Doc was experiencing something he had not known before. He had had his troubles in the past, but he had been, at most, a peripheral figure in the public life of other towns. Now, when the dapper, well-dressed young man walked down Fremont or Allen Street or took his chair at the faro bank in the Alhambra, people looked at him with a combination of fear and deference. For the first time, too, he had an avowed enemy—a nemesis—in the person of Milton E. Joyce. With all of this came a grudging respect for a dangerous adversary. Though generally quiet and restrained, he could be quick-tempered and vocal, especially when drinking. Though usually unassuming, he had a sense of honor that at times smacked more of inferiority complex than principle. Whatever it was, when it was violated, he was not afraid to seek redress of grievances at the point of a gun.
He was healthier and stronger than he had been in years. No doubt, he was visiting Dr. Glendy King’s hot springs, and the general climate of southern Arizona benefitted him, as he had hoped, even with his long hours in smoky saloons and gambling halls. He was reported to have regained some of his sense of humor, and, although it seems unlikely, the story was told that “if any stranger entered Tombstone wearing a post hat he would follow him round the street ringing a dinner bell.”2 He was robust enough to ride with the Earps and from time to time joined posses and other expeditions. He was associated in the public mind with the Earps, but, in truth, he was never Wyatt Earp’s lackey as legend would later portray him. Had he been, he would have caused Earp less trouble. The most troubling thing was that Doc remained under bond on the charges brought against him by Joyce awaiting disposition by the courts.
Not everyone in Tombstone saw him as a bad man. In 1881, young Billy Hattich, along with his mother and two sisters, moved to Tombstone to join his father, Bartholomew Hattich, who owned a tailor’s shop at 528 Allen Street. Doc, always the dapper dresser, was a customer. Doc took an interest in young Billy and used him to run errands for him. Doc paid the boy fifty cents to a dollar for carrying notes to other people. Billy liked Doc. Hattich said that Doc was friendly, generous, soft-spoken, and a favorite among the town’s kids because he always carried candy in his pocket.3
In spite of everything, John Henry was still his own man, still living by a code that dictated his responses, though modified by the less genteel environment of his Western life. Even his outbursts confirmed that he was his father’s son, jealous of his reputation and quick to brace anyone who impugned it. It was more than his record as a gunfighter that caused men to respect and fear him. They knew that he would not hesitate at flash point, which made him a dangerous adversary and a dependable ally. For much of the summer of 1881, though, he had little role to play in the unfolding drama of Cochise County beyond that of professional gambler and local character. His movements from mid-July until October were not recorded with any dependability, but he was reportedly out of town through much of that time. Most likely, he simply tried to escape the heat, perhaps following the gamblers’ circuit as far away as Prescott to find more congenial climes or journeying to Globe to see Kate as she later insisted he did. Later on, however, some would claim darker explanations of his movements. And all of those started with the men known as Cow-Boys.
Doc had known men like them since his days in Texas. They were not merely cattle drovers, or cowboys, in the ordinary usage of the terms, although they shared characteristics with them. The favored press usage, “Cow-Boys,” suggested more than profession; it designated a harder, restless, free-wheeling, lawless lot. Most of them arrived on the heels of the silver boom, many already on the run from other parts of the West and drawn to both the boom phenomenon and the relative isolation that southern Arizona afforded. They were what Virgil Earp called “saddlers,” men with no homes save their saddles, no loyalties except to themselves and one another.4 A Galeyville hotel owner, who came to know many of the Cow-Boys, provided an insightful portrait of them:
They are wild, reckless men from all over the world. They do not claim a home, a business or close affiliation with civilization. Some are miners from Colorado and the Black Hills, others are escaped criminals and refugees from all parts of the world. Some are mere reckless adventurers who have followed the line of new railroads since the first rail was laid from the Missouri River or in the Sacramento Valley. They do not work, and they are never without money. They live in a style that you city folks would despise no doubt, but still they are never actually without food, a good horse, arms, ammunition and blankets. They are not all brave, and often sneak away from danger, but in my twenty years’ intercourse with them I never knew one of them to whine and squeal when he knew he had to die.5
John Henry could admire that attitude and see in those hard men reminders of the free grazers of his native Georgia. Some of them even had a kind of honor that a man like Doc could appreciate. In the beginning, the Cow-Boys were of little concern to John Henry, except when they sat across the table from him at faro, monte, or poker. Virgil explained why:
As soon as they are in funds they ride into town, drink, gamble, and fight. They spread their money as free as water in the saloons, dancehouses, and faro banks, and this is one reason they have so many friends in town. All that large class of degraded characters who gather the crumbs of such carouses stand ready to assist them out of any trouble or into any paying rascality. The saloons and gambling houses into whose treasuries most of the money is ultimately turned receive them cordially and must be called warm friends of the cowboys.6
John Henry Holliday, in a photograph believed to have been taken at Tombstone. This photograph was first published by Bat Masterson in his Human Life series, “Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier.” It was also identified as Doc by both Kate Harony and Josephine Earp. Still, despite this strong provenance by people who knew him, some recent studies have questioned whether it is he.
