Dodge City is bracing herself up for the cattle trade. Places of refreshment are being gorgeously arrayed in new coats of paint and other ornaments to beguile the festive cowboy.
—Dodge City Times, April 28, 1877
The Earp brothers, Jim Masterson, and the other lawmen were keeping an eye on things during a winter of little activity. Before 1876 was over, the Dodge City Fire Company was established, and the following February the Union Church was organized. Services were held in the same building that had been constructed the year before to hold nondenominational services.
The Victorian custom (or dictate) that a man and woman living together must be married was practiced by those in the middle and upper levels of society, but in the frontier towns everyone else was not concerned about such morality. It was not uncommon in Dodge City for men and women to live as man and wife, even if they were lawmen and brothel operators or their employees. This group included Wyatt and the blond, slightly plump Mattie.
With Sally Haspel having disappeared out of Wyatt’s life, Mattie had him to herself. One wonders how unromantic or at least practical a man Wyatt had become by 1876, because Mattie did not leave some of her Wichita ways behind. Mattie, it seems, was Mattie, warts and all. As E. C. Meyers offers in his biography of her, when Wyatt and his “wife” took up residence in Dodge City “real doubt exists that Mattie was even interested in a completely domestic life for she had grown used to the glitter and auditory vibrancy of nightlife. She knew her way around the sporting areas … and she felt very much at ease among her peers. She could always make a few dollars hustling drinks in whatever saloon Wyatt was operating his faro game; and if a newfound friend expressed interest in her she could always spare some of her time for him.”
It does not sound like Wyatt and Mattie had much of a romantic relationship. Making it worse was that she was flirting with addiction. That she liked whiskey could have been harmful enough, given that Wyatt’s preferred drink continued to be coffee, but Mattie was now beginning a relationship with opium. She had to buy it from somewhere, and she had no other marketable skills than being a prostitute. She lived in a small house north of Front Street, which Wyatt had probably bought or rented for her but did not visit very often if it doubled as a brothel. With the lack of any mention of Mattie in the two local newspapers, either she was very discreet or Wyatt’s connection to law enforcement kept her out of trouble.
Other than any volatility in his relationship with Mattie, the winter was too peaceful for Wyatt. There weren’t even that many dogs to shoot. No, he was not necessarily cruel to animals, but part of the job of a peace officer was to get rid of dogs that were suspected of having rabies. Though it still made him the highest-paid lawman in the city, Wyatt’s modest salary was no longer being boosted by earning $2.50 per arrest. With cattle drives done for the year and a prairie winter having arrived with its frigid windy blasts from the western mountains, troublemakers were in short supply. That was good news for the law-and-order faction, but not for Wyatt and Mattie.
They left Dodge City in early March 1877. Wyatt’s destination was Deadwood. It shared with several of the Kansas cow towns a reputation for lawlessness, where gambling and violence thrived, with one exception being that the source of income was not cattle but the nearby mining operations. Wyatt went there to make money. Deadwood was fertile ground for a man experienced in dealing faro. (Participating in a game and hoping to beat the dealer was sometimes called “bucking the tiger.”) And whatever lawlessness transpired on the streets or behind saloon doorways was not Wyatt’s concern.
Given its rowdy reputation, few would have predicted that thanks to mining profits Deadwood would become one of the wealthiest communities west of the Mississippi River. Just two years after Wyatt gambled there, and a year after the new device was installed in the White House, lines were strung to give Deadwood the distinction of being the first community west of the Mississippi River to have telephone service.
Wyatt would later report that he did not end up doing much gambling while in Deadwood because another opportunity to make money was available. Unlike the seasonal cattle drives and buffalo hunts in and around Dodge City, mining operations and thus the building and maintaining of mining camps were year-round. Harking back to his freight-hauling days, Wyatt delivered wood. The demand was such that he did it seven days a week, and the job was made more difficult by the weather conditions in western South Dakota even in March and April. “But I was young and tough,” said Wyatt, who was turning twenty-nine, “so were my horses, and we came through into spring in fine shape physically.”
As summer approached, Wyatt and Mattie remained in Deadwood. Wyatt took on a side job riding shotgun on stagecoaches. He would have been safer if he were back wearing a badge in Dodge City.
With the mines in the area thriving, gold had to be regularly shipped out of Deadwood. Outlaws and would-be thieves caving in to temptation knew that. And men taking on the job of guarding the shipments knew they knew that. The pay had to be very good, especially for Wyatt, who with every trip was taken away from wood-hauling and some faro dealing. He signed up as a guard with the Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express, a subcontractor working for Wells Fargo.
Legend has it that because Wyatt Earp was on board, his stages traveled unmolested. However, while he had experience lawing in Wichita and Dodge City, Wyatt would not have been well known beyond those cities, where he had not even been the marshal but an assistant. He might have struck some fear in an inebriated cowboy who fired off a shot on Front Street, but not among the larcenous likes of those in the hills surrounding Deadwood. He had to take his chances, just like any other driver and guard.
