"In those days it used to take two years or more to get a wanted man extradited from Mexico, so there was a constant stream of criminals south of the border," King said. "Earp wanted someone to go over the border with him and bring a man back but without the benefit of formal extradition. I had been with the Los Angeles Police Department and was a good shot, so Earp offered [me] the job."
King said he and Earp usually disguised themselves as miners on these jobs. They had their sources of information and eventually they would find their man and bring him back for trial. "The Mexicans had our graves dug for us a number of times, but we managed to outsmart them. Earp was a very quiet fellow-a fine man, one of the coolest I've ever seen. He was afraid of nothing. When he'd get angry the corner of his right eye would twitch just a little. He loved to gamble, too. Faro, or Bucking the Tiger, was his choice. And he was a prospector at heart. He loved being around miners."
Wyatt's former helper did not paint a particularly attractive picture of the one-time marshal. King said they served as strikebreakers delivering beer to saloons when the regular workers refused to work. As in San Francisco a decade earlier, Earp took his liquor in large doses.
He ... was an artist at swearing, and he took to drinking pretty heavily when he reached fifty," King said. "You see, Earp never used to drink at all. The old days of Dodge, Ellsworth, and Wichita were far behind him and Earp was not too proud to work for $10 a day the same as any peace officer who wanted to eat."
King told how he and Earp halted a run on a bank with a little trick. In 1909, bank examiners checked Isaias W. Hellman's bank and revealed that more money had been loaned than remained in the vaults. Depositors stormed Hellman's office to pull their money. In the days before bank insurance, this could mean disaster. Earp told King that the mayor of Los Angeles had asked him to intercede to save the bank.
"I'd rather skin a wildcat or walk into a shooting than do a job like this," Wyatt said, according to King. "People nowadays get to thinking I'm a damned magician or something."
Hellman apparently expected Earp to intercede and bring order to the mob. But Earp had another idea. He took some empty money sacks from the bank and hired a big wagon and driver. Then, with King at his side, he rode to a nearby iron works and filled the sacks with iron slugs the size of $20 gold pieces. Earp and King rode shotgun as the heavy wagon rattled across the cobblestone and brick streets to the bank, where police were holding back the angry depositors.
"Pull in here, back those plugs up," Earp shouted to the driver, then stood and waved his hat to recruit police help. An officer came over and asked Earp what he had. "About a million dollars," Earp responded. "Now get these loco jugheads out of the way and tell your boys to pass the word that we've got a million dollars aboard and that any gent who thinks he can find a better bank to put his money into to go and find it. But he'd better be damned careful he don't get hit over the head and robbed while he's doing it."
Earp and King loaded the sacks onto the counter, in plain sight, long enough to assure the depositors of the bank's stability, then moved them into the vault. The run subsided, and Earp and King went for a drink. King recalled Wyatt's words as he lifted his glass: "I guess I'm growing old when I got to ride shotgun on a lot of bridge washers from an iron works just to convince a lot of damned fools."19
Earp apparently did have police connections. In October of 1910, he received a most unusual offer from LAPD commissioner Tom Lewis. George Parsons had been asked to lead a posse of thirty men, apparently without legal sanction, into the remote regions of San Bernardino County to dispossess parties holding disputed mining claims.
"Like old Arizona times again," Parsons jotted in his diary. "But my lame ankle prevented any action as this is an immediate case and I was selected as the best man to lead party and do the business.... Second choice for leader of expedition fell on Wyatt Earp, the old Arizona outlaw (so called) and mankiller, also old friend of mine and a square man if he did gamble and kill occasionally. Certainly this selection of me is a high compliment to my courage, fighting abilities and tact, and I appreciate all."20
With Parsons resting his aching ankle, 62-year-old Wyatt Earp led the posse into the desert to take control of a potash field near Searles Lake in northern San Bernardino County. The California Trona Company and Henry E. Lee & Associates both claimed legal ownership of the potash, which was used in explosives. Awaiting a decision in court could have taken years, while control of the potash fields meant quick profits with threats of war in Europe. Earp, along with Lee and Lou Rasor, served as leaders of the posse organized to defend the claim of Henry Lee & Associates. Earp ordered the men to lie in the sagebrush in preparation for a night battle, ready to open fire should Trona's force arrive and try to take control of the mining site. Far in the distance, headlights bobbed along the road leading toward the claim, and the leaders conferred, choosing Earp to parley with the Trona representatives. Earp went to sleep, knowing it would take the rest of the night for the Trona band to arrive.
