In 1886, Bat Masterson gave another account of what happened that night, noting that Doc “had some trouble with Mike Gordon, a tough gambler,” at his saloon, after which Gordon left. “About an hour afterward, though, Gordon came back and fired a shot from the sidewalk into the saloon.” Bat described what happened next: “The bullet whizzed a couple of inches from Holliday’s head and went crashing through a window at the rear of the room. ‘Doc’ drew his gun and rushed to the front door and saw Gordon standing on the sidewalk with a revolver in his hand. Gordon raised his revolver to fire a second time, but before he could pull the trigger, ‘Doc’ had shot him dead.”69
The reason Holliday was not identified at the time may well have been that the coroner was Hyman G. Neill, known as “Hoodoo Brown,” who was the boss of New Town, a justice of the peace, and the leader of what was known locally as the Dodge City Gang. The group included the town marshal Joe Carson, Mysterious Dave Mather, Dave Rudabaugh, Frank Cady, John “Bull Shit Jack” Pierce, William P. “Slap Jack Bill” Nicholson, and others. Hoodoo Brown supposedly came from a respected family in St. Louis but had plied his trade as a gambler and con man for a number of years before arriving in Las Vegas with the railroad. He was described as “a tall thin man, has light hair, small mustache, and a rakish look which is a terrible giveaway, and one would at once set him down as a desperate character, and a man to beware of.” Rightly or wrongly, Doc was accused of being part of the Dodge City Gang, and, in fact, Jordan Webb, his partner, was a known associate of Hoodoo Brown’s. The Optic later claimed that Doc had “crept through one of the many legal loop-holes that characterized Hoodoo Brown’s judicial dispensation.” It was a plausible explanation of what happened. County authorities never followed up on the matter.70
Masterson also claimed that the day after Gordon was killed, “a Mexican gambler who had been a friend of Gordon swore out a complaint against all the saloons and gambling houses in town. Among others, Doc was indicted. Afterwards, Doc, Jim Pearson and two of their friends met the Mexican in front of a saloon. A fight was of course the inevitable result. During the row, the Mexican was killed and Doc had to leave Las Vegas.”71 Masterson was wrong both with the timing and with the result, but there were odd coincidences over the next few weeks that make it impossible to dismiss his commentary out of hand.
On July 15, four days before the Gordon shooting, Jim Pearson and his two brothers (the two “friends” of whom Masterson wrote) assaulted a Mexican gambler named Epifanio Baca in a dispute arising out of a card game, not out of the Gordon killing, which had not yet occurred.72 John Henry was not involved as far as the record shows. He was concerned with other, more mundane matters. On July 30, ten days after Gordon died, Holliday purchased an additional parcel of land adjacent to his saloon. He once again seemed to be making an effort to settle down, rather than move on. On August 1, however, he was called as a witness, along with Charles Hennessey and James Dunnigan, in a gambling case against Hoodoo Brown, and later the same night Doc was arrested for gambling himself, for which he posted a $200 bond.73
Then, on the night of August 5, 1879, John McPherson, a former marshal of Old Town Las Vegas, was mortally wounded “at the dancehall kept by Pierson [sic]” in New Town. During the fight, McPherson also shot Charles Karth, a henchman of Hoodoo Brown’s commonly called Charley Slick, Slick Charley, or Slicky. Slick was apparently the instigator, and the papers would later suggest that Hoodoo Brown was behind the incident. Initially, McPherson’s assailant was identified only as a “little policeman,” who admitted pursuing McPherson from the dance hall into the “exchange saloon” with the intent of killing him. Gossip was rampant that the policeman was allowed by Brown, in his capacity as justice of the peace, to escape. On August 9, however, McPherson signed a deathbed statement identifying Jim Pearson as the man who shot him. That same day, the chief justice of New Mexico’s Supreme Court brought local law enforcement officers before him and insisted that they strictly enforce local ordinances against carrying deadly weapons. “Every difficulty that occurs in town grows out of a violation of this law,” he told them.74