For a man like Doc, then, there was no inherent animosity. The Cow-Boys helped pay his bills and provide the standard of living he sought. And he was not one to judge the source of the coin and greenbacks that filled his coffers. Doc even claimed to have known some of them in Texas before coming to Arizona. As Tombstone grew and more of the Cow-Boys frequented the town, however, they were increasingly the subject of news reports and editorial commentary. Both in terms of local incidents and as a larger territorial problem, they concerned public officials, community and territorial leaders, and the law enforcement agencies from top to bottom.7 Of themselves, such matters might have been little more than curiosities to Doc, but for the Earps, as law enforcement officers and agents for the express and mining companies, the behavior of the Cow-Boys was another matter. It was this simple connection that drew John Henry into the controversy.
The Cow-Boy problem evolved over time, although it had already attracted attention before Tombstone and its satellite towns sprang up in southeastern Arizona. Along the border with Mexico from El Paso to Yuma, smuggling and international theft had been a problem for years, and, in fact, the practice of stealing Mexican cattle for sale in the United States to fulfill government beef contracts and swell the herds of Southwestern ranchers was tolerated, even encouraged. It was a clandestine practice, largely out of the public eye so long as the border regions were thinly populated. The development of mining towns like Tombstone changed that, first, by increasing demand for beef, and, second, by inevitably making the illegal activities more visible. The problem developed “on account of the tide of miners flooding in, thus creating demand for Mexican goods,” as Special Agent R. M. Moore of the U.S. Customs Service put it. The increased volume of illegal cattle and other smuggled goods also swelled the volume of Mexican protests in official circles as well as the raw numbers and boldness of the Cow-Boys. By the end of 1879, the border problem was increasingly the subject of both diplomatic discourse and editorial commentary in the territory’s newspapers.8
Some of the Cow-Boys had arrived relatively early and owned ranches in the area. Newman Haynes “Old Man” Clanton and his sons, Phineas (c
alled Fin), Ike, and Billy, moved into southern Arizona in the mid-1870s. Locating near Fort Bowie, they enjoyed a mixed reputation almost from the beginning, as both reputable settlers and as parasites looking to profit from government contracts. Old Man Clanton counted Henry Hooker, the Sierra Bonita rancher, and John P. Clum, then still the Indian agent at San Carlos, as friends. Of the Clantons, Ike was the most troublesome, because he was quick-tempered and boastful. He was prone to run with a rowdy crowd, but Old Man Clanton generally kept him in check. In 1877, the Clantons settled at Lewis Springs below Charleston and constructed a fortlike adobe atop a hill. When the Tombstone boom occurred, Ike even ran a restaurant in town for a time. But they were mainly stockmen. Curiously, though, the Clantons did not have a registered brand in Pima or, later, Cochise counties.9
Robert Findley “Frank” McLaury and Thomas Clark McLaury came to Arizona from Iowa by way of Texas. They appear to have been in Arizona as early as 1877, although there was a report that they worked for John Chisum in New Mexico for a time. They were clearly in southeastern Arizona in 1878 and employed on Walter Vail’s Empire Ranch. By the time silver was found at Goose Flats, and before Tombstone boomed, the McLaury brothers had laid claim to a stretch of prime grazing land west of Tombstone between the Babacomari and the San Pedro rivers. Later, they sold these lands to John Slaughter and settled at Soldier’s Hole in the Sulphur Springs Valley east of Tombstone.10
