The integrity of our police force has never been seriously questioned.
—The Wichita Beacon
Wyatt Earp would lose another wife in Wichita. And just like he had done in Lamar, he would get into a peck of trouble and hit the trail. This time, his next stop would be Dodge City … with a third wife in tow.
Sarah Haspel had the unhappy habit of being arrested for being an operator—sometimes with James Earp’s wife, Bessie—of a brothel. This was bothersome to Wyatt, not for moral reasons but because it cost money to keep bailing her out and hiring lawyers. It also drew unwanted attention to him and his contradictory position of being a police officer. Chances were that Wyatt saw being a lawman in Wichita as a more promising pursuit than making a living gambling or being a brothel bouncer, but an added incentive was keeping his wife out of trouble.
In April 1875, he was appointed a regular member of the police department, making his somewhat ambiguous status official. During the 1870s, Bill Smith and Mike Meagher would trade the position of marshal in Wichita as the whims of the voters dictated. It was Meagher who would help Wyatt’s lawman career along.
Mike and his twin brother, John, had been born in Ireland in 1843. The Meagher family emigrated to Illinois, and when the Civil War began the brothers joined the Union Army. Both survived the war, and they made their way to Kansas as stagecoach drivers. Whatever skills Mike Meagher had, they were enough to become the city marshal of Wichita in 1871. He appointed his brother and Bill Smith to the police force. The latter became marshal in 1874, when Mike became a deputy U.S. marshal.
Mike was back the following year, and in the election he beat out Smith and once more led the police department. In addition to hiring Wyatt on full-time, he appointed John Behrens and James Cairns (who would later be brother-in-law to Bat Masterson) as assistants. Wyatt earned sixty dollars a month, so he continued to moonlight as a gambler. His specialty was a game popular at the time called faro.
Mike Meagher did Wyatt another favor, in addition to giving him his first position as a full-time lawman. He taught the young policeman a tactic known as “buffaloing,” one that would be a big help to Wyatt in the coming years of confronting desperadoes and other rough characters. In buffaloing, when it looked like a confrontation could get violent, the lawman would strike first by hitting the dumbfounded drover over the top of the head with the barrel of a gun. The unconscious cowboy would recover, either in jail or in a saloon, where he could resume being free with his money. Not having to resort to gunplay probably kept the mortality rate in the police department down and certainly allowed for more repeat customers in the saloons. Wyatt was especially suited for buffaloing because he was taller than most men of that time.
Meagher proved to be an especially effective marshal, managing to juggle the interests of saloon owners, shopkeepers, cowboys, bordello operators, and the citizens who wanted to feel safe on the streets. He did so while rarely firing a shot. He would not kill a man until 1877, when the only one he dispatched was Sylvester Powell. At some point in the past Marshal Meagher had arrested Powell, maybe buffaloed him, too, and the man harbored a grudge. On New Year’s Day, he saw an opportunity for revenge. Meagher went out the back door of a saloon and stepped into an outhouse. Powell moved in close and began shooting. Though wounded, Meagher was angry as a yellow jacket when he busted out of the outhouse with his gun blazing. One of the bullets took care of Powell and his grudge.
It was no coincidence that Sarah was not arrested after Wyatt became one of Meagher’s policemen. Or there may be another reason: Sarah left Wichita, and her “marriage.”
In the 1875 census conducted by the state of Kansas, the names of Wyatt Earp and his brother and sister-in-law are listed, but not Sarah’s. There is no mention of her again in Wichita. According to the sleuthing done by Sherry Monahan, Sarah can next be found in 1883, living under the name Sadie Haspel in Kansas City. For a time during that decade she lived with a prizefighter named Murphy, then married a man named Bollman. She died as Sadie Bollman on July 29, 1919, at the age of sixty-six, in Oak Forest, a suburb of Chicago.
Wyatt did not suffer anything like the grief when Sarah left as he had when Aurilla died. He already had her replacement picked out. In fact, he may have met her before Sarah.
More so than any of the Earp brothers, Wyatt had complicated relationships with women. The others would find steady relationships, even James, whose wife was involved in prostitution. After he had branched off from the California-bound wagon train led by his father to give Nevada a try, James lived in Idaho, Washington, Wyoming, and Montana, which proved to be his favorite. But he didn’t stay there, either; he looked up his parents in Missouri, then tried Kansas City, then returned to Missouri, where as a wounded Union veteran he received a land grant of 145 acres in Boonville.
Somewhere along the way James met Bessie Nellie Catchim, a divorcée from New York City with a son named Frank and a daughter named Hattie. James and Bessie were married in Illinois in April 1873. Apparently, farming was not for them, because James wound up reuniting with Wyatt in Wichita the following year, now with a family to support. Either James could not support them well enough or Bessie wanted to continue making use of business skills she had developed, because she became a brothel operator.
Virgil was not long out of his twenties when he married for the third time. His marriage to Rozilla Draggoo may have ended with her death because there is no further record of her, and apparently Virgil was free to marry again. He did, probably in 1873, to Alvira Packingham Sullivan, a girl of Irish descent known as Allie.
