boys in and night is commenced in earnest."16 Among the town's sundry other excitements were races staged by naked belles of the demimonde, dashing through Delano as the onlookers bet on the winners. There were wild nights in this corner of the wild West, all to keep the drovers entertained and spending their cash.

  Into this scene came young Wyatt Earp. He had never seen this type of wildness, the kind reserved for few places outside San Francisco's Barbary Coast, and he must have been taken with the opportunities. By 1874, Wyatt's older brother Jim and his wife, Bessie, along with Wyatt, settled into the cowtown life of Wichita. It is likely that here Wyatt learned the skills of gambling, a natural for a young man who was unusually quick of hand and mind, brimming with the nerve to make the big bet. He was 26 years old and filling out to 6 feet and 180 pounds with an athletic build and natural strength. Rugged, bright, and clever, he was the image of a frontier lawman with at least some reputation trailing him from his dealings with Ben Thompson. Despite his relative youth, he had an aura of authority about him, a solemnity and bearing that commanded a situation. He rarely laughed or even broke a smile. He was all business when he was going about his business.

  Wichita deputy Jimmy Cairns recalled that town marshal Bill Smith saw Earp and chose him for an officer because of his physique and appearance. Cairns said that when he and Smith approached Earp to discuss the job, Earp quickly agreed to wear a deputy's badge. i7 While official records do not show him appointed to the force until April 21, 1875, there is evidence that he served in some capacity during the 1874 cattle season. The farm boy quickly found himself a deputy in a tough town, where the police faced a complex task. Officers had to preserve peace and keep some degree of order without becoming so tough they would scare off the trade. Obviously, cattle bosses would be less inclined to choose a shipping point so dangerous that they could expect their drovers and perhaps themselves to wind up in jail or even dead. Merchants wanted the trade, and dead drovers were bad for business. Ellsworth's mistakes in hiring the two Jacks for their police force had brought more problems than solutions, and Marshal Smith seemed to have a far better comprehension of the situation. His officers were tough, not deadly.