Eventually, Clanton’s fears seemed sufficiently allayed that Joe Hill left Tombstone to put the plan into motion. He returned ten days later and announced that he had arrived too late; Leonard and Head had been killed the day before he arrived. On June 10, Leonard and Head were shot by Ike and Bill Haslett near the New Mexico line after the Hasletts had been warned that Leonard and Head had threatened to kill them on sight to gain control of their ranch. Leonard still had “two big holes in his belly” from the robbery attempt and begged to be put out of his misery after the confrontation with the Hasletts. Both Leonard and Head soon died. A short time later, Crane and fifteen to twenty Cow-Boys caught the Hasletts and an immigrant named Sigmund Biertzhoff in a saloon and riddled them with bullets.87
The deaths of Leonard and Head short-circuited Wyatt Earp’s plan and deprived Ike and his friends of any possibility of rewards. What was left was a potentially deadly secret between them, and the summary vengeance by the Cow-Boys against the Hasletts gave Ike Clanton legitimate reason to fear what would happen if the secret ever came out. Finally, the deaths of Leonard and Head reduced the chances of being able to exonerate Doc of the suspicions against him. Virgil’s concerns turned out to be justified and potentially troublesome for him as well.
The town fathers were not entirely happy with Marshal Ben Sippy, so when he asked for a two-week leave of absence on June 6, it was granted. Virgil became acting city marshal in his place. He immediately impressed locals with his attention to duty and his even-handedness. On June 9, Ike Clanton got into a quarrel with Denny McCann (also known as Daniel Burns), a gambler known to be friends with the Earps, in a saloon on Allen Street. McCann slapped Clanton, after which both men left to get their guns. They met again outside the Wells, Fargo office prepared for gunplay, when Virgil and Constable Hugh Haggerty “stepped between them and spoiled a good item,” as the Epitaph put it.88
While Wyatt Earp’s plot with Ike Clanton was unraveling, on June 19 the press reported, “There was a little triangular matinee between a couple of gamblers and another party Sunday morning, which had one time threatened a good sized item, but it fortunately ended without bloodshed.” It was a discreet but tantalizing notice, especially since Virgil Earp arrested Wyatt and hauled him into Recorder’s Court before Judge Wallace and charged him “with disturbing the peace and fighting in violation of an ordinance.” Wallace fined him $20 and discharged him.89
The details of the “little triangular matinee” escaped direct documentation, but circumstances suggest that this may have been the occasion of Johnny Tyler’s final attempt to cause trouble at the Oriental. Rickabaugh had just opened his new club rooms above the saloon on June 11. Milt Joyce was arrested on that very day by officer James Coyle for “fighting” and paid court costs in Wallace’s court. Wyatt would say later that Tyler was “sent to hoorah [the] place,” but he never said by whom, and no reliable account of what followed has been located. Earp’s biographer Stuart N. Lake claimed that Tyler brought “a dozen followers” to disrupt play at the Oriental. According to him, Tyler braced Rickabaugh at his own faro table. That was bold enough in itself, for Rickabaugh had a reputation as a fighter. Still, according to the story, Tyler laid his money on the queen and coolly told the big man that if he did not win his bet, he would blow away the chips. Unperturbed, Rickabaugh drew the card from the box. It was not a queen.