During a robbery of a stage, a man with the prescient name of John Slaughter was shot dead, becoming the first driver killed along the Cheyenne-Deadwood Trail. On a Monday morning soon after this ominous event, Wyatt rode shotgun on a stage that was to follow the same route. The report that it carried two hundred thousand dollars in gold was most likely an exaggeration, but no doubt the stage still had enough to make any successful self-respecting bandit happy.
Wyatt was armed to the teeth—a short-barreled shotgun, a Winchester rifle, and two Colt revolvers. The stage had gone only two miles when Wyatt noticed movement, and then it became clear that there were several men on horses riding parallel to the road. They worked their way out of the hills and drew closer to the stagecoach. Now the driver saw them, too, but his job was to keep the horses moving in the right direction. Just like with buffaloing a man who could be dangerous, Wyatt didn’t wait for the other guy to make his play: He raised the Winchester and fired. He continued to fire until a horse went down. That display of aggression and firepower was enough to persuade the men to wait for easier pickings, and the stagecoach made it to Cheyenne.
The Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express did not want to depend on the bravery or mortality of drivers to safeguard their cargo. They built two new stagecoaches with steel-plated compartments and named one the USS Monitor after the ironclad submarine that had fought the CSS Virginia to a draw in March 1862. The other special coach was named Slaughter. The fortified vehicles dissuaded robbers, except for one gang that attacked the Monitor in September 1878 and made off with its treasure. Over time, all of the gang, except for its leader, Charles Carey, were caught. Carey and the ten thousand dollars in his saddlebags were never found.
Wyatt continued to ride shotgun as the days grew longer and the chilliness of spring in western South Dakota softened. Wyatt’s absence from Dodge City had made his heart grow fonder for it.
Just in time, too. The town was gearing up for an even more active cattle-drive season. And after the cattle business, the best money in Dodge City was found in gambling and liquor, so no wonder every few months another saloon or dance hall with gambling facilities opened on Front Street or Railroad Avenue or the dicey area across the Dead Line. As Robert Wright noted in his memoir, “Gambling ranges from a game of five-cent chuck-a-luck to a thousand-dollar poker pot. Nothing is secret, but with open doors upon the main streets, the ball rolls on uninterruptedly.”
The bigger the game and the players, the better the payoff. One example was Thomas Carney. A wealthy resident of Leavenworth and a former governor of Kansas, in March 1877 he came to Dodge City to buy buffalo hides and, he thought, to make some easy money off the local yokels at the gambling tables. The Dodge City Times reported with a touch of glee that Carney thought he was sitting down with three businessmen ripe for the taking, but Robert Gilmore, Charles Ronan, and Charlie Norton (who had relocated from Sweetwater) were actually professional gamblers who were more wolves than hens. As the drinking continued, the stakes in the poker game increased.
Finally, the former governor had what he believed was an unbeatable hand: four kings. He was delighted as the other men kept matching and raising his raises. When he had exhausted his chips but not his excitement, Carney upped the ante again by tossing his watch and gold chain and cuff links on the table. It was showtime. Norton placed his cards on the table. What they revealed to the visitor “caused his eyes to dilate with terror, and a fearful tremor to seize his frame, and his vitals to almost freeze with horror.” Norton had four aces.
It was time to bid farewell to the abruptly destitute governor, and “dragging his feet over the floor like balls of lead, he left the room, sadly, tearfully.”
* * *
When Bat left Dodge City the previous year, he had traveled by train to Cheyenne. Though not adjacent to the Black Hills, where men and women hoped to get rich from gold, it was a place to purchase supplies and get outfitted for exploring. Inflation ran rampant, as the hotels, restaurants, stores, saloons, and other establishments were tripling and quadrupling their prices. This didn’t dissuade more people from coming. The Wyoming Weekly Leader had commented rather indelicately that so many “gamblers and sneaks” had arrived from Denver that “the dying town seems to be ‘taking a puke.’” Wild Bill Hickok had been in Cheyenne but left right before Bat arrived—for his date with destiny in Deadwood.
Because he was on a winning streak at the gaming tables, Bat stayed in Cheyenne into the fall. It is not known, when he finally did leave, whether it was because his hot hand had turned cold or he was wise enough to quit while he was ahead. Instead of purchasing a pick and a mule to go prospecting, Bat returned to Dodge City, but he did not stay long. It seems that Bill Tilghman and Neal Brown had experienced enough lawing for a while and wanted to see if there were any buffalo herds left to hunt. Bat agreed to accompany them.
The trio were joined by a teenager named Fred Sutton. Tilghman had known the Sutton family during his early days in Atchison, and he promised to look after the boy during his search for adventure. Mostly, it was the adventure of living out on the prairie that they got, because there were far fewer buffalo to hunt, skin, and sell than there had been just a couple of years earlier. Most of Bat’s shooting involved rabbits and other game to feed the hunting party as it endured winter. Tilghman told his wife, Zoe, many years later (twenty-six years younger than her husband, she wrote the memoir Marshal of the Last Frontier, and died at eighty-four in 1964) that Bat also used his guns to conduct shooting contests, until his companions resisted losing any more money.
