Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend
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Wyatt and Sadie lived at several San Francisco addresses, occasionally sharing a home with her parents, Henry and Sophia Marcus. They always seemed solvent, occasionally seeming to border on prosperous. Wyatt took pride in wearing custom-made clothing. Despite a lingering taint from his days in Arizona, he made a point of cultivating friendships with the right people. During the San Francisco years, Wyatt variously listed his profession in the city directories as capitalist, sporting, and horseman. He spent much of his time at the Ingleside track and at the Oakland track across the bay, but apparently in 1894 he found time to do some work for the railroad. In a story that cannot be substantiated, he worked for Southern Pacific as a guard on a train carrying a payroll through dangerous country, in which the train might be stopped by strikers or outlaws before the money could be delivered to pay the strikebreakers. Sadie Earp said that she begged Wyatt not to take the job. He responded: "There's practically no danger at all. I have been in tighter places than this will be hundreds of times." Sadie still fretted and said, "I know, but you never can tell. This might be the time they'll get you. You belong to me now, and I don't want anything to happen to you." Earp returned without incident.4
His main concern was racing. Some wins, some losses. Never enough to hit big. According to Sadie, their racing colors were navy-blue polka dots on a white background, and for every win Wyatt would give her jewelry. "Sometimes our fortunes were up, sometimes they were down, but there was always Wyatt with me and nothing mattered a great deal to me so long as I had him," she said. Something else began to matter to Sadie. In an unusually candid statement, she said she started betting regularly at the track, "with more fresh-handedness than wisdom." She borrowed money from Lucky Baldwin, giving him a piece of jewelry she had received from Wyatt and expecting to retrieve them with her winnings. Instead, Wyatt paid off her debts until he ran out of patience.
"You're not a smart gambler," Wyatt told her, as Sadie recalled. "And you have no business risking money that way. Now after this I'm not going to redeem any more of your jewelry." Wyatt told Baldwin to stop lending her money and said he would no longer retrieve her jewelry. Sadie said the experience awakened her and forced her to use better judgment in her bets.5 In actuality, the problem had only just begun. Wyatt Earp, a professional gambler, was not the only or the biggest gambler in his household.
In the summer of 1896, Earp agreed with a friend, Examiner editor Andrew Lawrence, to prepare a memoir with the help of a ghostwriter, probably star reporter Robert Chambers. They conducted long interviews for a three-part series that began appearing in the Examiner in August, beginning with a dose of dramatic prose that certainly was not Earp's style:
It may be that the trail of blood will seem to lie too thickly over the pages that I write. If I had it in me to invent a tale I would fain lighten the crimson stain so that it would glow no deeper than demure pink. But half a lifetime on the frontier attunes a man's hand to the six-shooter rather than the pen, and it is lucky that I am asked only for facts, for more than facts I could not give.
While Chambers pumped up the prose, the stories present Wyatt Earp's personal account of the events in Arizona and Kansas, and they were told only fourteen years after he rode out of Arizona amid controversy. A few days after the series began, the Examiner complemented it with an editorial:
The eruption of genuine bad men in San Francisco during the past few days adds a contemporary interest to the true tales of the frontier which Wyatt Earp is writing for "The Sunday Examiner." You may know your Bret Harte and your Dan Quinn [Alfred Henry Lewis] from beginning to end, but you will never know the frontier until you have read Wyatt Earp.
Why, there is nothing in fiction to compare with the cold record of this man's experience. His mind is simply saturated with the vivid colors that bedaub the life of the plains and the mining camp, and he has the gift to bestow those colors upon the canvas so that people who live in cities and never heard the cracking of six shooters may know the life for what it really was. Just consider the wealth of literary material that has soaked into the great peace-officer's consciousness, now to be squeezed out again for the entertainment of "Sunday Examiner" readers. As a boy he crossed the plains with a caravan and learned to use a rifle on the Indians who infested the trail. Later he drove a Wyoming stage through territory devastated by the Sioux. Since then he has lived in every mining camp of importance; has trailed nearly every desperado of prominence in the country-and killed many of them-has been a shotgun messenger, Deputy United States Marshal, proprietor of a gambling house, miner and man hunter, has known the most renowned gamblers, bandits, gun-fighters and bad men in the country, and has the reputation of being the bravest fighter, squarest gambler, best friend and worst enemy ever known on the frontier.6
The legend of Wyatt Earp grew with its own retelling, and the Earp story caught the imagination of a city angered by the reemergence of ruffians. The stories helped make Wyatt a celebrity of sorts in the biggest city west of the Mississippi.
