Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

by Casey Tefertiller

  In May of 1874, Wichita resident Charley Sanders, an African American hod carrier, returned to his house to find two Texans bothering his wife. Sanders responded by beating the drovers badly and tossing them bodily from his house. According to Cairns, the cowhands were wild with rage: taking such a beating from a black man was unthinkable. They returned to their camp outside town and gathered a group to plan retribution. A cowhand referred to as Shorty Ramsey received the "honor" of being the triggerman. The next day, May 27, the group drifted into town, two at a time to avoid drawing attention. Sanders was working on a building being constructed in the downtown area. Ramsey stepped forward, shot Sanders twice, one bullet grazing the skull and the other going through the rib cage, mounted his horse, and rode out of the city yelling and flourishing his revolver. A gang of Ramsey's Texas friends followed him to the bridge across the Arkansas River, quickly located Smith, and held their drawn revolvers on the helpless marshal to prevent him from taking action. Smith's inaction led the Wichita Eagle to call for a reorganization of the police department, which may have led to adding young Wyatt Earp to the force. The marshal's helplessness in the situation also apparently disappointed Earp and led him to question Smith's competence in a tough situation.18

  A few weeks later, Wyatt Earp would meet a major test as a peacekeeper when a few drovers decided to take out their revenge on the town. As Earp biographer Stuart Lake told the story, a brothel keeper known as Ida May, "the high priestess of the Cyprian Sisterhood in Wichita," purchased a piano in Kansas City for $1,000 and paid the first $250 before turning away all other visits from bill collectors. Earp took four tough men into the saloon and began to repossess the piano, chastising the Texans for being too cheap to help their hostess pay her debts. This led to the assorted patrons passing the hat to collect the remaining $750. Earp left, warning the drovers not to head into anything they couldn't buy themselves out of. Earp's comment and manner infuriated the drunken drovers. 19

  Cairns could never forget the events that followed. A mob of nearly fifty men, made up of cattle bosses and their hands, banded together in Delano, across the bridge from Wichita, while Earp and the other officers led a group of citizens through the streets of town to meet them. As Earp's party approached the bridge, the Wichita defenders scattered so as not to be easy targets. Mannen Clements, a cousin of gunman John Wesley Hardin, served as leader of the cattlemen. According to Cairns, Clements was "by no means classified as a 'bad man,' but had the peculiar psychology of most of the early day cattle handlers that caused them to use violence at times in an effort to have their own way."

  The Texas men rode onto the bridge, their horses clapping hooves against the wooden planking. Clements saw Earp's spread-out force across the river, and Cairns recalled the cattlemen drawing their guns, ready for action. The two forces halted within speaking distance, the cowboys defiant and the townsmen determined to hold their ground. Any wrong move could have led to a deadly battle. Earp stood in the center of the line of defenders and calmly called for Clements to put away his guns. When Clements failed to comply, Earp said, "Mind me now, Mannen, put up those guns and go on home." Clements paused for a moment, then slipped his pistol back in the holster before turning his horse back across the bridge. What could have been war ended quietly, defused by Earp's steadiness under pressure and calm in a tense situation. "Wyatt certainly had a way with men," said Cairns.

  Wyatt Earp understood his duty as a lawman was to prevent trouble, not ignite it. Law enforcement meant keeping the peace more than solving crimes or hunting down wrongdoers, because the cowtowns were not so much centers of criminality as they were wild areas subject to the instant outbreak of disorder. The police had to keep the drovers and townsmen from killing each other at night so they could do business the next day. The Wichita police would not tolerate man killers on the force.