Like Wyatt, Bat certainly had an entrepreneurial streak—he was just better at it than his friend was. He apparently had saved some of his winnings at the gaming tables in Cheyenne, because back in Dodge City, after tiring of buffalo hunting, Bat invested in the Lone Star Dance Hall. It was on the south side of the Dead Line and was set up with everything any self-respecting, or nonrespecting, cowboy would want—faro and roulette and other gaming tables, a mahogany bar, a stage wide enough to accommodate dancing girls with an actual orchestra pit in front of it, and rooms upstairs for the girls to provide other forms of entertainment.
Bat was about to offer his saloon, or maybe just a portion of it, as a congenial place for an Earp family reunion.
In the spring of 1877, Nicholas and Virginia Ann Earp, with their two youngest children, Warren and Adelia, were on the move again. This time, it was back to California. Nicholas had not been successful with several ventures, and there had been a few more legal skirmishes, so the promise of California glowed brighter than ever. They were joined by the equally restless Virgil and Allie. On the way west, the group stopped in Dodge City and visited with Wyatt and Morgan. James and Bessie were still in business in Dodge City, and Wyatt had returned from Deadwood. In its July 7 edition, the Dodge City Times reported that Wyatt “will accept a position on the force once more.” He probably worked at it in some capacity, even if it was as a special deputy during the peak cattle-drive months, but he apparently did not make headlines. For a peace officer in a Kansas cow town in the 1870s, that was a good thing.
According to Allie Earp’s reminiscences, as Nicholas drove his wagon through town, he spotted two of his sons, Wyatt and Morgan, walking down Front Street. Virgil hopped off his wagon and the three brothers greeted each other warmly. (Presumably, young Warren squeezed in there, too.) It stands to reason that the Mastersons and Earps hoisted a few together at the Lone Star. Allie also mentions that one night when Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan visited the wagons, they brought along a couple of friends: “One of them was a handsome young man I liked right away. His name was Bat Masterson.”
Allie and the rest of the Earp family plodded on to a Quaker town in Kansas named Peace. Virgil, who had stayed behind to spend a little more time with his brothers, rejoined them there, and the travelers crossed the Plains and turned south to Arizona. Newton Earp and his wife had already relocated to Prescott in the middle of Arizona Territory from the farm in Kansas. Based on the reports they had mailed back, Virgil and Allie had considered settling there, with Virgil remembering it from the days when he and Wyatt were freight haulers.
The town rested in a small fertile valley and there would be no Kansas-like or midwestern winters. He and Allie did decide to stay when Virgil was offered a job as a hauler of mail and other cargo in and out of Prescott, and Allie found work as a caretaker for a family with five children. By that fall, with Prescott having been designated the capital of Arizona Territory and the town enjoying some prosperity, Virgil and Allie planned to stay indefinitely. Nicholas and the other travelers had continued on to California.
Like Wyatt had experienced, Virgil found that he was not done with lawing, no matter how far west he traveled. The sheriff of Yavapai County was James Dodson, a great-grandson of Daniel Boone, and Virgil became his deputy. Newton Earp, showing as much restlessness as any family member, and his wife tired of Arizona pretty quickly, and they packed up and headed back east, to Missouri. They were not in Prescott, then, to witness Virgil become involved in one of the more famous gunfights in the territory.
On October 16, 1877, a man came running fast into the center of town waving a document. He was Colonel W. H. McCall, and the document was a warrant for the arrest of a fellow named Wilson, wanted in Texas for murder. McCall had just spotted Wilson and another man, John Tallos, on the edge of Prescott. Both were drunk, and they were taking turns trying to shoot a dog, seemingly not concerned that they might also hit the yelping woman who owned the dog. When a constable, Frank Murray, appeared, the two intoxicated men began directing shots at him.
The two men wearing badges, whom McCall had run up to, were William Standefer, a U.S. marshal, and Ed Bowers, the new sheriff of the county. There was a buggy handy, and Standefer and McCall hopped into it. Bowers got on his horse and was soon joined by an unscathed Murray on his. Virgil had heard the commotion and come running, toting a Winchester rifle. Continuing on foot, he hurried after the other men. It is not known if the dog survived its ordeal, but when the five pursuers found Wilson and Tallos, they still held their pistols. With seven men holding weapons, guns began blazing.
Within seconds, Tallos was dead from eight bullet wounds. Wilson had been shot in the head, a cigarette still sticking out of his lips, and he too would be dead within a few days. It was later learned that not only had Wilson been accused in Las Animas County in Colorado of killing a sheriff and deputy there, but in 1875 in Wichita he had defaulted on a debt involving a wagon, and the lawman who had forced Wilson to pay up was Wyatt Earp.
Though all of the lawmen had drawn their guns in the free-for-all, Marshal Standefer was to credit Virgil and his Winchester with hitting both men. As word spread in the ensuing days and weeks, the most famous lawman in the Earp family was not named Wyatt.