Before Tyler could make good his threat, he was dragged from his seat as Wyatt Earp seized his earlobe between his thumb and index finger. Tyler had not been aware of Earp’s presence, and when he realized who had him, he protested that he did not know that Earp had an interest in the Oriental. According to Lake, Wyatt assured him that he did and told him to tell his friends that it was the “fighting interest,” after which he propelled Tyler out of the saloon into Allen Street. Holliday was on hand that evening to keep Tyler’s friends from stepping in. He covered them with his six-gun and greatly enjoyed Wyatt’s humiliating dispatch of his foe with appropriate commentary.90
If this, or some less melodramatic incident involving Tyler, was indeed the affair for which Earp was arrested in June, the expulsion of Tyler was rendered anticlimactic when, on June 22, the Oriental burned to the ground in a disastrous fire that leveled several blocks of downtown Tombstone. Joyce desperately tried to rescue $1,200 from his safe, but he was driven out by the flames. Afterward, he decided to get out of the saloon business and transferred his interest in the Oriental to Rickabaugh and his partners. It was weeks, though, before the Oriental was able to reopen under new management. By then, the gamblers’ war was effectively over, and Johnny Tyler was in Leadville, Colorado.91
Milt Joyce now turned his attention primarily to politics as chairman of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors. At the time, Cochise County law allowed county officials to keep a percentage of local taxes for themselves. Though not uncommon, this practice was not popular. “Much dissatisfaction is manifested at the high rate of taxation decreed by the County Supervisors—$2.83 on $100—and at their course in allowing the Sheriff 10 per cent for collecting it, a percentage whose exorbitance is without a precedent,” wrote Clara Brown. With Harry Woods as undersheriff as well as editor of the Nugget, it was no surprise that the Nugget supported the county government. Nor was it surprising that the Republican Epitaph, edited by Mayor John P. Clum, attacked Joyce as the leader of the “Ten-percent Ring,” while suggesting that Behan was so preoccupied with collecting taxes that law enforcement was practically an afterthought.92
In the meantime, Virgil Earp was continuing to prove himself to be a capable officer. During the fire that destroyed downtown Tombstone, Virgil won praise for using his police force to support the firefighting effort and afterward mobilizing a large special police force to protect property, prevent looting, and displace lot jumpers who had squatted on choice lots in the burned-out district. His prompt and firm action was approved by businessmen and the leaders of the Citizens Safety Committee. It was no surprise then, that on June 28, when it was clear that Sippy was not coming back, Virgil was appointed marshal permanently. On July 4, 1881, he was officially sworn in.93
Joyce’s political clout was about to strike closer to the Earps and Holliday than tax use, however. Kate came back to Tombstone for another visit in June and lost little time catching up on local gossip. Arguments with Doc followed, with all the old issues rehashed once again, and Kate began to drink heavily. In this vulnerable state, she encountered John Behan, and possibly Milt Joyce, who sympathized with her and baited her until she signed an affidavit accusing Doc of complicity in the attempted stage robbery and murders of Bud Philpott and Peter Roerig.94
On July 5, 1881, Sheriff Behan arrested Doc Holliday. Charges were brought against him both for attempting to rob the U.S. mail and for the murder of Bud Philpott. Holliday was taken before Justice Wells Spicer and released on a bond of $5,000 guaranteed by Wyatt and Doc’s employers, John Meagher and J. L. Melgren. A hearing was set for nine o’clock on the morning of July 9.95 Later on the afternoon of July 5, Virgil Earp arrested Kate for being drunk and disorderly. Apparently, her binge was not over, and Virgil kept her in jail overnight. The next morning she was fined $12.50 and released. The Nugget observed, “Miss Kate Elder sought surcease of sorrow in the flowing bowl. She succeeded so well that when she woke up she found herself on the Chief’s register with two ‘Ds’ appended to it. She paid her matriculation fee of $12.50 and departed.”96
Her education was not yet completed. Sober, but still angry, she directed her ire at someone (the record is silent on whom, although several were properly in her sights) with sufficient fervor that she was arrested again, this time for “threats against life.” In Judge Andrew J. Felter’s court, she was pronounced guilty, but she promptly hired Wells Spicer and appealed her case to the commissioner of the first judicial district, T. J. Drum, who granted her a writ of habeas corpus and discharged her. Said the Nugget, “Such is the result of a warrant sworn out by an enraged and intoxicated woman.”97
Kate always claimed (and it seems logical) that during her quadrille with Tombstone’s judiciary, the Earps pressured her to change her story. In fact, Kate’s version of affairs had a more deeply sinister hue that revealed even decades later an almost pathological hatred of the Earps. Her affidavit of accusations against Doc was not the result of intoxication, she said, but of her desire to get Doc away from the Earps. She blamed what happened on them and explained the situation this way:
