Lady at the O.K. Corral (9 page)

Clara Brown voiced a point of view initially held by many in Tombstone's business establishment who stood firmly behind the Earps and pointed a harsh finger at Behan, accusing him of acting in collusion with the cowboys, even to the point of accepting bribes. But she was troubled when reports surfaced that at least two of the cowboys may not have been armed. At the very least, she acknowledged two sides to the controversy. “Opinion is pretty fairly divided as to the justification of the killing,” she considered. “You may meet one man who will support the Earps, and declare that no other course was possible to save their own lives, and the next man is just as likely to assert that there was no occasion whatever for bloodshed.”

As Clara predicted, Tombstone became a “warm place” for the Earps. After a contentious year of conflict and provocation, frontier justice moved swiftly through a thicket of hearings, writs of habeas corpus, arrest warrants, indictments, affidavits, remanded testimony, and jurisdictional disputes. A formal inquest was convened two days after the gunfight. Ten jurors considered the evidence and failed to find against the Earps and Holliday. In disgust, Ike Clanton filed a first-degree murder complaint. Morgan and Virgil, still bedridden, were suspended from duty. Wyatt and Doc were taken into custody. Bail was fixed at $10,000, and was raised by Wyatt's friends. Doc would probably have languished in jail had Wyatt not urged his friends to help him. Big Nose Kate Elder, contrite over her false accusations, gave Doc most of the $100 she possessed and left town.

Attorney Tom Fitch, an experienced courtroom lawyer, helped to raise bail for Wyatt and undertook his defense. Fitch's strategy depended on winning the hearing, and thus avoiding a trial in which Wyatt might confront a jury full of cowboys. Frank and Tom McLaury's brother, successful lawyer Will McLaury, rushed from Texas to aid in the prosecution of his brothers' killers. “I think we can hang them,” he assured his sister. At his insistence, bail was revoked for Wyatt and Doc. But the prosecution never recovered from the disastrous testimony of Ike Clanton. He was an unsympathetic witness, rambling and inconsistent, and spoke in a high falsetto voice, “rather like a rusty hinge,” as one observer noted. Fitch outmaneuvered the prosecution by demonstrating that Ike had entered into a secret agreement with Wyatt to hand over the Benson stage robbers in exchange for the reward.

Fitch pushed Johnny to repeat his grievances against Wyatt and caught him in several lies. Behan testified that he had originally intended to appoint Wyatt as deputy sheriff, but he evaded any explanation of his change of heart, saying only “something afterwards transpired that I did not take him into the office.” He also denied that he had any particular relationship with Ike Clanton; it would be decades before it was known that Behan had secretly underwritten Clanton's court costs.

Wyatt's testimony was far more effective. He used his physical presence to his advantage and read in a sonorous voice from a well-prepared script. Without apology, he disclosed his ambitions to become sheriff: “I thought it would be a great help to me with the people and businessmen if I could capture the men who killed [the stagecoach driver]. . . . I told them I wanted the glory of capturing [the robbers] and if I could do it would help me make the race for Sheriff at the next election.” He also presented impressive character references from his former constituencies in Wichita and Dodge City.

There were two sides at the hearing, and Josephine was significant to both of them, but her name was never spoken, her existence never revealed. If Fitch or Will McLaury knew about her role in fueling the hatred between Wyatt and Behan, they remained silent. Introducing her story would bring no obvious advantage to either side. It would certainly not have helped Behan to admit his infidelity and jealousy, which would have then been considered as additional motives in his war against the Earps.

After a month of testimony, Spicer issued a strong verdict acquitting the Earps. It did not matter who shot first, he reasoned, only that the Earps had acted in “discharge of an official duty.” He invited the grand jury to consider new indictments if they disagreed with the decision, but in the meantime, “there being no sufficient cause to believe the within named Wyatt S. Earp and John H. Holliday guilty of the offense mentioned within, I order them to be released.”

THE EARPS SHOULD
have left Tombstone. While they had been vindicated, the outcry from the other side made it clear that Spicer's decision would hardly stand as the last chapter in the Earp-cowboy war. Virgil and Morgan were now strong enough to travel. Their family in California urged them to come back. Their professional future as lawmen was cloudy: acting governor Gosper had visited Tombstone during the Spicer hearing and believed that Johnny Behan and the Earps should be permanently removed from office.

