Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

by Casey Tefertiller

  A lot in the tiny downtown of Eagle City became the site of gunplay. Property rights in the area were determined by who made a legitimate claim to a parcel, then made improvements. Enright, Payne, Ferguson, and Holman, but not Earp, claimed to have legally purchased the lot from a Philip Wyman, who had built foundations on the front of the property. William Buzzard said that he bought the same lot from Sam Black, and he erected his own cabin. To further confuse the situation, Enright claimed Buzzard's cabin was not on the same lot and that the holdings were separate properties.

  In March, Buzzard hauled logs on the site to begin construction of a hotel, and Enright protested. Both declared they would hold their land in any way necessary. On March 29, Buzzard pointed a Winchester in Enright's face and ordered him off the property. Enright said he would return. He did, and he was not alone. Enright, Payne, Holman, and Ferguson marched up the main street of Eagle City, carrying Winchesters, revolvers, and shotguns, making a show of force. Buzzard and three associates readied their weaponry for the arrival as spectators scampered out of the way. Buzzard stepped onto the log foundation and fired two quick shots, then ducked down as bullets began flying in all directions.

  About fifty shots were fired in rapid succession, according to a newspaper report. Enright's party began to advance as the besieged fought back for about ten minutes before retreating into the cabin in the rear of the property. Buzzard, the last to enter the cabin, had two bullets pass through the crown of his hat. A bullet closely missed Enright's face as he continued his advance into the gunfire from Buzzard's cabin.

  With bullets flying in both directions, Wyatt and Jim Earp stepped into the middle of the fray. The report said they took a prominent role as peacemakers, and "with characteristic coolness, they stood where the bullets from both parties flew about them, joked with the participants upon their poor marksmanship, and although they pronounced the affair a fine picture, used their best endeavors to stop the shooting." Shoshone County deputy sheriff W. E Hunt arrived to order both sides to stop shooting. Hunt entered the cabin and disarmed Buzzard's band, and the Earps ordered Enright and his shooters to put up their guns. With the shooting finished, Enright and Buzzard met and smoked together, complimenting each other on their courage. The only casualty was an onlooker who took a shot through the fleshy part of his leg. 58

  The papers of the day referred to Earp as a peacemaker, not a warrior. A little more than a decade later, when Earp found himself in a bigger mess, a reporter hunted up Buzzard and quoted him as saying that Wyatt was the brains of a lot-jumping and real-estate fraud scheme; that he sat in his saloon while his henchmen went out and did the dirty work. Buzzard's version of events would gain the attention of the West and again tarnish Earp's reputation.59

  Problems in the mining camp continued. On June 19, Danny Ferguson, a 23-year-old Nebraska native and Earp's partner in the land syndicate, found himself in serious trouble for, by his version, playing good Samaritan. Thomas Steele, the son of an Omaha doctor, went drinking with a prostitute who drank beyond her limit. She dropped down in the muddy street and announced that she planned to spend the night there, prompting Steele to slap her on the face several times. According to Ferguson, he came out of Johnny Donnoly's saloon and saw the battering. Another bystander told Steele not to hurt the woman, and Steele jumped to his feet and mistakenly confronted Ferguson.

  Ferguson said that Steele approached within six feet of him when he heard the familiar clicks of a Colt six-shooter. Ferguson stepped back at the sound and Steele stepped up and slapped him across the nose and said, "Now what have you got to do with this?"

  "Nothing," Ferguson answered, "only I wouldn't hurt a wo.. .

  Ferguson did not complete the sentence when Steele knocked a gun against his left temple. The pistol discharged, tearing off some flesh and hair. The blow knocked Ferguson backward so hard against a tent wall that he bounced off, drawing his gun and firing. Two shots went off instantaneously. Ferguson missed; Steele's return shot zinged next to Danny's face and grazed his ear. Ferguson fired again into the night, directly at the spot where Steele's gun had flashed. Ferguson ducked his head below the haze of gunsmoke and saw nothing. Then he heard footsteps running down the sidewalk and muttered, "Is it possible I missed him?"

  From not far away a weakened voice called, asking for a doctor. Steele, mortally wounded, had fallen between two pine trees, out of sight. Ferguson went to see Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp standing in his long underclothes at the door of his cabin. Ferguson recalled the conversation.

