Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

by Casey Tefertiller

  That was how I met Jack London and Wyatt Earp. London was getting on in years, but his seamed face was still as rugged as his stories, which had thrilled me when I was growing up. His books had been published in most countries of the world. The legendary Earp was tall and a little stooped, but I could still see him as the marshal of Tombstone....

  I tried to draw both men out about their own doings. Neither wanted to talk about himself, but I did manage to get a few good details from Earp about the Clanton family and the famous shootout at the OK Corral. London reminisced about Klondike days and the circumstances that spurred him to write "The Call of the Wild."

  I was listening with both ears when Charlie Chaplin, sitting with friends at another table, got up and went into his waiter act. I called him over and he bowed to us with a napkin over one arm and produced an order pad. "Cut it out," I cautioned him, "or I'll tell [director Mack] Sennett you're breaking your contract."

  He quirked up one side of his mustache in a typical leer. When I introduced my guests, he viewed Earp with evident awe. "You're the bloke from Arizona, aren't you? Tamed the baddies, huh?" He looked at London and nodded. "I know you, too. You almost made me go to Alaska and dig for gold." He sat down and related some of his experiences "when I was a snot-nosed brat in Cheapside." I had a fine time just listening to them and later wished I had some way of recording their conversation.29

  Earp made other friends around the sets, including the young extra and prop man Marion Morrison, who later took the name John Wayne, future director John Ford, who served Earp coffee on the sets, and actor Tom Mix. Wayne would later tell Hugh O'Brian that he based his image of the Western lawman on his conversations with Wyatt Earp.

  But the best friend Wyatt Earp made in Hollywood was William S. Hart, a Shakespearean actor who became the biggest cowboy star of his time. In 1920, Earp and Hart began a correspondence that would last the remaining years of the former marshal's life. Wyatt congratulated Hart on his triumphs and sympathized with his struggles. Earp's friends would later say that Earp tried to teach Hart the fast draw, practicing with him for several hours and laughing heartily at Hart's fumblings. Hart dropped his gun so often that a blanket was spread on the floor for padding.30 Hart paid tribute to Earp in a letter to the New York Telegraph under the headline "Bill Hart Introduces the Real-Not Reel-Hero":

  Now, I am just an actor-a mere player-seeking to reproduce the lives of those great gunmen who molded a new country for us to live in and enjoy peace and prosperity. And we have today in America two of these men with us in the flesh.... One is Wyatt Earp, the other is William B. (Bat) Masterson.

  To those few who have studied the history of the frontier days, these names are revered as none others. They are the last of the greatest band of gunfighters upholders of law and order-that ever lived. Wild Bill Hickok, Luke Short, Doc Holliday, Shotgun Collins, Ben Thompson, all have crossed the Big Divide but Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp still live-and long may they do so!

  Gentle-voiced and almost sad-faced, these men are today uncheered while I, the imitator, the portrayer, am accorded the affection of those millions who love the West. I appreciate from my heart of hearts all the honors bestowed upon me, and in my work I do my best to be worthy; but "lest we forget," don't let us pass up those real men -those real figures-who did so much for us in bygone days... .

  Let us not forget these living Americans who, when they pass on, will be remembered by hundreds of generations. For no history of the West can be written without their wonderful deeds being recorded.31

  Earp, who developed a sincere friendship with the actor, would soon ask Hart for one of the biggest favors of his life.

  As Earp hobnobbed with the stars, two items appeared in 1922 that grated heavily on Wyatt's pride. He always believed he had done the right thing in Tombstone-that he had followed the only course possible in a wicked time when courts could not convict and the law failed to function. Others did not agree. Frederick Bechdolt, author of the 1919 Saturday Evening Poet story on Earp, published his When the West Was Young, the ultimate blood-and-thunder western saga, telling the story of Wyatt Earp as it had never been told before. Of course, most of the facts were wrong and the Earps emerged as stage robbers.