The San Miguel County grand jury was in session at the time, and its members listened to the judge if the police did not. On August 12, indictments were brought against the Pearson brothers on charges arising out of the Baca incident, and the next day, August 13, Jim Pearson was charged with murdering McPherson and for carrying a deadly weapon. Curiously, Doc Holliday was also indicted on August 13 for carrying deadly weapons on the night of August 5, the same evening that McPherson was shot. No connection was ever shown or implied publicly between Doc and the Pearson brothers’ crime spree until Masterson’s later account linking Doc with Jim Pearson and “their two friends,” but the combination of evidence with Masterson’s account creates a strong circumstantial case of a relationship of some sort between Doc and the Pearsons.75
Pearson was “not found,” but Doc did not leave town. He did, however, begin to rethink his position in Las Vegas. Shortly after his indictment, he surrendered his saloon to Thomas L. Preston, his liquor wholesaler and possible mortgage holder, apparently in settlement of accounts, and, on August 18, Preston sold one-half interest in the saloon to Samuel N. Lacy. On September 1, Preston and Lacy leased the property for $75 a month to B. O. Bertholf, who also ran the Globe Theater, a few doors east of the saloon. John Henry and Jordan Webb appear to have continued gambling in the saloon, but ownership had passed on to others.76
During that summer, Holliday may have played cards with Jesse James and Billy the Kid, as they both were reportedly in town between July 26 and 29, even having dinner together with other locals at the new Las Vegas Hotel at Montezuma Hot Springs.77 That year, Easterners had bought the property and had constructed a new three-story hotel on the grounds, along with a new bathhouse that made the facility even more attractive. Doc still took treatments there, and the arrival of the railroad meant a new accessibility to the curative waters. It was characteristic of the town for the notorious and the respectable to coexist, but that was about to change because of the flagrant excesses of Hoodoo Brown.
Later in August, two stagecoaches were robbed near town, and again locals suspected that the Dodge City Gang running East Las Vegas was responsible. On August 24, 1879, after the first robbery, the Gazette deplored the fact that “the town is evidently filling up with a good many of those bad characters who usually congregate in new and growing railroad towns.” In a long editorial, the paper deplored the “burglars and highwaymen” who had settled into the community: “The robbery of the coach and mail so near town and the tracing of the culprits directly back to town shows that we have some bold, bad men in the community who will not scruple to commit any crime for money.” On August 30, the second robbery occurred between Las Vegas and Tecolote, with similar suspicions about the perpetrators.78
The situation was serious enough that express companies, apparently not trusting local authorities, sent their own operatives into the area. Josh Webb, Doc’s old associate and comrade in arms from Dodge City, signed in at the Mackley House on Railroad Avenue in New Town in September, apparently as an undercover man for the Adams Express Company. Later in the month, the Ford County Globe reported that “Webb is engaged in some very mysterious business up there,” and gave him credit for “quietly capturing two or three mail robbers out in New Mexico.”79 Perhaps his undercover operations explained why he fell in with the Dodge City Gang initially, since Hoodoo Brown and his cronies were primary suspects in the robberies. His effectiveness in blending in with the gang would eventually prove costly, however.