  Earp did branch out into a little debt collection in October of 1874 when a cattle outfit left Wichita with a mass of unpaid bills. M. R. Moser, who lost a new wagon to the drovers, either hired or convinced Earp and John Behrens, both identified as officers, to trail them. "Those boys fear nothing and fear nobody," the Wichita City Eagle said. Earp and Behrens rode across the prairie almost to Indian Territory, when they caught the indebted drovers. The Eagle reported: "To make a long and exciting story short, they just leveled a shotgun and six-shooter upon the scalawags as they lay concealed in some brush and told them to 'dough over,' which they did, to the amount of $146, one of them remarking that he was not going to die for the price of a wagon. It is amusing to hear Moser tell how slick the boys did the work. 1120

  Earp's exact role as an officer during 1874 is unclear. Records do not identify him as a member of Marshal Smith's police department, though several newspaper stories refer to him as "Officer Erp." Wyatt could have served as a part-time officer, appointed for work during the cattle seasons, or he may have been a member of the special reserves that served almost as an auxiliary of the police force. Both Morgan and Virgil joined their brothers Wyatt and Jim at times in Wichita, and Virgil apparently acted as a member of the special re- serves.21 During his first year in the cowtown, between police duties, Wyatt probably worked in one of the keno parlors, gambling houses where bettors played a bingo-like game. It was common for the parlors to hire tough dealers capable of keeping order.

  Jim Earp and his wife, Bessie, had their own activities to keep them busy. Jim worked in saloons while Bessie engaged in the brothel business, not an unusual situation for cowtown couples of the saloon crowd. Court records show that Bessie and a Sally Earp were repeatedly prosecuted for prostitution, with arrests starting in May of 1874 and continuing for nearly a year. On June 3, 1874, Sally and Bessie were arrested on the complaint of Samuel A. Martin, who swore that they did: "Set up and Keep a bawdy house or brothel and did appear and act as Mistresses and have the care and management of a certain one story frame building Situated and located north of Douglas Avenue near the Bridge leading across the Arkansas River used and Kept by Said parties as a house of prostitution in the City of Wichita." The 1875 census lists Jim Earp's wife as Bessie, in the profession of sporting-a common way of referring to prostitution-and it is most likely the Earps were supplementing their income with a few brothel-house transactions. Mysterious other women identified as Earps- or Earbs -also show up on the docket books. Eva, Kate, and Minnie all identified themselves as Earps on court records.22 The assumption must be that the women of the house took the madam's name to protect their own identity, not an unusual ploy for women in this trade.

  Prostitution played a strange role in Wichita. Officially, it was illegal, and in fact there was a concerted effort to isolate it in the vice district of Delano across the river. Wichita proper did have two legal brothels, Bessie's not among them, and several freelancers. Most prostitution arrests were considered simply the equivalent of licensing fees, an unpleasant necessity of the business. The civic leaders of these freshly born cowtowns understood that such activities were necessary to keep the herders finding their way to Wichita.

  Wyatt's role in brothel activities is open to speculation, but he could not have been happy about the arrest of his sister-in-law and her sisters in sin. He may also not have been pleased with Marshal Smith for never naming him officially to the police force, although he was serving in some capacity. And Smith's handling of the Shorty Ramsey flight had been unimpressive. Whatever the reason, Earp and Smith would not remain the best of friends.

  Wichita faced an important election in April of 1875, with Smith trying to keep his job in the race against former marshal Mike Meagher and the assistant marshal, Dan Parks. Meagher had been appointed city marshal in 1871 and served until April of '74, when a new city council decided to replace him with Smith, whose impressive detective work in solving a murder case had drawn much local praise. Meagher spent a year serving in the low-paying job of deputy U.S. marshal before returning to Wichita to run for his old job. Meagher won easily, drawing 340 votes to Parks's 311 and only
65 for Smith. On April 21, the new city council approved a police force of Assistant Marshal John Behrens and deputies Jimmy Cairns and Wyatt Earp. Cairns was dropped from the force at the end of the cattle season.23

  Deputy Earp piled up an impressive list of achievements during his tenure as a Wichita lawman; and, most important, there were no major outbreaks of violence or rowdyism. For the most part, cowtown violence flared up after too much whiskey and too liberal a use of six-shooters. There were shootings and few killings, and planned crime was a rarity. There was only a trickle of crime, not a wave, and the police were always ready to act. In May of 1875, Deputy Earp called the bluff of a horse thief.