I became desperate and in a vain hope of breaking up their association with Doc, whom I loved, I swore out a warrant charging him with the murder of Philpott and Roegrig [sic] and he was arrested by Sheriff Behan. But Wyatt Earp and others of his gang of legalized outlaws furnished $5,000 bail to get him out. It took all of the persecution of the Earps and other law officers aligned with them to make me quit. In doing it I had known I was taking a desperate chance, and I was not astonished when I lost out.98
Kate never explained how accusing Doc of robbery and murder was going to help him. Nevertheless, she claimed that Behan took her to Spicer and that he interrogated her at length about the complicity of the Earps in the robbery attempt and grew impatient with her when she did not provide specific details. She also claimed that Virgil locked her in a room at the Cosmopolitan Hotel and pressured her to recant her story. “Of course,” she said, “I am not positive about the hold-ups…. But although I have no positive knowledge of the Earps and Doc having held up those stages between Hereford, Charleston, and Bisbee, I do know that they went often at night to those places. And now and then Doc dropped significant remarks that had me worried.”99
In yet another version of her story, Kate was more specific. “All I know is how Doc acted that afternoon before the stage was held up,” she wrote to Anton Mazzanovich. She explained that Doc came to their room and quickly changed clothes. When she asked why he was in such a hurry, he said he had business and would not be able to take her to supper. Later, Warren Earp came to her door with a note from Doc, asking her to send his rifle to him by Warren. Warren told her he did not know why Doc needed the rifle. She said, “Doc did not come home until late that night. He did not bring his rifle back. It was four or five days after the holdup that he brought the rifle back. I thought that after the holdup things looked very suspicious about the Earps and Doc. Something tells me that Doc was in with Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan in that affair.”100
According to Kate, the most substantial evidence she had of wrongdoing came from Mattie Earp, Wyatt’s second wife, several years later when she told Kate that the Earp women believed their husbands were involved in illegal activities. Kate also alleged that Wyatt had once shown her masks made of rope similar to those found at the scene of the crime. She would claim that after she was released, Napa Nick invited her to take a buggy ride with him. She declined, she said, and was told later by Mattie that the gambler had been hired by the Earps to kill her.101
In yet another account, however, Kate did not even mention her role in Doc’s arrest. She recalled being in Tombstone at the time of the robbery attempt, with no reference to the events of July. She even appeared surprised at the allegations:
Now, after all these years I see it in print that it was the Earps and Doc Holliday [who attempted to rob the stage and killed Philpott and Roerig] and that Doc Holliday was the one that killed Bud Philpot [sic]. Although Doc did not come to his room until late that night that does not mean that the Earps and Holliday were in that hold-up. There were plenty of people in Tombstone who knew where the Earps and Holliday were that night. There was no arrest made. Nothing was done about it. There could not be.102
The great difficulty with these statements is that they are all recollections written by a woman anxious to protect her own reputation. They consist primarily of speculations and suspicions and are short on facts. Unfortunately, her sworn affidavit accusing Doc of complicity in the affair has not been found, so the question of exactly what she said at the time remains unanswered.
Nevertheless, the case was handed to Lyttleton Price for prosecution. Price investigated the charges, and at ten o’clock on the morning of July 9 Doc appeared before Justice Spicer:
The District Attorney, addressing the court, said that he had examined all of the witnesses summoned for the prosecution and from their statements he was satisfied that there was not the slightest evidence to show the guilt of the defendant; that the statements of the witnesses did not even amount to a suspicion of the guilt of the defendant, and he was therefore asking that the complaint be withdrawn and the case be dismissed.
Spicer dismissed the case, and “thus ended what, at one time, was supposed to be an important case.”103
Doc’s innocence could hardly have been stated more emphatically. And yet, the Nugget’s assessment of the outcome was not completely accurate. Doc was free of legal jeopardy but not of suspicion. If anything, suspicions had increased among those looking for reasons to be suspicious. Doc’s friendship with the fragile, flawed, addicted, consumptive Bill Leonard first aroused suspicions, but Kate’s charges spawned a whole new set of speculations that extended beyond Doc to the Earps themselves.
