While a northern attorney was visiting in Wichita he dropped into the court room to see how the law was administered in that locality. A placard above the judge’s seat read: “No smoking allowed,” but the judge, nine of the jurymen, and half of the attorneys were smoking pipes or cigars.
—The Girard Press
Wyatt took to being a teamster right away. The work wasn’t any easier than plowing and harvesting and other responsibilities on the farm, but at least he wasn’t looking at the same fields every day. By the spring of 1866, Wyatt and Virgil Earp were very busy transporting cargo to and from towns and cities that included San Bernardino, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas in New Mexico.
After two years of that, Wyatt changed jobs, being hired to haul supplies to construction sites of the Union Pacific Railroad. If one of his goals was to see more of the American West, he certainly succeeded, because his routes allowed him to cover hundreds of miles between destinations. The hard work and being exposed to all kinds of weather and long stretches when he was driving alone and isolated in a vast, changing landscape hardened Wyatt in several ways. By the time he was twenty in 1868, he was a tall, strong, handsome man with piercing, cold blue eyes who had to depend on his strength and wits and patience to deal with a variety of places and people.
He and the protective Virgil relaxed together when not working together. While Wyatt never quite got the handle of hard liquor, he learned how to gamble and do it well at saloons and mining camps. He also took a shine to boxing. He was quick and packed a powerful punch. This came in handy when disputes, especially if the other person was drunk, could have led to shooting. Wyatt learned that a fast and well-placed fist or butt of a pistol could end a fight before it escalated.
But boxing became more than just recreation for him; it was a lifelong interest. Wyatt did not become a prizefighter himself; he instead learned how to referee boxing matches—and, of course, to bet on them. He would do one or both with boxing matches for most of his life, including high-profile championship bouts.
If he and Virgil weren’t already as close as two brothers can be, it was during this time that they became the best friend each other could have. In his biography of Virgil, Don Chaput has him as “an experienced farm hand and well-traveled stage driver [who] would be described in the coming years as a smiling, pleasant, rough frontiersman, with a keen sense of humor, afraid of nothing, eager to help, and all-around good company, for campfire, gambling hall, fence mending, and chewing the fat with friends, neighbors, and relatives.” Wyatt was not nearly as outgoing, but he and his brother had each other’s back.
Wyatt’s career as a peace officer might never have happened if he had remained traveling to and from California and the towns and camps in between. There was no indication that anything to do with being a lawman interested him at all. Probably, men like him worked and played with as little contact with the law as possible. And the restlessness in Wyatt had to be satisfied by hauling freight over hundreds of miles, not patrolling a city street.
Life changed thanks to the unabated restlessness of his father. Nicholas, even at fifty-five, was not content to stay put, and in 1868, only four years after making the perilous trip west, he was on the road again. After a short stay in Wyoming, the family arrived in southwestern Missouri. Nicholas and Virginia Ann and their youngest sons and daughter found a place to live in Lamar, and somehow he wangled a job as constable. Also living in Lamar was one of Nicholas’s brothers, Jonathan, who was a minister, like their father, Walter, had been.
Nicholas may have felt more comfortable being back in the South. Lamar, founded as recently as 1852, still showed signs of having been in the thick of the fighting. Only seven of the town’s buildings were still standing when the Civil War ended. When the Earps arrived, Lamar was recovering, as evidenced by the construction of a courthouse and a bank. Soon, Wyatt showed up in the town. Perhaps he’d had enough of the dust of the Great American Desert in his nostrils and clothes, or even as a full-grown man he didn’t want to be too far away from family. Wyatt’s reason for giving up an itinerant life to try to settle down in Missouri can only be conjectured, because until the end of his days he refused to talk about Lamar.
It was there that Wyatt received his first taste of being a lawman. When a justice-of-the-peace position opened up, Nicholas took it, and his son was appointed to take his place as constable. Around the same time, in late autumn 1869, Wyatt experienced another life-changing event: he fell in love. In his travels as a teamster, Wyatt may have been smitten more than once with an appealing young woman, but it didn’t take long for him to conclude that his feeling for Aurilla Sutherland was the real thing.
William and Permelia Sutherland were real city folk, originally from New York. Aurilla was the sixth child and second daughter born to the couple, on January 10, 1850. Like Wyatt, she had been born in Illinois. When she was ten years old the Sutherlands moved south, to Missouri, to own and operate William’s Exchange Hotel right in the Lamar town square.
The twenty-one-year-old Wyatt and Aurilla could have met each other simply when Constable Earp stopped into the hotel. Or it may have been at a social event in Lamar, a town that had only sixteen hundred residents. Sherry Monahan, in her book Mrs. Earp, about all the women who were or fancied themselves wives of the Earp brothers, points out that the peripatetic and enterprising Nicholas Earp sold baked goods and oysters from a shop three doors down from William’s Exchange Hotel. It is even possible that they met at church, with members of both families attending Methodist services on Sundays.
In any case, Wyatt did not waste any time courting his new love in the fall of 1869 and through the holidays. With Nicholas officiating, Wyatt and Aurilla were married six days after her twentieth birthday, on January 16, 1870. Perhaps Wyatt had sown enough wild oats as a teamster and freight hauler out west that he would be content for many years with a wife and family and a steady job in Lamar.