  "Those pistol shots sounded like there was a fight up the street," Earp said.

  "Yes, I had one," Ferguson answered.

  "Did you win it?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, wait until I get my clothes on, and I'll go up and look over the battleground."

  Earp left Ferguson in his cabin and went up to confer with the Shoshone County sheriff. Steele had died moments after Ferguson's departure. Earp told the sheriff that Ferguson would not surrender until the coroner's inquest the next morning. When he returned to his cabin Earp asked Ferguson, "Now what are you going to do, ride or stay?"

  "Stick," Ferguson answered, then returned to his cabin.

  The coroner's jury did not recommend charges against Ferguson, but the grand jury was to meet in July, and charges could then be brought against him for Steele's murder. Ferguson went south to the Wood River area.

  "Wyatt Earp's loyalty to a friend now enters into the story," Ferguson wrote. Ferguson said that the grand jury would convene in a few weeks, and Wyatt expected his friend to be indicted. Earp went to the telegraph office and asked the operator, named Toplitz, if anyone had contacted Ferguson to warn him of impending trouble.

  "No, and if they do we will indict them," Toplitz responded, according to Ferguson. Wyatt tried to grab the operator, but he ducked under Earp's arm and darted outside. Knowing he could not catch him, Earp fired a rock past Toplitz's head, causing him to trip and fall. Wyatt grabbed him around the neck and dragged him back to the office to send a telegram warning Ferguson of the approaching danger. "Now send that telegram or I'll beat you to death," Wyatt said, according to Ferguson. Toplitz sent the telegram, giving Ferguson warning that he could expect to be indicted. Ferguson skipped out before the indictment was completed. He would live out his life under the name of Danny Miller.60

  Earp apparently played no role in another gun battle a few weeks later. Enright, who had eluded Buzzard's bullets, could not survive his next quarrel. On July 2, Enright argued with Henry Bernard, manager of the Eagle City Pioneer. "You have been trying to make me suck the hind teat, and I will make you suck the bung hole," Enright shouted in the newspaper office. As the shouting continued Bernard grabbed a gun and fired. Enright took a bullet in the ribs and died.61

  The Coeur d'Alene gold rush petered out quickly, and many of the hardfought claims that were the subject of court challenges for the Earps were sold at taxes. Again, the Earps came up losers.

  The Earps were in El Paso in '85. Wyatt was in the gambling room of the Gem Saloon on April 14th when Will Rayner and Buck Linn quarreled with dealer Robert Cahill and cowboy R. B. Rennick in a confrontation that began with a disagreement on a faro bet and erupted into gunfire. Cahill and Rennick killed Rayner and Linn. Earp apparently had no involvement other than to testify at the inquest.

  He moved on to Aspen in May and entered into partnership with H. C. Hughes in the Fashion Saloon. In October Arizona deputy U.S. marshal E. M. Mills showed up and recruited Wyatt Earp to help him arrest stage robber James Crothers. Mills and Earp simply walked up to Crothers, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, "I want you." Crothers went to jail, and Mills went to Earp's saloon to smoke cigars and talk.62

  While the event itself proved uneventful-no shootouts or shotgun duelsit shows that Earp remained in high esteem among at least some Arizona lawmen. Mills chose Earp as his backup, something he would not have done had the marshal's office believed the canards circulated by Sam Purdy and B
ehan's friends.

  Probably in late 1885 or in '86, Wyatt and Sadie stopped at the Windsor Hotel in Denver. Sadie Earp recalled sitting in the lobby when a familiar form appeared:

  There, coming toward us, was Doc Holliday, a thinner, more delicate-appearing Doc Holliday even than he had been in Tombstone.

  I have never seen a man exhibit more pleasure at meeting a mere friend than did Doc. He had heard that Wyatt was in town, he said, and had immediately looked him up. They sat down at a little distance from us and talked at some length, though poor Doc's almost continuous coughing made it difficult for him to say anything. Wyatt repeated their conversation to me later.

  Doc told Wyatt how ill he had been, scarcely able to be out of bed much of the time.