Some were already raising questions about the Wells, Fargo agent Marshall Williams’s ties to the stage robbers; he may have been the person referred to in the earlier report that “it is certain that several men around Tombstone, among them one who was a participant in the preliminary pursuit, are under surveillance.” And in the minds of others predisposed to believe the worst anyway, the possibility of a conspiracy involving the Earps now seemed plausible, or at least politically useful. Once the public accusation had been made against Holliday, however implausible it was, a few nurtured and exploited the notion of the Earps’ involvement. As Wyatt recalled years later, “I was Holliday’s friend and they tried to injure me every way they could.”104
Unfortunately, Holliday never made a public statement on the issue or left a clear presentation of his version of what happened. Even some of the Earps’ friends who did not care for Doc had lingering questions. For the moment, though, the feelings were largely unspoken or at most whispered. Still, Virgil knew what Wyatt would not admit: Doc Holliday had become a liability to the Earps. Ironically, the whole affair revolved around loyalty: Doc’s loyalty to Bill Leonard and Wyatt’s loyalty to Doc. The truth of what happened may have escaped the recovery of history, but no credible evidence ever linked Doc Holliday to the attempted robbery.
Wyatt Earp made perhaps the most telling observation when he told Walter Noble Burns that “Doc was not in on the Benson stage hold up.” Wyatt emphasized that Holliday “never did such a thing as holdups in his life.”105 Wyatt understood Doc’s character. Doc lived on the edge. He was guilty of many things. He was quick-tempered when he drank and had a penchant for getting himself into trouble. He did not always choose his friends well, but nothing in his life before or after the Benson stage robbery attempt indicated that he was the type of man who would participate in the kind of affair that happened on the Benson road.
Still, Doc may well have known more than he said. Frederick Bechdolt would later write, after speaking with Earp, “He does not try to exonerate Holliday from knowledge of the robbery, although he makes a show of claiming Holliday was entirely innocent of knowledge.”106 If, as Wyatt believed, Doc visited Leonard that day in March, Doc may have learned of his friend’s intent. Perhaps that was why he made a point of riding back to Tombstone in the company of Old Man Fuller or why he offered Bob Paul a drink of whiskey at Watervale—to make sure that he had an alibi. He kept quiet out of loyalty to one friend and created troubles for another, better one. However, riding with Old Man Fuller and offering Bob Paul a drink of whiskey could as easily be explained by his Southern breeding (which emphasized both conviviality and congeniality) and need not imply either an attempt to build an alibi or something more sinister as suggested by Breakenridge.
Kate’s account of Doc being called out late at night and returning to sit on the bed saying,
“The damned fool. I did not think that of him,” almost certainly applied to Leonard. After all, the names of the suspects in the case were not publicly announced until after Wyatt Earp returned to Tombstone from the chase, and Doc’s alleged comment, “Well, I don’t know what I am going to stack up against today. I am getting tired of it all,” was appropriate to his realization that his friendship with Leonard would raise questions and make him a suspect.
Now, in July 1881, a thicket of rumor and suspicion encircled the Earps on Doc’s account, and Wyatt found himself with his own potentially explosive secret growing out of the scheme with men he could not trust and who could be depended on to do whatever it took to save their own hides. For the moment, though, the troubles were largely hidden from view. No public accusations were made against the Earps, and, in fact, they continued to enjoy the confidence and support of Tombstone’s citizenry, especially the business elite. Stuart Lake said that Doc offered to leave town, but that Wyatt told him all that he asked was that Doc send “that woman” away. Both are plausible. After his recent experiences, Doc did not need much encouragement concerning Kate. She was soon on her way back to Globe.107 Ike Clanton and his friends could not be sent away, however, and they were the greater threat.
Chapter 6
FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
[H]ere is a man who, once a friend, is always a friend; once an enemy, is always an enemy.
—Gunnison Daily News—Democrat, June 18, 1882
At midsummer of 1881, John Henry Holliday found himself with an unenviable notoriety in Tombstone. Although he had been legally cleared of charges relating to the Benson stage robbery attempt and the murders of Bud Philpott and Peter Roerig, suspicions remained. For many people, including some of Wyatt Earp’s friends and supporters, Doc represented what was wrong with Tombstone. “Yes. ‘Doc [Holliday] was a tough citizen and a bad egg,’ and I was fully aware of the situation between Doc and Wyatt,” Fred Dodge would recall later. “Doc never played square with anyone in that country.”1 Dodge would always believe that Doc was involved in the stage robbery attempt at Drew’s Station, whatever the district attorney and judge had said, and he was not alone. Wyatt Earp, though, stood by his friend.
Doc Holliday Page 19
