Happy Trails to Some

In his later years, Wyatt got tired of people asking him about the OK Corral.  After all, he said, he had lived in Tombstone only about eighteen months and that was only a small part of a life that stretched more than eighty years.

The truth is that afterwards nothing really measured up to those days in Tombstone.  As fitting for an indicted murderer in the old West, Wyatt did one final stint as a deputy sheriff in Colorado, but after that his life was really pretty humdrum, actually.  That is unless if you think the life of a wandering, homeless, gambler and saloonkeeper (at present) is exciting.

Sometimes, a few sparks would smolder through.  Shortly after Wyatt left Arizona, Luke Short, a gambler and saloon owner in Dodge City, got run out of town by the mayor.  Luke vented his spleen to the newspapers and called up a number of his friends including Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, to come and help him out. The sight of the now notorious gunmen moseying into town led the mayor and his friends to settle with Luke amicably.  Luke was allowed to keep his saloon business, and Wyatt and his buddies got their picture taken.

Two years later, in Lake City, Colorado, Wyatt had his final gunfight. He was accused of cheating at cards. Hard words were followed by drawn guns and Wyatt, for once, came out second best with a bullet wound in the arm.

Anticipating the mores of the later generations with surprising accuracy, he and Josie mostly spent their time trying to get rich with a minimum of work and a maximum of profit.  Although he kept trying prospecting and mining speculation, his most reliable cash flow was from running saloons.  And as before his real money here came from gambling.  He would sometimes see his old friends and acquaintances but mostly he and Josie kept moving around.

At times he'd get some news about Doc Holliday, who remained as cantankerous as ever.  Doc, like Wyatt, was still a wanted man in Arizona and extradition efforts were made to get him back for trial.  Fortunately Bat Masterson (who was now deputy sheriff in Trinidad, Colorado) managed to keep him out of Arizona by filing a lesser charge against him and then let him go.  Doc headed up into the Rockies and into Leadville.  It was a rather unusual town which within a space of five years boasted sponsoring a lecture by Oscar Wilde on aesthetics and housing Doc Holliday.

In Leadville he continued to find trouble.  Shortly after arriving he got into a shooting scrape with none other than Billy Allen, the same cowboy who testified (probably truthfully) that Doc fired the first shots at the OK Corral. Billy was wounded but recovered. Doc was arrested and acquitted since Billy seemed to have actually been the instigator.

But Doc's tuberculosis was catching up on him fast. In 1887 he went to Glenwood Springs, a famous health resort on the western side of the Rockies, to live out his few remaining months.  On the morning of November 8, he asked for a glass of whiskey, said "This is funny", and died.

He was carried up the hill to the town's cemetery and buried.  A surprising number of people attended the funeral and the newspapers even said nice things about him, even painting him up as a law and order man.  That WAS funny.

Today the the unsuspecting tourists, lured by signs of "Doc Holliday's Grave", can still make the long, steep, and laborious walk up the hill, where, panting and gasping for air, they can follow the well-placed signs only to find out that it's just a marker placed in Doc's memory and that he's buried "somewhere" in the cemetery.  Even now the unwary can get conned by Doc Holliday.

Ike Clanton may have had some satisfaction when he heard that Doc, the man who he believed killed his younger brother, had breathed his last.  But this was a fleeting pleasure since Ike himself was killed in an altercation the following month.

As anything to do with the Earps and the Clantons you can pick out about three or four different versions as to what happened, and each is staunchly defended by its advocates.

The Earp Champions of course say he was caught rustling cattle by a deputy sheriff and resisted arrest.  What could the deputy sheriff do but defend himself?  Once again justice prevailed and this proves Ike had been a rustler all along

Right?

By now you can guess that the The Earp Detractors don't agree.  The man who shot Ike, they say, was nothing but a "correspondence school detective" and some actually hint he may have been a killer hired by Wyatt in one last act of revenge.  As most stories about Ike or Wyatt, neither extreme is likely correct, and the truth is that no one really knows what happened.

It was Bat Masterson who made the transitions to the twentieth Century as well as anyone.  And actually a lot better than most.  As he moved into middle age, he realized he would have to leave law enforcement to younger men.  Besides, Bat himself had no objections to finding more lucrative work.

So he moved to Denver and began to promote sporting events.  Naturally in the dying days of the Old West this included horse racing, but his favorite sport seems to have been boxing.  That professional pugilism was still illegal in every state in the Union didn't bother Bat at all.

Again Bat's intelligence and affability served him well and he flourished at his new profession.  He was even one Jake Kilrain's officials when Jake fought John L. Sullivan in the last bare knuckle contest. This was the bout that lasted 75 rounds and brings up horrifying pictures of men pounding each other into gelatinous misshapen and strawberry colored masses.