  "When I heard you were in Denver, Wyatt, I wanted to see you once more," he said, "for I can't last much longer. You can see that."

  Wyatt was touched. He remembered how Doc had once saved his life ... in Dodge City.... My husband has been criticized even by his friends, for being associated with a man who had such a reputation as Doc Holliday's. But who, with a shred of appreciation, could have done otherwise? Besides my husband always maintained that the greater part of the crimes that were attributed to Doc were but fictions created by the woman with whom he lived at times when she was seeking so lace in liquor for the wounds to her pride inflicted during one of their violent disputes....

  Wyatt's sense of loyalty and gratitude was such that the world had been all against Doc, he should have stood by him out of appreciation for saving his life.

  "Isn't it strange," Wyatt remarked to Doc that day in Denver, "that if it were not for you, I wouldn't be alive today, yet you must go first."

  Doc came over and chatted with us for a few minutes, then he and Wyatt walked away, Doc on visibly unsteady legs.

  My husband was deeply affected by this parting from the man who, like an ailing child, had clung to him as though to derive strength from him. There were tears in Wyatt's eyes when at last they took leave of each other. Doc threw his arm across Wyatt's shoulder.

  "Good-bye old friend," he said. "It will be a long time before we meet again."

  He turned and walked away as fast as his feeble strength would permit. Only a short time after this we heard that he had died.63

  Doc Holliday died on November 8, 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

  Dead at the age of 36, Doc would constantly be reborn in the legend and mythology of the American West. He was intelligent, educated, and always a caliber or two above most of the men around him, both with his mind and with his six-shooter. He was hated by some, but he was totally loyal to Wyatt Earp at the time Wyatt most needed a friend. Dr. John Henry Holliday may have written his own epitaph shortly before his death. A reporter asked if he had ever been troubled by his conscience. "No," Doc replied. "I coughed that up with my lungs long ago."64

  As the years passed, Wyatt Earp gradually grew into a true Western sport, adroit in a card game and always ready to bet the horses. At different times he managed racing stables, handling details for the racehorse owners. He and Sadie kept traveling, never settling too long in one spot until they landed in San Diego in 1886 for a stay that would last nearly four years.

  The Earps hit San Diego during a land boom, where a great influx of population led to rising property values. Wyatt bought property and leased concessions for three gambling halls in the burgeoning seaside town and generally had a pleasant time. He refereed prize fights, judged horse races, and occasionally did a little bounty hunting on the side. According to Sadie, they joined Bat Masterson on a trip to Ensenada to reclaim a prisoner. The Earps left San Diego briefly to join in the 1889 boom in Arizona's Harqua Hala Valley, where Wyatt set up a saloon. The boom ended before anyone could make much of a profit.

  The legend of Wyatt Earp had barely begun. Early in 1887, an article from the Police Gazette went into national distribution retelling the story of Wyatt Earp and the Arizona War. The details were simply a remembrance. The opening paragraph was the stuff that makes legends:

  Wyatt S. Earp is one of the most famous Western characters living. Probably no man has a wider spread reputation throughout the Western territories than Wyatt S. Earp, of the famous Earp Brothers, who created such a sensation a few years since at Tombstone, Arizona, by completely exterminating a whole band of out-lawed cutthroats who had sought safe refuge in Arizona's mountain ranges.65

  There is no indication Wyatt Earp was seeking the limelight. The story reads as if one of his friends had recalled the events for an interviewer, providing firsthand details without any personal insights. Such stories would reappear periodically over the next two decades, recalling the wild times on the frontier. Earp would variously be named hero or villain.

  Mattie Earp continued to use the name she acquired in common-law marriage. She had returned to Colton with Bessie after Morgan's assassination, and it seems almost certain that the family had expected to reunite in Tombstone once Wyatt's troubles blew over. Mattie waited for a telegram that never arrived. She went to Globe, Arizona, and became a prostitute, possibly her trade before hooking up with Wyatt. Mattie seems to have been servicing impecunious old men, probably with little financial return. At the end of June in 1888, she told her friend S. E. Damon that she was going to "make away with herself as she was tired of life." She had been drinking heavily for three months, and the slide had been difficult. On July 3, 1888, Celia Ann Blaylock Earp, always called Mattie, took an overdose of laudanum, a popular painkiller of the time. It was almost certainly suicide, and both Wyatt and Sadie would forever have an embarrassing secret to hide.66

  A FIGHT FOR HONOR

  TYATT S. EARP, CAPITALIST. A fine way for a frontier sport to list his occupation in the San Francisco city directory. The lure of the big city had called to the Earps, partly because Sadie wanted to be closer to her family and partly because of Wyatt's new job, managing horses for a stable in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco.