  More troubling was a story that appeared on March 12, in the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, where Wyatt's friends and all his Hollywood pals could read it. Written by retired journalist John M. Scanland, the story told how Sheriff John Behan tried to rid the town of Earps, recounted far-fetched tales of the Tombstone events, and even said that Doc Holliday shot a man in Los Angeles. Even worse, Scanland wrote that Earp had died. The article so rankled Earp that he hunted down Scanland two years later and knocked on his door to tell the story from his point of view. A surprised Scanland, whom Earp described as an old man, apologized profusely. "He expressed regret over the incident and offered apologies and amends, and gave me a type-written retraction of the story which he very willingly signed," Earp wrote to Hart.

  Wyatt's meager efforts to counteract his bad publicity did little to stop the flow. In the March 1925 issue of Scrihner's magazine, John Hays Hammond, his old friend from Tonopah, dug up the absurd story of the midget mountie who supposedly humbled Earp in Dawson, an incident that never occurred. From Sam Purdy to Bechdolt and Scanland, the false stories combined to produce an embarrassing picture he could no longer tolerate. With his emotions clearly showing through the writing, Earp wrote Hammond: "Notoriety has been the bane of my life. I detest it, and I never have put forth any effort to check the tales that have been published in recent years, of the exploits in which my brothers and I are supposed to have been the principal participants. Not one of them is correct. My experiences as an officer of the law are incidents of history, but the modern writer does not seem willing to let it go at that.... What actually occurred at Tombstone is only a matter of weeks. My friends have urged that I make this known on printed sheet. Perhaps I shall; it will correct many mythic tales."32

  After the Scribner'e story appeared, Earp wrote to Hart to ask him for help in righting the wrongs he believed had been done to him:

  During the past few years, many wrong impressions of the early days of Tombstone and myself have been created by writers who are not informed correctly, and this has caused me a concern which I feel deeply.

  You know, I realize that I am not going to live to the age of Methuselah, and any wrong impression, I want made right before I go away. The screen could do all this, I know, with yourself as the master mind. Not that I want to obligate you because of our friendship but I know that I can come to you with this and other things and not feel hurt at anything you may wish to say.... This is something I can't write very well. I wonder whether I might come and talk the matter over with you?33

  Hart probably responded during a personal discussion, suggesting Earp start by telling his story in the form of a book, which could be made into a motion picture script. It would be Earp's responsibility to find a biographer and tell his story properly.

  The person he found was John Flood. Mining engineer John Flood first met Wyatt and Sadie in 1906, and began an on-and-off acquaintance that would last the remainder of the old gambler's life. An expert typist, Flood handled much of Earp's correspondence and helped with some personal duties. He became a friend of the Earps and some of their acquaintances, and he adored listening to their stories. Flood eagerly agreed to take on the project of writing Wyatt's biography. He would later tell of spending nights in a room filled with cigar smoke, listening to the old tales and jotting notes.

  Earp's final decade was one of struggles. He hobnobbed with movie stars, then returned to a life of quiet poverty. The 1920s were not always kind to an aging legend. Wyatt and Sadie continued their pattern of wintering at the Happy Days copper mine and returning to L.A. during the summer, usually residing in low-cost rentals or staying with friends. There were no Social Security payments or pensions for retired gamblers/lawmen. The oilfields and mines never hit big. Hildret
h Halliwell recalled: "Once in a while he'd find a little something, then there'd be months they wouldn't take anything out." The Happy Days mines did not guarantee all days would be happy.34

  Earp, it seems, served as a deputy sheriff in a mostly ceremonial position in San Bernardino County in the early '20s; he apparently assisted in one arrest. According to an oft-told story, Constable James Wilson came to Calzona to arrest a reputed badman waving a gun in a local store and located Earp in the vicinity. Earp was to walk in the front door as Wilson waited at the back, expecting the holdup man to flee. Instead, Earp walked in, ordered the intruder to hand over the gun, and marched him outside for Wilson to arrest.35

  Wyatt may still have had grit, but by the mid-'20s, his funds were running low and he also had kidney problems. The Earps were living in a shack near Vidal, in the present town of Earp, when Wyatt's friend from Alaska days, Charles C. Welsh, invited them to move into his top-floor apartment in Los Angeles, giving 9-year-old Christenne Welsh, Charlie's granddaughter, a summer she would never forget.