Early the next morning, S. W. Austin, then federal receiver, and three armed men appeared in the camp, Rasor testified when the case came to trial. With his pistol pointed, Austin ordered the Earp party to leave. Earp snatched a rifle from one of Austin's deputies and calmly faced Austin's revolver, then discarded the captured gun.
"Wyatt grabbed that gun and threw it down in the dirt swearing with as much color as any pirate," Arthur King recalled. "He said he hadn't had his breakfast yet and didn't want no gun in his empty belly."
The Austin party made no further requests and both groups sat down for what must have been one nervous breakfast before Austin and his assistants left peaceably.
"It was the most nervy thing, Earp's act, that I ever saw," Rasor told the court.21
The case did not come to trial until 1916 and took nearly three months of court time. Although court observers expected Earp to testify, he was never called. Almost five months after the case ended, Judge H. T. Dewhirst ruled in favor of Trona and gave the company possession of the valuable fields just as the conflict in Europe was building into a full-scale world war.22
It would be Wyatt Earp's last known confrontation. The one-time lawman had become a hired tough to protect a corporation's property.
Wyatt and Sadie settled into a more tranquil lifestyle. In 1905 they had located what they would call their "Happy Days" mines near the ArizonaCalifornia border, close to a town that would later be named "Earp." The claim would never amount to much. The Earps would follow a peripatetic lifestyle the rest of their days, wintering at the claim as they tried to work the small mines, then summering in more comfortable climes, usually Los Angeles and occasionally Oakland, near Sadie's sister.
There are no records to certify that Sadie and Wyatt ever went through the formality of a marriage ceremony. Sadie would later tell relatives they had been married aboard Lucky Baldwin's yacht. Several times she gave the date as 1888but the Earps were in San Diego then, apparently before the friendship with Baldwin even began. The census taker caught up with the Earps in 1910, when they were living in Los Angeles. Sadie gave her birthplace as New York and her birthdate as 1866-her birthday seemed to move up as the years passed, and she always kept it her secret. Once again they said they had been married in 1888.
There would always be stories that followed the Earps. But old stories do not build big houses or buy nice clothes. They invested in oil wells near Bakersfield, mining claims and other ventures that made some money, nothing big. The Alaska money gradually dwindled, and Wyatt S. Earp, Capitalist, could not find another boom. Earp had become an aging frontiersman when America ran out of frontiers.
BACK IN THE OLD DAYS, in both Dodge City and Tombstone, Wyatt Earp never seemed too bothered by con artists. It was one thing to take a man's money at gunpoint, and something else entirely to cleverly extract it from him by playing on his own greed. Many of the old frontiersmen saw such questionable activities as a good way to teach greenhorns the ways of the West.
By this morality, robbing a stagecoach would be repugnantly wrong while playing a little confidence game fell within some range of acceptability.
Stuart Lake often told the story of Bat Masterson being pestered for his guns by New York collectors. Masterson then sent a kid scribe-sometimes a young reporter named Damon Runyon-to the pawn shop to buy an old gun, and the lawman emeritus would carve in his twenty-two notches and sell it to the happy collector. The tale may be fiction, but the likes of Earp and Masterson seemed to condone taking advantage of another man's gullibility.
Thirty years after Tombstone, Wyatt Earp was neither a moral giant nor a bright light of goodness. He certainly was not above separating a fool from his money when the opportunity arose, and in 1911 he would be caught and publicly embarrassed. Wyatt Earp, still a hero or a horror to opposing groups, found himself again trying to raise bail.