At the time, Earp was only a distant party to an ink war between the Examiner and the San Francisco Call, a smaller-circulation paper owned by the powerful Spreckels family and operated by Charles Shortridge. Shortridge had been sued for libel, and the Examiner took every opportunity to embarrass him in print, with both words and cartoon caricatures. The Call responded with sundry attacks on the Examiner. None of this could have seemed particularly important to Earp, at least not until early December, when he again wound up in the middle of a newspaper war.
Shortly after the Examiner stories appeared, sport came into focus in San Francisco. Since the bare-knuckled days, boxing had been banned. But the police and courts began ignoring the laws as the new Marquis of Queensberry rules made fighting more civil. In the old days, the fighters went to secret barges on the Bay to slug it out barehanded, gouging and kicking as much as punching. Now the sweet science seemed more refined, with the boxers donning gloves and hitting only above the waist. And now, San Francisco was set to hold its most heralded prizefight ever under the new rules.
Cornwall native Bob Fitzsimmons and sailor Tom Sharkey were to meet for the heavyweight championship of the world at Mechanics' Pavilion on December 3, 1896, perhaps the most important sporting event to be held on the West Coast in the nineteenth century.
It was not quite everything a world championship fight should be, mainly because of a taint on Fitzsimmons's claim to the title. San Francisco native Jim Corbett had won the title in 1892, stopping the aging John L. Sullivan. But Corbett grew more involved in theater than the ring, and he refused to defend his title. He finally renounced it and announced his retirement from the sport, suggesting that Peter Maher and Steve O'Donnel fight for the crown. On November 11, 1895, Maher stopped O'Donnel in only 63 seconds of the first round, much to the dismay of Corbett, who had backed O'Donnel. Corbett entered the ring and told Maher, "I give you the title." Maher refused to accept it unless Corbett would fight him, and Corbett stormed out of the ring in disgust.
Unlike Corbett, Maher kept fighting. He agreed to meet Fitzsimmons on February 21, 1896, near Langtry, Texas, under the auspices of Judge Roy Bean, one of the West's true eccentrics. Fitzsimmons struck fast, knocking out Maher in 95 seconds to claim the much-disputed title. Corbett still would not fight. He disliked Fitzsimmons and had ignored him in naming the two men he thought should battle for his crown. Fitzsimmons owned a title that hardly seemed legitimate, and sports across the nation labeled him "the great pretender." Fitzsimmons did not hesitate to defend his pretension, and scheduled the fight against Irish native Tom Sharkey, who had come to the United States as a boy and later enlisted in the Navy.
San Francisco settled into the excitement, with four major newspapers billing the event as a world championship and spending much of November scrutinizing the daily training routines of the two fighters. But behind the hype, a problem festered: the two sides could not agree on a referee. All the usual names were suggested, then dismissed. Finally, the sponsoring
National Athletic Club had to step in and make a decision. They chose "the bravest fighter, squarest gambler, best friend and worst enemy ever known on the frontier." The call went out for Wyatt Earp to step into another fight.
As with just about every fight of that era, weird rumors floated through the streets. The morning before the fight, a strange note arrived at the offices of the San Francisco Bulletin:
Editor Bulletin: The opinion prevails, and belief in its truth is growing, that the police have been instructed to protect the interests of their official superior, Moses Gunst, who wagers on Fitz, by stopping before the final round the mill between Sharkey and Fitzsimmons, contingent upon the apparency of Sharkey winning. FAIR SPORT.