  While making his usual nightly rounds, Earp ran across a man whose appearance and dress answered the description of W. W. Compton, wanted for stealing two horses and a mule in Coffey County. Wyatt asked the stranger's name; "Jones" came the stranger's unconvincing response. Earp took "Mr. Jones" to a saloon called the Gold Room to make a more complete examination under lamplight. The stranger turned and ran out, with Earp in pursuit. Earp paused and fired a warning shot; the stranger stopped immediately. As Earp escorted his prisoner to jail, he acknowledged his true identity as Compton, wanted for horse theft. Investigation showed Compton had stored a black horse and a buggy, which he had traded for the stolen horses. The Wichita Beacon editorialized: "He will probably have an opportunity to do the state some service for a number of years, only to come out and go to horse stealing again, until a piece of twisted hemp or a stray bullet puts an end to his hankering after horse flesh."24

  The young deputy earned civic acclaim in December when he found a drunk in the street carrying $500. The drunk awoke in jail the next morning, with his bankroll intact. The Beacon said: "He may congratulate himself that his lines, while he was drunk, were cast in such a pleasant place as Wichita as there are but few other places where that $500 roll would ever been heard from. The integrity of our police force has never been seriously questioned."25

  The two incidents say much of Wyatt Earp as an officer. He would have faced little recrimination for shooting Compton, a criminal in flight. Instead he fired a warning shot and took the horse thief to jail. In the incident of the drunk, Earp could easily have taken the cash, with the potted victim none the wiser. He was neither dishonest nor murderous when he patrolled the streets of Wichita, and he was alert enough to be aware of criminals who might be passing through the area. He was both competent and effective.

  Most of Earp's police duties in Wichita were far more prosaic than facing down Clements and the cowmen. He inspected chimneys, swept the sidewalks, and dragged out dead animals. He and the other officers also tried to control the packs of wild, yapping dogs that infested the area. The police were charged with doing sidewalk repairs, so Earp-the low man on the force-would have to haul out his hammer and nails to replace broken planks in the sidewalk. Being a cowtown cop was not always glamorous. Earp also had a moment of true embarrassment. On January 9 of 1876 Wyatt Earp nearly shot himself when his pistol dropped from his holster. He was sitting in the back room of the Custom House Saloon when the gun fell out, hit a chair, and sent a ball through Wyatt's coat.26

  Earp's police term in Wichita ended dramatically on April 2, 1876, when he took a too active interest in the second marshal's race between Meagher and Bill Smith. Apparently Smith had said that if Meagher was reelected, he would place Earp's brothers on the police force. Virgil and Morgan had both been in Wichita during the past year. What else Smith said is subject for speculation, but he could have tried to turn Bessie's brothel into an issue as well. He may have chosen to run his campaign against Wyatt Earp, since he knew he would have little chance of beating Meagher without a campaign issue. Wichita's citizens were growing discontented with the thriving vice trade, and a deputy with family in the flesh business would have been enough to draw attention. The Beacon said, "The remarks that Smith was said to have made in regard to the marshal sending for Erp's [sic] brothers to put them on the police force furnished no just grounds for an attack, and upon ordinary occasions we doubt if Erp would have given them a second thought." Meagher ordered Earp to stay away from Smith, but Wyatt decided to go see the former marshal and settle things. Earp was settling them with his fists when Meagher arrived to pull the young officer off Smith before Wyatt did serious damage.

  Meagher had no choice but to fire Earp and arrest him for disturbing the peace. Wyatt received a hefty $30 fine-about two weeks' wages. In reporting Earp's firing, the Beacon said: "It is but justice to Erp to say he has made an excellent officer, and hitherto his conduct has been unexceptionable."27 Meagher easily won reelection and two weeks later, with a new city council in place, tried to reappoint Earp to the police force. On April 19, the council voted two in favor and six against Earp's reinstatement. Apparently Meagher or a councilman spoke in Earp's favor and convinced the body to reconsider young Wyatt. This time the vote tied at 4-4, and the measure was tabled with Earp unemployed. Wyatt apparently remained with the police in some capacity through part of April, since the council approved payment to him of $40 for 20 days' work, but the board also ordered an investigation of unauthorized persons collecting money due the city.