The Los Angeles newspapers told the story of a clever scheme to bilk Los Angeles real estate agent J. Y. Peterson out of $2,500. Three men attempted to lure Peterson into a room at the Auditorium Hotel for a rigged faro game. According to Peterson, he was to purchase $2,500 in chips, then leave when his pile reached $4,000, in a larcenous attempt to get money from the big San Francisco syndicate that backed the game. The three men told him that they were angry with the San Francisco group, which paid them only $10 a day for running a game that netted hundreds of dollars. Peterson was told that the "sharps" would prick the cards in the middle so they could see the cards underneath, then make sure he left a winner. Peterson went to a practice session, then informed police of the planned game on the evening of July 21, 1911. According to one report, Peterson did not bring the agreed-upon $2,500 when he arrived at the club rooms. He found only the three men and was told that he was early, but the others would arrive later. Peterson refused to accept the excuse and said that he would leave and return in an hour or so. When he opened the door, three L.A. police detectives walked in and placed the sharpers under arrest. All three were booked as suspected confidence men.23
When police took the accused bunco men to the station, they registered as E. Dunn, Walter Scott, and W. W. Stapp. It quickly became clear that Mr. W. W. Stapp had a better-known identity, that of Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp. According to the Los Angeles Tunes report, "Earp, who in addition to being known by the police as a professional gambler and all-around sharper, has made his headquarters here several years. He was a prominent figure here during the days when racing thrived."24
Two L.A. papers, the Times and the Examiner, placed the story on an inside page. The more sensationalistic Los Angeles Herald ran it at the top of the front page, under the headline, "Detectives Trap Wyatt Earp, 'Gun Man,' in Swindle." The Herald called Earp "the noted western 'gun man' and survivor of the famous Earp-Clanton feud" and laced into the old marshal: "Earp, who since race track gambling became a dead letter in California is alleged to have devoted his time to fleecing the unwary in card games here, conceived the plot, it is declared."
The day after the arrest, officials realized the police had erred. The officers had broken up the game before it began, before anyone had actually tried to bilk Peterson and before a card had even been tossed. Charges were reduced to conspiracy to violate the laws prohibiting gambling, a misdemeanor that would be heard in police court. Earp and Scott were quickly released on $500 bail. Dunn changed his identification to Harry Dean of Montana and remained jailed, unable to make bail.
The situation, of course, grew more complex. According to police records, Dean pleaded guilty to a battery connected with another charge, and the courts dropped the conspiracy charge. Dean received a six-month suspended sen- tence.25 But Wyatt Earp and his attorney, Frank Dominguez, vowed to fight the accusation with a big-time defense that would include calling former governor Henry T. Gage and other prominent California pioneers as character witnesses. Earp told the Lod Angeles Examiner: "I was told that a faro game was in operation in the hotel where Scott and Dean had apartments. I like faro and went to the hotel to play. I know absolutely nothing else of what transpired there as there was no game in sight when I entered."
Former Tombstoner T. C. Lovejoy wrote the Examiner to defend Earp's integrity. "I am and always have been an admirer of the Earp boys, braver men never lived. I was in Tombstone, Ariz., during all of their trouble with the Clanton gang of cowboys. As chief of police, Virgil Earp did good work, Wyatt Earp as United States marshal made Tombstone a quiet little burg from a 'shoot-youreye-out town.' I am indeed sorry to see Earp in this trouble. I have always heard of Earp being a high bettor-the higher they stacked the chips the better he liked it-and I can't make myself believe Earp was looking for crooked work."26
The hearing proved anticlimactic. Earp and Scott appeared in the police court of Judge H. H. Rose on September 27. The city attorneys had expected a guilty plea from Scott, but he instead informed the court he had no intention of pleading guilty and demanded a jury trial. Earp repeated the claim that he had just visited the room by accident and no evidence had been secured against him. A disgusted Rose discharged both prisoners, and Earp's brush with the law ended as another misfire. As with the Spicer hearing in Tombstone and the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons case, there was freedom without exoneration.27
Coming to a conclusion about his role in the bunco is virtually impossible. His defenders have believed he simply tried to set up a game, unaware that Scott and Dean were trying to rig it. This is certainly possible. It is also possible that Earp, down on his luck, tried to find a pigeon. This would be one of those stories he would not tell in later years.