Wyatt did not waste any time, either, starting that family. Aurilla became pregnant soon after the wedding. In August, to provide a home for his wife and expected child, Wyatt paid seventy-five dollars for a small house next to ones where Nicholas and Virginia Ann and their youngest children lived and where Newton resided. Also living in Lamar by then was Virgil. He too may not have wanted so much distance between himself and family. On May 30, also with Nicholas doing the honors, Virgil married Rozilla Draggoo. She was just seventeen.
The 1870 U.S. Census, conducted in Lamar on September 3, listed Nicholas and Virgil as grocers, Virginia Ann as keeping house for her husband, the children Warren and Adelia as members of the household, and Newton Earp as a farmer. Wyatt and Aurilla were listed as constable and homemaker. Life, it would seem, was good.
It got better when Wyatt won the election (receiving 137 votes) that month to remain as constable. He did it by defeating his own brother. Newton had not run against him out of any sibling rivalry but more likely to ensure the office stayed in the family. With Nicholas still justice of the peace, the Earps had the local legal system sewn up. They could look forward to the holidays with some financial security and an expanding family.
And then Aurilla died. The baby did not survive.
There is no record of a cause of death, though typhus or childbirth has been speculated. Wyatt’s never talking about Lamar certainly meant not mentioning anything about his first wife. Even in his later years, the memory must have been too painful, in addition to risking the jealousy of his fourth wife.
In November, the dreams of a home for his family dashed, Wyatt sold the lot, making a twenty-five-dollar profit on the transaction. It probably would have been best if he’d left Lamar and its painful memories. He didn’t, and he would soon live to regret it. He would go lower than the loss of his wife.
The first sign of Wyatt heading for trouble was when there was a brawl between Virgil and Wyatt (Newton or James may have been involved, too) and two of Aurilla’s brothers and three of their friends. There may have been some bitterness over her marriage and subsequent death, or it was a financial dispute. It is even possible that Wyatt was in a reckless mood—and Virgil, too, after Rozilla apparently left him—and went looking for mischief. In any event, the boxing Earp brothers took on five men, and no one was badly hurt.
Then early in 1871, Wyatt was hauled into court, accused of stealing or not repaying a loan of twenty dollars. The charge was dismissed, but clearly Wyatt was in a downward spiral, driven almost mad with grief. He resigned as constable, and his next step after that—decidedly a step down—was to become a horse thief.
The two horses stolen belonged to a man named William Keys, who lived in Indian Territory. Wyatt must have made his way to what is now eastern Oklahoma, because in the company of two men, John Shown and Edward Kennedy, he showed up at the home of Keys in Fort Gibson. A strange statement later given to the court by Shown’s wife alleges that Wyatt and Kennedy got Shown drunk and they rode for three nights into Kansas with two horses stolen from Keys. They were arrested and arraigned on April 14, and Anna Shown claimed that Wyatt and Kennedy threatened to kill her husband if he testified against them.
Wyatt somehow came up with five hundred dollars to make bail. He was never convicted; it is believed that after Kennedy’s trial resulted in his acquittal, Wyatt was let loose. There is a story that Kennedy and Wyatt were kept in a jail in Van Buren, Arkansas, from which they and five other prisoners escaped on May 8. In any event, if he had been tried and convicted of what was a very serious crime, there may not have been lawman Wyatt Earp.
It would have been that autumn, perhaps trying to stay as far away from peace officers as possible, that Wyatt joined up with a buffalo-hunting outfit and crossed trails with Bat Masterson. Corroboration comes from two other sources. Bat’s good friend Billy Dixon, in a book written many years later, recalled meeting Wyatt in the hunting camps and that he “was a shy young man with few intimates. With casual acquaintances he seldom spoke unless spoken to. When he did say anything, it was to the point, without fear or favor, which wasn’t relished by some; but that never bothered Wyatt.”
Another source is Bill Tilghman, who would become one of the more famous frontier lawmen. He recalled meeting Wyatt while buffalo hunting, and noted that what separated him from the other men was that Wyatt never drank alcohol.
And many years later in her family memoir, Adelia Earp Edwards recalled an incident: “Morgan was in a fight with a buffalo hunter one day and it would have come to shooting if Newton had not gotten between them and talked them into shaking hands. Morgan had a terrible temper while Newton was always very even in his ways. I recall he used to say, ‘Morg and Warren will be the death of me.’” Hundreds of young men had turned to buffalo hunting to make good money, and with no other prospects, it makes sense that Wyatt was one of them.
In March 1872, he turned twenty-four. He was already a widower and a fellow who had had repeated brushes with the law. He had no home and no real prospects and, writes Sherry Monahan, he “apparently continued his downward spiral into the depths of depravity.” Wyatt was a lonely man touched by tragedy, who was reluctant or unable to make friends and to let anyone get close to him. It would have been very easy for him to fall in with the wrong crowd and repeat the ill-advised horse-stealing escapade, or worse.
Instead, Wyatt went to Wichita and found redemption.