In early September, the Globe announced that “Mr. Wyatt Earp, who has been on our police force for several months, resigned his position last week and took his departure for Las Vegas, New Mexico.”80 After an appropriate farewell party, Earp headed west with a young woman named Mattie Blaylock, his brother Jim, and Jim’s family. Curiously, Earp later claimed that Doc Holliday left Las Vegas and returned to Dodge City look
ing for him but arrived three days after he left Dodge for Las Vegas. He said that Doc caught up with him at Trail City near the Colorado line (at the time it was still known as Sargent) and traveled with the Earp party back to Las Vegas, arriving there before September 23, when a Las Vegas correspondent wrote the Globe that “Dodge City is well represented here, N. F. Kelly, Henry Sherer, Dr. Milligan [Holliday?], J. J. Webb, Wyatt Earp, and many others are here, not excepting ‘Crazy Horse’ [Thompson] with his cap and ball death dealer.”81
If Doc did leave town in time to reach Dodge just after Wyatt left, he missed another important event in Las Vegas. On September 11, Jordan Webb, his former partner, was arrested while dealing keno in the saloon they formerly owned. He was charged with complicity in the August 30 stage holdup. Webb was transferred to Santa Fe for trial. He would face three trials and would not be acquitted until February 1881, long after Doc Holliday had settled in Tombstone. More likely, Doc did not leave Las Vegas and was on hand when Earp arrived. Kate later claimed that Holliday encountered Earp on the Plaza in Old Town and accompanied him to his camp on the edge of town for a reunion.82
Doc’s old friend from Atlanta, Lee Smith, also checked into the Mackley House late in September for a surprise reunion with John Henry.83 Whether the meeting was by chance or was planned was never clear from the surviving record, but the visit hints that the two were at least haphazard correspondents. Smith’s investments had paid off, and he was expanding his interests into Western mining, which may have been prompted by Doc’s letters. His investments would eventually take him to Denver. The visit gave Doc the opportunity to catch up on what was happening back home in Georgia. Briefly, John Henry was able to escape the world of Hoodoo Brown.
Earp stayed in Las Vegas for nearly a month, long enough to be remembered later as one of the “hoodoo fellows.” Oddly, a Dodge City paper would later report that he was also working “as a special messenger by Wells, Fargo & Co., on a division of the railroad in New Mexico” when he left Dodge. On October 14, 1879, masked men robbed a train near Las Vegas, and Charles E. Bassett, Chalk Beeson, and Harry Gryden showed up from Dodge to investigate the robbery for the Adams Express Company.84 It almost appeared that there were two Dodge City gangs in the area for a while. If Earp was involved somehow with the express companies, it was a temporary assignment passed on to others. Robberies in New Mexico were not his primary concern.
Earp had learned of the silver strike in southeastern Arizona from his brother, Virgil, who was living at Prescott, the territorial capital of Arizona. Wyatt planned to give up law enforcement and open his own stagecoach operation out of the new boom camp of Tombstone in partnership with his brothers. He painted a glowing picture of opportunities there and encouraged Holliday to join him. With his partner in jail and suspicions doubtlessly directed at him, the environment in Las Vegas was dangerous enough to give Doc concerns, and when the Earps pulled out of Las Vegas bound for Prescott, Doc and Kate left with them, much to Kate’s chagrin.85
In October 1879, W. G. Ward, the carpenter who had built the Holliday Saloon, filed a claim against Doc for an outstanding balance of $137.50 still owed him out of the $372 contract for the construction of the Holliday Saloon. Included in the record was a copy of Ward’s contract, which recorded $45 received from Doc on July 20, leading some researchers to conclude erroneously that the construction of the saloon was not begun until July 20. Clearly, the contract was for “work done on house or building” before that date. In any event, he still owed Ward a balance on the saloon construction, and when Doc left town, Ward filed the claim.86
Curiously, the legal documentation provided by the contract supported Kate’s later claim that she and Doc were married: “J. H. Holliday being first by me informed of the contents of this instrument did confess upon separate examination independent and apart of his said wife that he executed the same voluntary and with[out] the compulsion or illicit influence of her [sic] said wife.” Something seemed to be implied by this phraseology that was never made clear in the record, so that its main significance is the support it provided for Kate’s claims of marriage.87
Of course, by the time Ward’s claim was filed, Doc was in Prescott, a town that proved to be interesting to both John Henry and Kate. They moved into a hotel, while the Earp party looked for Virgil. But when the Earp clan pulled out for Tombstone in mid-November, Doc and Kate stayed behind. Perhaps Doc was discouraged by reports like this one from the Prescott Miner:
We are told that travel of late has been brisk to Tombstone, but during the past few days it has taken a backward move, where one goes in, four are leaving. It is true that they have a few good mines there, but nothing to justify the great immigration that has gone on there during the last three months. It is asserted authoritatively that not more than one out of every four living at Tombstone are employed. It is enough to kill any new town.88
By March, however, the Miner was describing Tombstone as “that new and flourishing city.”89
Prescott was a nice change with attractions that boom camps did not have, including a level of stability and a more settled and cosmopolitan society that must have appealed to something deep and almost forgotten in John Henry Holliday. Curiously, though, Doc made no effort to establish a dental office there; indeed, after Las Vegas he apparently never practiced his profession again. He was a professional gambler now, and he found his place on Whiskey Row, Prescott’s gambling district. Doc passed the winter there.