  "Grandpa and Mr. Earp used to take me for a walk down to the fire station on Washington Boulevard, and we'd stop at Harry's Drug Store and have a chocolate ice cream soda," Major Christenne Welsh, a retired Women's Army Corps officer, said in 1994. "Mr. Earp was a very neat, neat man. I can always remember as sick as he was, as slow as he walked, because he was sick then, he was always straight as an arrow, and I used to just love to walk with them, my grandfather on one side and Mr. Earp on the other." The man who chose ice cream over whiskey in Tombstone now chose quiet walks with a little girl in his old age.

  While Wyatt stayed home, Sadie was preoccupied with something else. "He was sickly, and she'd go off to San Bernardino on the [Big] Red Car and gamble, she played poker," Christenne Welsh recalled. "It was a hotel that had a poker game in the back room. My uncle worked for Baker Linen and he saw her several times when she'd go in and lose all her money and she'd have a round trip ticket and come home. She was a compulsive gambler."

  Pat Welsh, Christenne's uncle, told her of seeing Sadie enter the private card room in the back of a San Bernardino hotel where an illegal game took place. "Uncle Pat said when he was selling the linen to the hotel, they'd see her coming and say, 'Well, we'll be able to more than eat today.' They'd take the money away from her. She didn't know how to play poker," Welsh said. "People say Wyatt was the compulsive gambler-he was a normal gambler, I imagine. She was the compulsive one."

  Welsh and others understood that Sadie received an allowance from her sister, Hattie Lehnhardt, who had remained affluent even after her husband's suicide in 1912 and the sale of his chocolate shop. Grace Welsh Spolidoro, Charles Welsh's daughter, said in 1994: "The check would come on the first, she'd be nervous and she'd say, 'I'm going to go see my friends.' She'd take the check and we wouldn't see her until the check was gone. And then they'd be hungry."

  Hattie Lehnhardt came to Los Angeles once or twice a year to visit her sister, but usually Sadie had ridden off on the Big Red Car, the train that ran through the Los Angeles area. "When she'd come to town my grandmother would say, 'Well, Mrs. Lehnhardt, you'll have to stay for tea,"' Christenne Welsh recalled. "She was a delightful lady-how Sadie came out of that, I'll never know."36

  While the Welsh family maintained an affection for Wyatt, Sadie became an unwelcome burden. Spolidoro said, "She was tough. There was nothing soft about her. She never struck me as a lady, she was just Sadie. She gambled on anything, she liked to gamble. I think [Wyatt] got angry with her on her gambling, that was the one thing that used to bother him an awful lot. Wyatt called her 'Say-dee' when he got mad; he gave a certain tone in his voice: 'Say-dee shut up.

  The Earps stayed at the Welsh home on and off through the '20s, though there was some friction. As much as the Welshes liked Wyatt, they were sick of Sadie. "She was stealing food out of the icebox," Christenne Welsh recalled. "My aunt would always count the eggs, and there would be three or four missing. She'd come in and say in her high voice, 'Have to fix a little something for Wyatt."' Wyatt Earp did what he could to maintain his pride. Charity came hard, even from friends. When the family offered him dinner, he always declined: "Don't do anything for me, Sadie will take care of me," he said.

  "He'd say Sadie will fix my dinner, and the only thing she ever fixed was hot dogs," Spolidoro said. "Then my sister would say, 'Oh no, Wyatt, we have this."' The family made certain the Earps remained fed.

  It was in the little apartment above the Welsh home that John Flood began a series of interviews that he hoped would finally tell the truth about Wyatt Earp's life. Spolidoro recalled that Flood would visit almost every night. "They would sit up in his bedroom and talk, and Sadie would come up and interrupt and tell it the way she wanted, and Wyatt would get so upset because he wanted to tell the truth. How he got some of the truth out, I don't know, with her interfering. She wanted to make it that nothing bad would be said about him-that he gambled, she didn't want that. There was an argument all the time. He said, 'Sadie, get out.' He'd tell her to go downstairs, then when [Flood] would read back what he had written, she'd correct it. Then she'd get upset because she didn't like the way he treated her. If there is confusion, it is on her part."