But Wyatt resisted the pressure to leave. The brothers had substantial business interests, including a part ownership in the Oriental Saloon and mining claims such as the “Mattie Blaylock,” which Wyatt had filed soon after they arrived in Tombstone. He held on stubbornly to the hope that he might run again as sheriff and defeat Behan. Josephine was still in town.

The “divided state of society in Tombstone” that Clara Brown observed at the cowboys' funeral intensified, stoked daily by the town's two newspapers. The cowboys were rumored to be holding secret midnight vigils, swearing blood oaths against the Earps, who represented everything in government that they most hated. Death threats were made against Spicer and Mayor Clum. Far from having any gratitude toward Earp for saving his life during the gunfight, Ike sought another day in court with new legal representation; Will McLaury left town in disgust.

Tombstone business interests cared less about justice than they did about resolving controversy and bad press that interfered with the flow of capital. The town's natural riches could make the county so great, Clara wrote, but for “an element of lawlessness, an insecurity of life and property, an open disregard of the proper authorities, which has greatly retarded the advancement of the place.” In her view, Tombstone was as safe as San Diego or Boston, but the town was getting a terrible reputation. Around the country, leading national newspapers were writing about the gunfight. Even in Australia, there was talk of a “cowboy war” raging in Tombstone between a family of professional gamblers named Earp and a “tribe” known as the Clanton gang. “Goodness knows when it will end,” reported the Australian
Town and Country Journal
.

The Earps should have left.

“Ever since our trouble we have stayed at the Cosmopolitan Hotel and it is very disagreeable to be so unsettled,” Louisa wrote to her sister. Wyatt had heard rumblings of a cowboy hit list and moved the family out of their houses and into the Cosmopolitan, while the cowboys took up residence at the Grand Hotel across the street. The “trouble” had also disrupted the Earps' businesses, especially now that Ike had begun a new lawsuit. To raise money to cover their legal fees, Wyatt sold his share of the Oriental Saloon and mortgaged his house in a legal document that bore his name as well as that of “Mattie Earp, wife.” But the clock was ticking down the days of their marriage.

The “Cowboy and Earp feud,” as Endicott Peabody and Clara Brown called it, exasperated the entire town. Ike was defeated a second time in court, but he renewed his public demand for revenge. He'd lost his brother and two friends, his public reputation was shredded, and he had been twice thwarted by the justice system. George Parsons recorded the judge's decision with a diary entry that “a bad time is expected again in town at any time. Earps on one side of the street with their friends and Ike Clanton [with his supporters] on the other side—watching each other. Blood will surely come.”

On December 28, Tombstone exploded again. Under the headline “Shooting a US Marshal,” the
New York Times
reported that “Deputy United States Marshal [Virgil] Earp was fired upon while crossing Fifth Street last night by three men, armed with shotguns, who were concealed in an unfinished building and who escaped in the darkness.” The hail of bullets shattered Virgil's elbow. According to George Parsons, Virgil was carried away on a stretcher while reassuring a terrified Allie: “Never mind, I've got one arm left to hug you with.” Virgil begged Wyatt to stop the doctor from amputating the shattered limb.

Josephine was still living quietly somewhere in Tombstone. With Wyatt's every move being watched carefully by the Clanton faction, the lovers would have had little opportunity for a liaison or to make plans for the future. Even exchanging greetings would have drawn Josephine into more danger. She could do nothing but wait.

DESPITE THE EXPLICIT
warnings of the Arizona governor to President Chester Arthur, outlining the persistent “problems of lawlessness” in southeastern Arizona and emphasizing that neither the Earps nor Johnny Behan deserved any law enforcement authority, Wyatt received an appointment as a deputy U.S. marshal to hunt down Virgil's assailants. He was wearing a badge again.