But in reality, bare knuckle fighting under the London Prize rules had many aspects of wrestling, and a round was over if one of the fighters was simply thrown.  And being thrown itself was interpreted fairly liberally.  As long as one of the fighters was simply touched by his opponent, he could fall onto the ground and the round would be over; sort of the nineteenth century version of a quarterback running out the clock.  Some rounds lasted only seconds and according to Bat, in the last forty rounds of the Kilrain-Sullivan fight no one threw a single punch.

As a boxing promoter Bat naturally became acquainted with the more important of the country's newspapermen and he himself began to turn to journalism.  In 1907, the editor of the national magazine "Human Life" asked Bat to write an article about the gunfighters he had known.  He praised Wyatt, Luke Short, Ben Thompson, and Bill Tilghman and trashed Doc. This article reintroduced Wyatt's name to a new generation, and set a major precedence as to which gunfighters would be the subject of study by twentieth century historians.  This was probably the beginning of the legendary Wyatt Earp.

Bat's dual career of boxing and journalism gradually pushed him further East.  He entered into a long-lived marriage to a former dance hall girl.  They settled in New York City and quite literally lived happily ever after.

Bat was always the first to admit his reputation as a gunfighter was based on exaggeration and hype and he continued to be both amused and irritated by it.  Once a pesky admirer asked for a gun of his for a keepsake. Bat went to a pawn shop, bought a pistol, and carved twenty one notches in the handle.  The kid asked bug eyed if Bat really had killed twenty one men.  "I didn't tell him yes and I didn't tell him no, and I didn't exactly lie to him," Bat later said.  "I just said I had never counted Mexicans or Indians and left it at that. He went away pleased a punch." The truth is that Bat Masterson may have killed only one man when he was twenty, completely in self-defense, and was in only three verifiable gunfights.

But the reputation WAS useful.  In 1905 Teddy Roosevelt appointed him deputy federal marshal for New York City.  By then deputy marshals were actually paid a salary rather than in the old days of the fee system when all they got two dollars for each man they brought in (alive).  So it wasn't too bad a job.  But with a change of administration, that particular job was eliminated. Bat didn't mind. He was getting too old for that sort of stuff.

And besides he was making good money as a sports promoter and in the first two decades of the twentieth century was probably the nation's top authority on boxing.  He ended up as a sports writer and newspaper executive for the New York Morning Telegraph, where sitting at his desk on November 21, 1921, he died of a heart attack.  Unlike Doc, Bat died with his boots on.

On the surface Johnny Behan did pretty well for himself.  On the surface, that is. He kept wrangling political jobs and was appointed director of the territorial prison at Yuma.  Now restored as a museum, anyone can walk along the old the cell blocks where Johnny did.

Continuing to use his clout, Johnny wrangled a commission in the Spanish American War, and later he returned to Arizona as a salaried clerk in the territorial legislature.  But he never seemed to shake talk about corruption and ineffectual administration, and all in all he probably wasn't a very happy man.  He died in 1912, the year Arizona became a state.

Although he never regained the use of his left arm, Virgil got back into law enforcement and as usual became respected as an able and and efficient law officer.  Later he opened a private detective agency in Prescott and intermittently spent time with Allie prospecting.  One suspects he didn't really take this seriously and it was more to satisfy the wunderlust that all the Earps seemed to have.

Virgil and Allie's relatively quiet and peaceful life had a big blip in 1895 when they got a letter from a lady who claimed she was Virgil's wife.  Not only that, she said she had born Virgil a daughter.

The biggest problem was that it was true.  It seems that at seventeen Virgil had eloped with a young girl and then went off fight in the Union army.  That was as much to keep away from her pappy as it was motivated by his patriotism.  Like all the Earps Virgil combined ideality with pragmatism.  Anyway the new Mrs. Earp heard Virgil had been killed, and when Virgil got back presumably he thought she had died.

Actually she had gone west with her family and thinking she was a widow eventually remarried.  But with the notoriety of the Tombstone days making the name of Earp at least vaguely familiar in the country, she had learned that Virgil was still very much alive and well.  Fortunately for all involved, everything accepted the situation as it was, and the two families became friends.

In 1905, Virgil and Allie decided to spend some time prospecting up in Goldfield, Nevada.  While they were there Wyatt and Josie stopped by for a visit.  Shortly afterwards in the same camp, Virgil caught pneumonia and died.  He was 63.  It was his relatively young death together with Bat's articles that put the reputation of Virgil - who was really the lawman of the family - in shadow of Wyatt.  This continued irritate Allie, who lived until 1941.

Warren, Wyatt's youngest brother, seemed to have gotten into the Earp mystique by his brief but significant role he played in Frank Stillwell's death.  Eventually he succumbed to a terminal case of the Earp Big Head Syndrome.  It seems that after his murder indictment languished out of legality, he wandered back into Arizona where he swaggered around the various towns thinking of himself as the official successor of Wyatt Earp.

But he wasn't.  One night in 1900 he walked into a saloon and got into an argument with a young cowboy. According to one version of the story Warren went for his gun, but almost immediately found out that a gun left in a hotel room was useless against someone in a barroom down the street. Warren was killed and the other fellow (of course) was acquitted.