In the beginning, at least, both the Clantons and the McLaurys were regarded as respectable ranchers by some of the area’s citizens. William M. Breakenridge, no friend of the Earps, would state flatly in his memoir that “the Clantons looked after the rustlers’ interests on the San Pedro,” while “the McLaurys looked after the stock brought up through Mexico through Agua Prieta, where Douglass now stands, into the Sulphur Spring[s] Valley.”11 And John H. Behan, Cochise County’s sheriff who would be charged with collusion with them, said, “The Clanton brothers and McLowrys [sic] were a tough lot of rustlers, who were the main perpetrators of that rascality rife in that region.”12
Other men, like Joe Hill and Frank Patterson, ran small operations. Together, these men controlled lands in the San Pedro near Tombstone, the Sulphur Springs Valley, Rustler’s Park in the Dragoon Mountains, and east to Galeyville and the Animas Valley in New Mexico, and south into Mexico. With government contracts to be garnered and big ranchers like Walter Vail and Henry Hooker in the market for cattle, slipping into Mexico was easy enough. Buyers in the settlements asked few questions, and stealing Mexican cattle enjoyed a semirespectable position in the economy of the region.
Special Agent Moore explained that “[a]s matters now are, Cattle men drive large droves of cattle from Mexico on to their ranches and report what number they please at the Customs House in Tucson, and from what I can learn I am of the opinion that not over 25% of the duties have heretofore been collected upon cattle.”13 The process was simple enough, according to a friend of the Cow-Boys: “Whenever a man wants a herd of cattle and contacts any of the leading spirits among them that he wants a bunch of stock, and a price is agreed upon, the cattle are forthcoming.”14
Most of the ranchers in the area ventured south less and less as the freebooters moved in. These more desperate types were often fugitives from other territories and states and sometimes added stolen cattle from New Mexico and as far away as Texas to their stock. Robert Martin and his gang, numbering more than a hundred, arrived early. By the time of Martin’s demise in December 1880, the numbers had swelled, creating the appearance of organized gangs, when in fact most were independent operators, loosely linked by a common cause. “The ‘cowboys’ have no chief, nor do they run in gangs as is generally supposed,” explained a local. “No sir, the ‘cowboys’ don’t band together in droves but come and go about their own personal business whenever they desire to go.”15
The prototype of this sort was John Ringo. Born in Iowa, Ringo had traveled with his family to California as a child, witnessing along the way the accidental self-inflicted fatal shooting of his father. Already troubled as a young man, Ringo went to Texas, where he acquired a reputation as a desperate man and a man killer before he moved on to Arizona in 1879. There, he shot a man named Louis Hancock in the neck for refusing to take a drink with him. In July 1880, he, Ike Clanton, and several others were involved in another violent spree at Safford. He was a morose, brooding man and a heavy drinker. He appears to have been well read and well mannered, which helped to spawn the story that he was well educated. Even in his own time, he was romanticized by some who knew him, but he was still feared as a dangerous loner.16
Ringo and Curly Bill Brocius were perceived as Cow-Boy leaders, probably based on their frequent escapades in the mining camps, but together with men like Pony Deal, Zwing Hunt, Hank Swilling, Johnny Barnes, Milt Hicks, Bill Hicks, “Rattlesnake Bill” Johnson, Florentino Cruz, Jake Gauze, Jim Hughes, Charlie Snow, Alex Arnett, Bud Snow, Charlie Green, Tall Bell, Charlie Thomas, Jim Crane, Luther King, Harry Head, and dozens—perhaps scores—more, they formed a loose league of rustlers and thieves that was often perceived to be an organized gang. Their links to the McLaurys, the Clantons, Joe Hill, Frank Patterson, and other ranchers did not go unnoticed, which first roused suspicions that the ranchers were part of the Cow-Boy scourge, as well.