  It took Flood more than two years to piece together the book, and the finished product was indescribably awful. Flood's description of Earp's escape after killing Curley Bill is only one bad example:

  Crack! he was in a desperate plight; he felt in front, then at his side, and his hip. Gradually, his hand followed his belt around which had slipped down over one of his hips and he remembered now that in the long ride out, he had loosened his belt to relieve the strain, and the weapon was dangling at his back half way to the ground.

  Crack! another hornet let loose, and Earp commenced to pull and tug.

  Crack! Crack! "Don't let him get away fellows!" still the weapon was out of reach.

  Crack! Ali, he touched it with the tips of his fingers, closer, now he had it in his grasp. Crack! Crack! Crack! he started to return fire.

  Crack! Crack! Crack! they certainly were warming up.

  Crack! Crack! Crack! he was giving them shot for shot, and scattering this way and that, they ran for the willows.

  Once more his ammunition was gone and he reached for the horn of his saddle. Instantly, his horse was in the air; up and down, backwards and forwards he struggled, and then came the whine of the slugs.

  Crack! Crack! Crack! ing! ing! ing! "Some one get him!" "Put him over the "37 jumps!

  Even worse than the writing was Flood's badly jumbled story, taking sections from Earp and items from Sadie and possibly others to create a most confusing tale. He reworked the manuscript at least three times. In two versions, he has Earp killing Ringo on the way out of Arizona, just as in the Hooker manuscript, while in another there is no mention of such a killing. He variously changed structures, with one version in the form of a series of lectures by Earp and other efforts listed as a biography by Flood. All were long on useless description and short on details, accompanied with more cracks, pops, and bangs than were ever heard on the real frontier. And, obviously, Sadie did her part to add to the confusion.

  Flood began promising a completed manuscript late in 1924, and Earp continually mentioned it in his letters to Hart, asking the actor to use it for a movie: "I am sure that if the story were exploited on the screen by you, it would do much toward setting me right before a public, which has always been fed up on lies about me."38

  Finally, in February of 1926, Flood delivered his awful concoction. Hart sent the manuscript to the Saturday Evening Poet, then to book publisher after publisher, always receiving the same answer. The most candid response came from Anne Johnston, an editor at Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis:

  I read the Wyatt Earp manuscript with interest-at least I began it with interest, for I am very keen about the history of the old West, but I must confess to you that I was deeply disappointed. The material itself does not strike me as so fascinating as the
stories of Wild Bill and Billy the Kid and some of the rest, but it would show to far better advantage in a more skillfully done setting. The writing is stilted and florid and diffuse. It would be far more effective if it were simple, direct, straightforward. A lot of the stuff ought to be cut out altogether and the rest boiled down. Then there might be a story. Now one forgets what it's all about in impatience at the clutter of unimportant detail that impedes its pace, and the pompous matter of its telling.39

  Hart sympathized with the flood of Flood rejections, writing to Earp, "I cannot figure what the devil is the matter with them. It may be some literary defect that they can see which is beyond our vision. However I am for hammering them until the hot place freezes over."40

  Well before the hot place froze, a series of events happened to change the perceptions of all involved. In July of 1926 Chicago journalist Walter Noble Burns dropped in on the Earps in Los Angeles and asked about the possibility of writing Wyatt's biography. Earp declined, saying Flood was already on the job, and Burns came up with another idea-he would write Doc Holliday's story, clearing up the old myths and bringing out the true Holliday. Earp agreed to help and sent a wonderful eleven-page letter telling his version of many of the Holliday-related events. He also told of his frustration with the continuing series of stories which falsely portrayed his career:

  I am getting tired of it all, as there have been so many lies written about me in so many magazines in the last few years that it makes a man feel like fighting. I know you mean to do the right thing by me, but I would ask of you please to say as little as possible about me. And I am more than sorry Mr. Burns that I was not able to give you my life story. Have as yet done nothing with it, and I may have it all rewritten.41

  Burns had already earned a degree of fame with the publication of his The Saga of Billy the Kid. He was a top-level Chicago journalist who had spent much of his time covering the early years of the gangster era. Now he was on the trail of gangsters in the old West, and he went after the story. Apparently with the best intentions of writing the Holliday book, Burns visited Tombstone, scoured newspaper files, and talked to old-timers. He was onto a good story, far too good to pass up. As the book evolved, Holliday developed into a side character and Earp, of course, became the leading player.