James Earp gave up tending bars and switched to driving a cab in Los Angeles.  Bessie (probably) gave up running sporting houses.  Jim died in 1926. Newton, Wyatt's older-half brother, died in 1928.

Wyatt kept moving around with Josie, looking for ways to get rich. He was involved a bit with Bat's boxing ventures and agreed to referee the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight in 1896. He walked into the ring, took off his coat, and a policeman immediately walked up relieved him of his revolver.  Later fined $50 for carrying a gun, he claimed he simply forgot he had it with him. The fight itself was controversial when Wyatt supposedly missed a foul punch that sent Fitzsimmons to the canvas and Sharkey got credit for the knock out.

The last few years of the century found Wyatt and Josie up in the Klondike.  Intending to do a little prospecting, he made his real money by banking gambling games in his various saloons.  This usually put him more afoul of the law than with it, and he was once arrested for interferring with a city marshal in the performance of his duty.

As he pushed on into old age, Wyatt began to center his activities back to California where his parents had lived and Morgan was buried.  He seemed to continue to show both his good and bad sides and always managed to wiggle out of any difficulty. He was once charged with trying to cheat a man out of $2500, but the charges were dropped.

He met the early cowboy movie actor, William S. Hart, (who once loaned him fifty dollars) but gradually he continued to slip into hard times.  He ended up in a small rented bungalow in Los Angeles, still with Josie.  Josie ruled the roost, and one friend said there was no way Wyatt could have been a killer.  Not if he lived with Josie for fifty years.

Like many old timers, Wyatt tried his hand at writing his memoirs.  Compared to Bat, who was actually quite a good writer, Wyatt's prose lacked the terseness that the modern readers demanded.  It took about fifteen horribly written and tortuous pages for Wyatt to get himself born. And it went downhill from there.

Some of Wyatt's other acquaintances were also writing their stories but with a less loquacious and more marketable pen.  Around 1923, Billy Breckenridge, Johnny Behan's old deputy, decided to write his story.  Despite being on the other side of the fence, he visited with Wyatt, and they talked about the old days. Billy really didn't have anything against Wyatt, but when his book came out, it didn't paint Wyatt exactly as a shining example of law and order.  Wyatt and Josie were ticked off, and they never forgave Billy.

By the 1920's, the Wild West had become the target of serious historians and they began seeking out some of the still surviving participants. Walter Noble Burns, who penned the first "definitive" biography of Billy the Kid, wrote Wyatt ostensibly to ask about Doc Holliday.  Some say Wyatt wanted Walter to write HIS biography.  Others say he did his best to make Walter NOT write it and got angry when he found that's what Walter really wanted to do.

But in 1928 a writer named Stuart Lake decided Wyatt was worth interviewing.  When the book, "Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshall", came out three years later, Wyatt was finally solidified into the mythological icon we know today.  The book itself is regarded by Champions and Detractors alike as unabashedly pro-Earp, completely anti-Clanton, and entirely unreliable.

Two stories exist about the souce of its (in)accuracy:  either Wyatt filled Lake with a pack of lies or Stuart made up a pack of lies because Wyatt WOULDN'T fill him with a pack of lies.  The trouble is no one knows who to blame. Was it Wyatt who was telling all the lies TO Stuart or was it Stuart telling all the lies ABOUT Wyatt?  Like so much about Wyatt Earp, you can really take your pick, but Lake later grumbled that Wyatt would hardly say anything.  But it's also clear that Lake's story is pretty much what Wyatt would have written himself.

Wyatt's finances continued to run into difficulty and he had to borrow money to make ends meet.  His decline in fortunes was mostly due to the country's changing attitude toward his true avocation - gambling. Unlike Bat who made the transition to the twentieth century by managing the once illegal but now legal sport of boxing, Wyatt had grown dependent on a once legal but increasingly illegal livelihood.

And by 1911 it was all over.  Every state and territory had outlawed gambling and it wasn't until 1931 that Nevada finally relented and became the only state for over fifty years to permit games of chance.

By then it was too late. Wyatt had been dead for two years. But the year after Nevada re-legalized gambling the first movie (loosely) based on the life of Wyatt Earp opened in the nation's theaters.  Many actors later played Wyatt, including a slightly mustachioed Henry Fonda playing alongside Victor Mature as a ridiculously robust Doc Holliday.  Although in the first movie, the names were changed to protect the innocent (or whoever), it was clearly about Wyatt and everyone knew it.

Did Josie see it?  Possibly.  She died in 1944, the same year as did Mrs. Martha Cummings, the last name used by Catherine Mary Horoney or Kate Fisher or Kate Elder or whatever the heck her real name was.  Anyway, it was Doc's old girlfriend, all right.  In the 1890's, Wyatt once wondered aloud to a reporter about her whereabouts and surmized she had long since passed on.  But she had outlasted Wyatt by a full decade and a half and stuck it out more than sixty years past the Gunfight at the OK Corral.