Kate, in her recollections, said that “a short time later” Doc received a letter from Wyatt Earp urging him to come to Tombstone. She and Doc quarreled over the letter, and she told him that she would not go to Tombstone: “If you are going to tie yourself to the Earp Brothers, go to it. I am going to Globe.” She said that Doc replied, “All right. I will be in Globe in a few days too. I don’t think I will like it in Tombstone anyway.” They traveled as far as Gillette together, she claimed, and then parted company, Doc going to Tombstone and Kate to Globe. She added, “I didn’t hear from Doc for some time.” Since Kate never mentioned Doc’s return to Las Vegas and noted a long separation, Doc appears to have changed his plan and decided to settle his affairs in Las Vegas before testing the waters at Tombstone.90
That winter, Hoodoo Brown and his cronies finally went too far. In fact, the situation there may have contributed most to John Henry’s decision to make a permanent move to Arizona. At any rate, events had taken a turn for the worse in Doc’s absence. As the Dodge City Times reported, “shooting scrapes” were all too frequent in Las Vegas, and New Town seemed out of control. On January 22, 1880, Marshal Joe Carson was killed in a gunfight with four men at Close and Patterson’s Saloon. Dave Mather killed one of them outright and wounded the others. Two managed to escape but were caught later by a posse that included Dave Rudabaugh and Josh Webb. The killers had been housed in the local jail only hours when a mob stormed the jail and dragged them to the windmill at the center of the plaza in Old Town to hang them there. Before the two killers could be hanged, however, the mob opened fire on them and riddled them with bullets.91
Afterward, Mysterious Dave Mather was named marshal, and Webb was appointed policeman. Neither appointment really pleased the better class of citizens because of the two men’s suspected complicity in the Dodge City Gang’s activities. Their reputation was not helped when three days after Carson was killed, Mather shot and killed a railroad man named Joseph Castello. He was promptly exonerated of any wrongdoing by a coroner’s jury with Hoodoo Brown presiding.92
Things finally came to a head on March 2, 1880, when two men were killed in unrelated incidents. One killing occurred that evening when James Allen, a waiter at the St. Nicholas Hotel and an associate of Hoodoo Brown’s, shot and killed the traveling salesman James A. Morehead, who was well thought of by the local business community. The fight began over a remark by Morehead about the food at the St. Nicholas. Morehead, who was the bigger of the two men, was besting Allen, when Allen pulled a gun and ordered Morehe
ad to his knees. When Morehead tried to grab the pistol instead, Allen shot him.93
The other episode, which occurred earlier on March 2, near four o’clock in the morning, had a more dramatic effect. It involved Doc’s friend Josh Webb. In the Goodlet and Robinson Saloon, Webb ordered a man named Michael Kelliher to surrender his pistol in compliance with the local ordinance. Kelliher refused, and, in the melee, Webb shot and killed him. Webb was then arrested by his friends Dave Mather and Dave Rudabaugh, of all people. It seemed an open-and-shut case of self-defense, and a coroner’s jury quickly ruled the shooting a “justifiable and absolutely necessary” act.94
The town was finally fed up with Hoodoo Brown’s shenanigans, however, and since the coroner’s jury consisted of members of the Dodge City Gang, the county’s grand jury reviewed the case, concluded that it was premeditated murder, and indicted Webb for murder. Hoodoo Brown and John “Dutchy” Schunderberger, Hoodoo Brown’s right-hand man, were named as accessories. Significantly, immediately after arresting Webb, Mysterious Dave Mather resigned his post as marshal and left town by train bound for Dodge City. He cited “the inadequacy of pay” as his reason, but he may well have recognized the handwriting on the wall. With Mather gone and Webb in jail, New Town was “without a police force,” and the Optic opined that “some action should be taken at once.”95
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