One thing is certain-above all else he considered himself a gambler, far more than a lawman. He had spent most of his years turning cards and running a faro layout, and only a few years wearing a badge. Even in his later years, he was proud of his gambling skills and enjoyed discussing them. He shied away from talking of Tombstone, almost to the end. But America had changed in the early twentieth century. The free-wheeling days of the frontier were over, and the nation embarked on a moral crusade in one of its periodic swings to bring higher standards to a country adrift in sin. With venereal disease reaching epidemic proportions, prostitution became illegal in all forty-six states. Although police tended to wink at a few upper-class houses in some areas, many of the former prostitutes elaborately hid their past.
In Los Angeles a few years later, Samantha Taylor, once madam of the exclusive San Jose House in Tombstone, would find religion and try every ruse to keep her past a secret. One of her former employees married a prominent dentist and worked equally hard to keep her past private.28 In the wild days of Tombstone and other frontier posts, life as a prostitute or a gambler had bordered on acceptability with even something of a romantic tinge.
With gambling and prostitution illegal throughout the land, the crusade against sin peaked in 1919 with the passage of the Volstead Act-Prohibitionwhich made the sale of alcohol illegal across the United States. As morality changed around the Earps, Wyatt had trouble changing his morality. The aging ex-lawman kept working: driving wagons, digging in his mines, and doing other jobs. Hattie Lehnhardt, Sadie's sister, probably helped with expenses when stakes ran low. Wyatt had helped Hattie establish claim to an oil field near Bakersfield, and she may have had some undocumented agreement to pay her sister. Still, the meager income did not amount to much.
Always, Wyatt Earp's reputation followed him. The bizarre story from Charles Hopkins of Wyatt's sister Jessie marrying Ike Clanton would occasionally show up again in print. In the December 1919 Saturday Evening Podt, Frederick R. Bechdolt rekindled the old Tombstone stories and confused them badly.
Forrestine Cooper Hooker already had a stake in the Wyatt Earp story. The daughter of Indian fighter General Charles Lawrence Cooper, she had married the son of Henry Hooker and lived with her husband and father-in-law on the Sierra Bonita Ranch during the early years of her marriage, before moving to Los Angeles. As a bright young writer, it was only natural that she would seek out Wyatt Earp to try to clear up one of t
he most confused and captivating stories of frontier history. At some point around 1920-the exact year is uncer- tain-Forrestine Hooker met with Earp to discuss his story. She also spoke with James Earp and used reminiscences from either her husband or her father-inlaw to complete a manuscript detailing many of the events in Tombstone, with a definite predilection in Wyatt's favor. While many of Hooker's stories parallel the newspaper accounts very closely, but add significant details, the manuscript ends with a very strange story about Earp killing John Ringo as Wyatt left Arizona. Clearly, Earp did not kill Ringo on the retreat to Colorado. If Earp had any involvement whatsoever, which is highly unlikely, it would have been on a surreptitious return trip that would have made an even greater story, one Earp apparently never told.
Earp and Hooker had some disagreement over the manuscript, and Earp refused to allow publication. The document was eventually donated to the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and remained uncatalogued for years until found by curator Richard Buchen and Earp researcher Jeff Morey. For reasons only he knew, this would not be the version of his story Earp wanted published.
AMERICAS NEW BOOM CAME not from metals and minerals but from movies. It was only fitting that Wyatt Earp would find himself at least on the periphery of a burgeoning industry. Hollywood loved the West, and old frontiersmen of all stripes began drifting into southern California to work as extras on motion pictures. The sets were open to the public in those days of silent movies, and locals could wander into the Los Angeles hills to watch the actors. One afternoon in 1915, Wyatt Earp went for a little ride with author Jack London, an acquaintance from Alaska days. Director Raoul Walsh told the story in his autobiography:
One day when I was taking it easy between studio shots, Buck Friedman came looking for me. "Two guys at the gate asking to see you. One says his name is London."
"What's his first name?"
"I didn't ask."
"If it's Jack, bring them in."
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend Page 51