Police Commissioner Moses Gunst blustered and denied betting the fight. "I don't believe in ten-round set-tos," he said. "Five times out of six the end is unsatisfactory. But this is not to the point. I couldn't stop the fight if I wished. San Francisco is not like New York, where the commissioners have the say. There Mr. [Theodore] Roosevelt can stand up and call a halt any time he sees fit." Moses Gunst stood accused, and he had no desire to see his reputation tar- nished.7
Wyatt Earp went to meet a friend at Lucky Baldwin's hotel a little after noon on Wednesday, December 2. Earp had a horse racing at the Ingleside track, and the friend wanted some inside information. James Groom and James Gibbs of the National Athletic Club, sponsors of the night's big fight, spotted Earp in the room and called him aside.
Earp would later say Groom and Gibbs explained to him that the fighters could not agree on a referee and asked if he would step in to officiate. Earp said he refused-he already had refereed all the fights he wanted to. But the sponsors told him what an honor it would be for him to officiate in such a major event. Earp said he considered it for a while and said, "I don't know but what it will be a little bit tony to referee a fight of this kind. I think the two best men in the world are coming together now, and probably it will be a little bit of tony to referee a fight of this kind." With that he accepted.8
It would be among the worst decisions of Wyatt Earp's life. He had refereed at least thirty fights in the San Diego-Tijuana area and earned a pretty fair reputation as an official. But nothing could prepare him for walking into the heavyweight championship ring for the biggest fight of the year, using the Marquis of Queensberry rules. Earp had not refereed since arriving in San Francisco, more than five years earlier, and most likely he had never officiated a fight under the new rules. The Bulletin called Earp "a man with a reputation for bravery, but inexperienced in ring tactics."
The fight fans packed Mechanics' Pavilion that night, a diverse crowd estimated at ten thousand, which included the elite of San Francisco and all the usual sports. For the first time, women were allowed to attend a major fight. Chinese fans "were sitting in common brotherhood with the whites. That may be called a step in the direction of social equality-and they all yelled just the same."9 Tightly packed bleachers rose to frame the ring, with the down-front $10 boxes holding millionaires, supreme court judges, politicians, a few wealthy Chinese, and several heavily veiled women. Up higher, in the $2 and $3 seats of the galleries, the crowd was packed together so tightly that even breathing became difficult. The hastily constructed boxes were of half-painted pine with narrow aisles that filled with vendors hawking programs, candy, popcorn, and soda; and with helmeted police officers trudging through to show a presence.10
The card began with five preliminaries, including one featuring a young lightweight named Harry Woods. Just the name must have aroused a few memories for Wyatt Earp. Fitzsimmons entered the ring at 10:10 on that Wednesday night, followed shortly by Tom Sharkey. Billy Jordan, the master of ceremonies, stepped into the ring and called for Wyatt Earp. Moments after entering the ring, Fitzsimmons's manager Martin Julian jumped in and spoke to Danny Lynch, Sharkey's manager. Their discussion could be heard only at ringside. A Bulletin reporter listened in on the exchange and reported that Julian said he had heard enough around town to convince him the referee had been fixed, so Julian objected to Earp's officiating. Lynch stubbornly refused to allow a change and insisted the rules be followed. The National Club had the right to select a referee, and the decision had been made. Julian responded by saying, "Take anybody in the house, we don't care whom; but spare us from Earp." Lynch continued to refuse any change, and at last Fitzsimmons rose, lifting one arm over his head and shouted: "I'll do as I've always done before. I give in."
According to Gibbs, Earp stepped over and asked to be excused from officiating, but Gibbs asked him to stand his ground and referee the fight. Earp agreed. With that settled, at least reluctantly, police captain Charles W. Wittman apparently noticed an unsightly bulge in the referee's pocket.
"Have you got a gun?" Wittman asked, according to the Examiner report.
"Yep," Earp responded.
"You'd better let me have it."
"All right."
Examiner writer Edward H. Hamilton called the disarming of Earp "an event' of the evening," and added, "So, for the first time in the history of the prize-ring in California it was necessary to disarm the referee." The event apparently happened quite quickly and quietly, because few seemed to notice, and the Bulletin did not report it. The Call, however, latched onto the incident in a big way, saying Earp "showed the 'yellow dog' in him by going into the ring with a Colt's Navy revolver in his pocket, indicating that he feared trouble over the decision that he would give if opportunity offered. When Captain Wittman saw it pushing out of his coattails he demanded the gun, and it was only after repeated orders from the big police officer that Earp gave up his weapon on which he depends for a living." What seemed an unusual though unimportant occurrence at the time grew to become one of the stranger events of the Earp legacy: a pistolpacking gunfighter carrying the frontier into civilized San Francisco.