Richard Rule, a capable journalist employed for a time by the Tombstone Nugget, would summarize the situation neatly:
There is no doubt that most of the cattle sold in the vicinity of Tombstone—more in the vicinity than in the town itself—during the past two years have been stolen. It is a current saying that all a man needs there is a band of fifty cattle to draw to, and he can come out with as many as he wants. It is necessary, though, that he have a small band to start with. A good many of the cowboys have ranches and live in the guise of simple cattle farmers. Those who make a business of stealing horses and cattle [a]re wild reckless fellows, but in their business with the men of Tombstone have a pretty good reputation. They pay their bills, and with the balance of their money are very liberal, and that of course brings them many friends of one class.17
For a time, then, the Cow-Boys enjoyed a kind of immunity from the law as authorities “looked the other way” and businessmen in the camps operated as witting and unwitting partners. Not everyone was so tolerant, however. As early as January 1879, protests were being registered with Governor John Charles Frémont at Prescott about Cow-Boy depredations, and by April 1880 U.S. Customs Agent Moore was reporting that over the previous two years “not less than 8000 or 9000 head of beef cattle that paid no duties” had been driven up the San Simon Valley out of Sonora. Moore noted in particular Walter Vail’s “crooked transactions,” which consisted primarily of purchasing illegal cattle.18
Not all cattlemen were pleased with the situation. T. W. Ayles complained that “[h]onest dealers in stock must either have protection or join the band of robbers and their accessories, the purchasers and hiders.”19 And following the disturbance near Safford involving Ike Clanton, Joe Hill, and John Ringo, the mill supervisor Jerome B. Collins said of the Cow-Boys, “It will be God’s blessing for this valley to get rid of them.”20 That would be easier said than done, and, over time, the Cow-Boys would prove problematic even to their associates among the ranchers, who acted as the primary middlemen between the rustlers and the government contractors, mining camp butchers, and other purchasers of beef. Not only were the Cow-Boys less choosy about whose cattle they stole but also, as the towns grew, they saw opportunity in other forms of criminal activity, including horse thievery and hold-ups.
On May 21, 1880, a stagecoach bound west from Shakespeare, New Mexico, was accosted on the downgrade through Granite Pass nine miles east of San Simon Station. Four men, two on each side of the road, ordered the driver to halt and immediately opened fire. The driver, John Henry, was shot twice in the leg, and Antonio Chaves, who was beside him, was killed. At first fire, the horses broke into a dead run, and Henry managed to reach San Simon Station. I
t would not be the last such incident in the region.21
In August 1880, under the headline THE RUSTLERS, the Tombstone Epitaph offered the following report: “Through George Fitzpatrick, recently from New Mexico, we learn of the existence of a gang of cattle and horse thieves, organized near the Arizona line under the above title. The band is comprised principally of young Americans. Several instances have occurred in which they have dismounted parties and taken their horses. So far as heard from, they have not engaged in anything but theft.”22 The Cow-Boys eventually became so brazen that they stopped a freighter using oxen to pull his wagons, stole them, and drove them to San Carlos, where they sold them as beef cattle, “When the contractor remonstrated with the cowboys as they were plundering his train, they told him he must be a d——d fool to team with oxen in Arizona. He ought to use mules.”23
The extension of criminal activities to stage robbery and horse theft on American soil changed things. For men like Hooker and Vail and even for Old Man Clanton and the McLaurys, the crime associated with the new Cow-Boys was problematic because investigation of these activities drew attention to the practices that had been tolerated in the past and tarred the ranchers with the same brush as hold-up men and horse thieves. Indeed, by the spring of 1881 the U.S. Customs Service was actively investigating, although Agent Moore declared, “It is evident that we have not reached the bottom of all the crooked cattle transactions.”24 Yet, except for the bigger operators like Hooker, ranchers were more or less forced to coexist with the outlaw newcomers because of their own vulnerability to the depredations of the Cow-Boys. The dilemma was illustrated by the episode that first drew the Earps into contact with the Cow-Boys.
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