  On May 10, the council ordered that the vagrancy act be enforced against the 2 Erps" and that Wyatt Earp and John Behrens not be paid until all cash collected by them for the city was turned over to the city treasurer. Apparently they complied, because no further effort was made to collect. The identity of the two Earps is not specified-it could have been two of Bessie's doves or an attempt to move Wyatt out of town. Within two weeks he was gone, with a job offer from another cowtown. The cattle trade had diminished in Wichita in 1876. The railroads were again moving west, and settlers kept filling the prairie around Wichita to plow the ground that had once served as grazing land for Texas cattle moving north.

  Wyatt Earp's stint as a Wichita lawman had been impressive. Dick Cogdell, who succeeded Meagher as police chief, would say twenty-one years later: "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 is honest, and would have decided according to his belief in the face of an arsenal."28

  Cairns also paid him tribute: "Wyatt Earp was a wonderful officer. He was game to the last ditch and apparently afraid of nothing. The cowmen all respected him and seemed to recognize his superiority and authority at such times as he had to use it."

  Quiet, unsmiling, and ever nervy, Wyatt Earp had been a highly competent deputy in a tough situation. He had helped keep the peace in Wichita, and he never had to take a life in the process.

  WITH THE RAILROAD TRACKS PUSHING WEST through Kansas, two liquor dealers saw a chance to turn a quick profit by building a little tent store near the Arkansas River, out in the midst of buffalo country, to provide drinks for both the railroad men and the hunters. The village in the southwest corner of Kansas boomed quickly, developing into a center for buffalo hunters by 1872. With the cattle trade moving west as settlers filled the land around the other cowtowns, Dodge City emerged by the mid1870s as the new site of cattle commerce. A collection of wooden saloons, stores, and houses sprouted on a gentle bluff that rose above the Arkansas River, looking out on a seemingly unending expanse of buffalo grass spreading in all directions.

  The town had been established by liquor dealers and saloon owners, and whiskey merchants controlled its politics. Texas drovers could find just about any pleasure they could imagine in Dodge, from enough cheap liquor to keep up a two-day drunk to cheap women ready to entertain them. Almost immediately, and probably inevitably, Dodge fell into political factionalism. A group called "The Gang" seemed to dominate local politics and controlled most of the early elections. Bob Wright, a hotel and dry goods store owner, acted as a political power who rarely chose to intercede but carried authority when he did. The day-to-day running of local politics fell to James H. Kelley, nicknamed Dog for the band of racing greyhounds he owne
d. The Irish immigrant had served with the Confederacy during the war and fought Indians with Custer before arriving in Kansas. He presented an unkempt appearance, wearing a handlebar mustache over his receding chin; an often-ratty top hat was his usual choice of headgear. Kelley and his partner Peter L. Beatty ran the Alhambra Saloon, one of the most popular dens in Dodge. Liquor dealer George Hoover led the political opposition, which carried no title, and drew the support of the growing German population that had settled around Dodge and begun farming sparsely settled Ford County. Three-hundred-pound Larry Deger, the son of a German immigrant, stood as one of the leaders of the community and held some political strength.

  Dodge would soon wear the label "Queen of the Cowtowns," but it was still a princess in April of 1876 when a reporter for the Atchison Daily Champion arrived in the four-year-old town brimming with saloons, brothels, gambling dens, and dance halls. If Wichita was wicked, Dodge was Sodom itself, with no pretense of being anything else. The reporter tried to capture the city in a poem:

  Lawlessness reigned beyond the control of the weak police force, which had changed marshals several times. The Atchison reporter described a town "infested principally with gamblers, horse thieves, prostitutes and murderers, who look upon the law as a huge joke.... The arm of the law is palsied and hangs powerless by the side of Justice, who stands away in the background like the statue of a forlorn and helpless exile. Horse thieves, burglars, peace disturbers and even murderers go at large."29 Young and wild, Dodge City had become a town spinning out of control.