  In the 1890s, when Wyatt brought Sadie back to her childhood home, San Francisco reigned as the great city of the West. The city pulsed through the '90s, serving as residence to many of the great characters of the time. Wyatt cultivated friendships with Examiner publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose father had known Wyatt in Tombstone, and with millionaire Lucky Baldwin and a legion of other prominent people. Here Wyatt Earp could be just another big fish in a giant pond. But even here, Tombstone remained a fresh memory. In 1891, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a retrospective on the Earp-Clanton feud in Arizona, retelling the basic story. One Sunday the Chronicle even ran a dramatic though impossible full-page account of the killing of John Ringo, saying that it was done by an angry neighbor seeking vengeance. Even a decade after the Arizona War, its events were being revisited in print.

  For the most part, the newspapers were interested in current events, allowing an aging legend to slip into the background. San Francisco papers had much to write about. The headlines were filled with breaking news of immigration problems and unrest on the mysterious Caribbean isle of Haiti, while inside the papers were advertisements for clinics treating cocaine addicts.

  Earp would later call San Francisco his favorite city and indicate that this was probably the happiest period of his life. He had some money; Sadie's sister Henrietta, called Hattie, had married prosperous chocolate maker Henry Lehnhardt, and the family was flush. Something else happened in San Francisco: Wyatt Earp started changing, hanging with a moneyed crowd and keeping up appearances. Earp had always been a gambler, never a drinker. During his years in Tombstone he rarely indulged in more than an occasional glass of beer or wine. After a few years by the Bay, however, he had started taking his liquor with the sporting crowd, stopping for drinks after the races and eating often at the Pup Rotisserie on Stockton Street or at the Cafe Zinkand.

  There are few known details and many old stories of Wyatt Earp in San Francisco. Perhaps the most tantalizing began in the parlor of the St. Francis Hotel when Zeb Kendall, a
speculator in horses and mining stocks, met with the old lawman. Earp had traded in his revolvers and marshal's star for a black business suit, but he still had a passion for gambling. Kendall told Earp that he had sworn to his wife that he would never bet on horses again. After several drinks they agreed that the best place to take such an oath was at the racetrack, so they set off together. When they returned four days later, Kendall's wife was waiting for him in their room. Before he could say a word, she seized his briefcase and threw it out the window.

  "Wait, ma," he yelled. "There's eighty-five thousand dollars in that thing that I won!"

  "I beat the elevators getting downstairs," Belle Kendall recalled. "The dispatch case was still bouncing when I got there. And do you know-there really was eighty-five thousand dollars in it."'

  Even in his new life, he remained the same old Wyatt Earp-a man not to be trifled with. In April of 1893, Earp confided in a bookie named Billy Roeder that his harness horse Lottie Mills had been running particularly well, and Roeder bet up the odds, meaning Earp had to bet two dollars to win just one. After Lottie Mills won, Roeder came by and snickered at Earp, who warned the bookie that he should leave before Earp took action. Roeder laughed and threw another insult. Earp responded by slapping Roeder in the face, then spinning him around and kicking him in his backside. Angering Earp was never a good practice.2

  Earp traveled, racing horses at various tracks through the West, and even journeyed to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, with a stop in Denver to visit old friends. The Denver Republican reported: "His hair, which was once as yellow as gold, is beginning to be stranded with white. A heavy, tawny mustache shades his firm mouth and sweeps below his square, strong chin. He wore, while here, a neat gray tailor-made suit, immaculate linen and fashionable neckwear. With a derby hat and a pair of tan shoes he was a figure to catch a lady's eye and to make the companions of his old, wild days at Tombstone and Dodge, who died with their boots on and their jeans pants tucked down them, turn in their graves. "3