Wyatt kept the family indoors and guarded. Virgil had not left his bed at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Morgan, however, was angling for a night out. Wyatt relented and agreed to accompany his brother to the opening night of a comedy at Schieffelin Hall. Surely a night of laughter would do them both some good, reasoned Wyatt. Surprisingly, this cautious man of few words loved the theater. Allie delighted in telling the story of how Wyatt once became so engaged in a performance that he stood up and threatened to draw his gun in defense of a young actor whose fictional character was falsely accused. “That was Wyatt for you,” Allie recalled. “He wasn't the one to stand by and see wrong done to an innocent boy anytime.” But on March 8, 1882, he should have obeyed his instincts. Instead of staying safely at the hotel, Wyatt and Morgan went to see
Stolen Kisses
and then finished up the evening with a game of billiards at Hatch's, a nearby saloon.

The game had just begun when two rifle shots rang out: one missed Wyatt, but the other tore into Morgan's right side. He lived for one more hour. Allie Earp had ventured out of the hotel to buy taffy for Virgil, and from a few blocks away she saw the commotion at the pool hall. Tiny Allie crawled between the legs of the men clustered around Morgan to see who had been shot. Wyatt saw her and said, “Allie, you and Doc [Goodfellow] fix up Virge so he can get out. Then I can go get those fellows.”

Now Wyatt had also lost a brother.

Morgan's inquest drew a most unexpected informant. Josephine's friend Maria testified against her husband, Pete Spence. It had been just over a year since she and Josephine shared gumdrops on the Benson stagecoach. The once-hopeful brides had remained friends in Tombstone, linked by their stagecoach trip and by mutual friends such as the local milliner. Perhaps they had cried on each other's shoulders for their bad choices of husbands, though Maria's match was arguably even worse. Pete was beating Maria and her mother, who was living with them.

Maria spoke out against her husband, telling the inquest jury that they had quarreled after she saw him identify Morgan to another member of his gang as the intended target of an assassination plot. Pete struck her and threatened to shoot her if she told anybody about what she had seen. After she testified, Maria privately warned the Earps that even now, with Morgan dead, the violence was not over. In her memoir, Josephine dramatized Maria's bravery at the most critical moment of Wyatt's life: “A dark-eyed young woman—the wife of the outlaw, Pete Spence—slips into Addie Bourland's [sic] millinery store—and saves the Earp family from annihilation.”

Morgan's body was taken by train to his parents in California, accompanied by his brother James. A few days later Virgil and Allie followed, guarded by Wyatt and a small army of his friends. They were expecting trouble. Allie was wearing Virgil's six-shooter under her loose coat, sitting at his right hand so he could draw the gun at the first sign of trouble. The train pulled into Tucson. While it idled at the station, Wyatt glimpsed the ambush he expected: Frank Stilwell and Ike Clanton, lurking on the tracks. When Wyatt followed the men, Ike ran away, as he had in Tombstone, but Wyatt caught up with Frank Stilwell. Without bothering to be discreet before or after, Wyatt unloaded so many bullets into Stilwell's body that one observer called him “the most shot up man I ever saw.”

For the rest of her life, Allie would remember those tense hours at the Tucson train station and Wyatt running alongside the train, holding up a finger and shouting, “It's all right, Virge. We got one! One for Morg!”

Knowing that Wyatt was hell-bent on revenge, Allie remembered that they “kept worryin' about Wyatt” as the train left for San Bernardino without him. He was the only Earp left in Arizona. It would be years before they saw each other again.

MATTIE AND JOSEPHINE
were the last of Wyatt's entanglements still in Tombstone. There was no room for romance in Wyatt's life, not now. He put Mattie and James's wife Bessie on a train to join his family in San Bernardino. With a compassionate farewell, the
Tombstone Epitaph
noted the departure of the two Mrs. Earps: “They have the sympathy of all who knows them.” Josephine's departure went unnoticed.

Wyatt Earp may have been devoid of physical fear, but he sent Mattie off to his parents without an honest word of good-bye.

FRANK STILWELL'S KILLING
marked the beginning of what became known as Wyatt Earp's Vendetta Ride.

It was Wyatt's actions after Tombstone, at least as much as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that sealed his reputation as an implacable avenger. Now he would ride for justice, not for law. He had seen enough of courtroom procedures to conclude that nothing made sense; after all, his attempt to represent the interests of businesses against the unruly and individualistic world of the cowboys had led to this grievous wound to his family. The courts had failed him. Henceforth, justice would be swift, personal, and final.