With Earp disarmed, the fight began. Fitzsimmons, a lean 172-pounder standing a quarter-inch under six feet, seemed to take early advantage of Sharkey, who carried the same weight and stood three and a half inches shorter. The Bulletin described Fitzsimmons as always holding the edge:
Fitzsimmons played with the sailor from start to finish. Sharkey fouled him frequently, but the Cornishman never lost his temper. Once in a while his beady little eyes would light up with a peculiar glitter, once in a while he showed his teeth. But he fought on with great judgment though he did show a little surprise at the clever way Sharkey ducked to avoid his swings. Sharkey countered well, too, more than once, and Fitz got it, strictly, in the neck.
The gong saved Sharkey twice. But he stayed the six and seven rounds required to win a host of bets, and was deservedly cheered for his performance. The people were willing to have it go at that; let Sharkey get the credit for staying his rounds, and now let Fitz knock him out and have done with it, a thing which appeared to come to pass in the very next round. Sharkey was badly punished, and being driven to the ropes, was sent reeling by a vicious uppercut. It looked as though no coup de grace were necessary. But it is to be presumed that Fitz was anxious to make assurance doubly sure, and the result was a blow which the referee declared a foul.11
In the eighth round, Fitzsimmons went into a flurry, punching Sharkey about the face and body. The taller Fitzsimmons continued the battering, launching a heavy blow toward the gut. Sharkey fell. According to the Examiner, Sharkey then put his hand down to his groin and began making grimaces and groans as Sharkey's top trainer and cornerman Danny Needham rushed into the ring, claiming the sailor had been fouled. Fitzsimmons just laughed at Sharkey's antics, grinning in his corner as Sharkey turned on his side and writhed while the police entered the ring.
Quietly Wyatt Earp walked over to Sharkey's corner and told his seconds that their man had won the fight. Sharkey's staff lifted him into a chair, where he sat with his head sunk on his chest, seeming to take no interest in Earp's decision. Needham stepped to the center of the ring and began waving a towel over his head to signify that Sharkey had indeed been named th
e winner. The stunned Julian ran over to Earp as Wyatt bent down to pass through the ropes. Wyatt informed him of the decision, and Fitzsimmons grew excited. He tried to make a speech but could not be heard in the uproar of the crowd. Spectators jumped out of the rickety wooden bleachers and charged the ring, trying to learn exactly what had occurred. Gradually word passed through the pavilion that Sharkey had been awarded the victory and the $10,000 purse, a surprising finish to a fight where the winner was carried from the ring.12
Wyatt Earp, lawman turned referee, called the foul for a low blow into the center of the groin and awarded the fight and the championship to Sharkey. Such a decision is solely the responsibility of the referee, who has no one to ask for help. Earp made the decision in a split second, just as he had against Billy Clanton and Curley Bill. And there were no second chances in the ring. The scene was so convincing that Examiner boxing writer W. W. Naughton wrote that Sharkey "was making grimaces and placing his hand on his groin. And if he were not in agony all I can say is that he must be a consummate actor and must have rehearsed that particular scene many a time and often."
Fitzsimmons and manager Julian ranted, accusing the sanctioning National Athletic Club and Earp of fraud. Fitz appeared fresh and absolutely uninjured as he spoke at length to the papers. He said he was robbed by the decision and that he had been warned by several people earlier in the day that Earp was part of a plot to "fix" the fight. He had accepted Earp, however, because he did not want to tarnish his reputation as champion-"If I had refused to fight, the whole country would have said that I was afraid to meet the man who nearly put Corbett out." He ended by saying: "No pugilist can get a square deal from the thieves who handle fighting in this city and it is a safe bet that the last big fight San Francisco will ever see was pulled off to-night."13