She was born in Florence, Nebraska, in January 1851. The family moved to Omaha, and when the Civil War began, her father, John Sullivan, enlisted in the Union Army despite (or maybe because of) having a wife and eight children. Louisa, Allie’s mother, died a year later. With John still away, the children were separated and taken into foster homes. Allie ended up in an abusive one and she ran away. She was taken in by other families, and then when she was sixteen she was back in Omaha, living with an older married sister. It was there she first encountered Virgil Earp, in late 1872.
Allie was working as a waitress, and when the tall, handsome stagecoach driver entered the restaurant, she was smitten. He noticed the attractive waitress and maybe sensed the same kind of wandering spirit the Earps had. “He always said I was just getting ready to take a bite out of a pickle when he first saw me,” Allie wrote many years later. “When I was mean he used to say I was just as sour. But mostly he said I was no bigger than a pickle but a lot more sweet.”
She and Virgil began to live and travel together in 1873. It is uncertain if they actually married, but their union would be a permanent one, lasting until Virgil’s death.
Morgan had gone up to Montana to join James Earp. His older brothers had been a bit protective of their boyish brother because Morgan hadn’t developed some of the rough edges they had. In Allie’s reminiscences about the family, she recalled that Morgan was “the nicest to us of all the Earps, the most good-natured and handsomest. His face was lean like Jim’s and Wyatt’s but more sensitive. His thick straight hair never did stay combed and his moustache was always scraggly.”
After Montana, Morgan returned to Missouri and became a bartender in St. Louis. In 1875, he was in Wichita, with James and Wyatt. Apparently, he was no stranger to their establishments, because Morgan was arrested during a raid on a brothel. He was fined three dollars, but when it was all sorted out that he was the brother of a city cop, it was rescinded. A woman named Nellie Spalding was Morgan’s girlfriend at the time and may have been in the same business as Bessie and Sarah. Morgan would not be married until a few years later, and not to Nellie.
Warren Earp, almost fourteen years younger than James, was still living with Nicholas and Virginia Ann Earp and his youngest sister, Adelia, and marrying anyone was not much on his mind.
At that time, the Earp brother with the most stable marital situation was the half brother, Newton. After his return from the Civil War he married Nancy Jane Adam, known as Jennie, in Missouri. They accompanied Nicholas and Virginia Ann to California, where Newton became a saloon manager, and returned east with them. Newton, a farmer, and Jennie were the neighbors of Wyatt and Aurilla in Lamar. Their first child, a daughter, was born in Missouri, and their second, a son named Wyatt Clyde, was born after they had moved to Kansas. The couple would have two more daughters and a son, Virgil Edward.
Mattie Blaylock would become Wyatt’s third “wife.” A photograph of her was taken in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1871, and Wyatt was believed to be in the vicinity at that time as part of his post-Lamar wanderings. It is possible that is where he first met Mattie. This would turn out to be the most turbulent relationship with a woman that Wyatt had in his life.
Celia Ann Blaylock was born in January 1850, the third of six children of Henry and Elizabeth Blaylock, in Monroe Township, Iowa. The family farmed land there. Celia Ann’s parents were Lutherans and strict enough in their ways to be a burden to at least two of their rebellious children. As teenagers, Celia Ann and a younger sister, Sarah, ran away from the farm. Nothing is known about Celia Ann until, under the name Mattie Blaylock, she was living in Fort Scott. Sarah would return home and eventually marry, accepting the more conventional life.
Mattie, apparently, was not similarly inclined. According to E. C. Meyers in his biography of her, in the summer of 1871, Wyatt was living on Newton’s farm outside Fort Scott. How they met was not necessarily unconventional at the time on the frontier, but their life together would be. “When Mattie Blaylock met Wyatt Earp she was a garden-variety prostitute quietly residing in a pleasure palace operating just off the main street,” writes Meyers.
Initially, the attraction may have been one-sided. Mattie noted that Wyatt was “tall, slim, with blond hair and neatly trimmed mustache, he was very handsome. She could not have helped but to also notice his blue eyes and ice cold they were.” She might have fared better, Meyers claims, “by walking away instead of tying her wagon to his erratic star. From that day and for the next eleven years, she went where he went, stayed where he stayed and did his bidding.” Mattie began to call herself Mrs. Wyatt Earp “and to her final day identified herself as such.”
In what could have become fodder for a French farce, Mattie went with Wyatt or at least joined him when he landed in Peoria, where he took up with Sarah Haspel. Mattie may even have been one of the women who worked at Jane Haspel’s brothel, but at some point she went to work for another madam, Jennie Green. Much of the confusion about the time before Wyatt went to Wichita is that Meyers and others assert that Mattie and Sarah are the same person and the same “wife,” because in front of a judge on September 10, 1872, Mattie reportedly said, “My name is Sarah Earp. I am Mrs. Wyatt Earp.” There are also assertions that after fleeing the overzealous law enforcement of Peoria, Mattie accompanied Wyatt back to Newton’s place, and he spent 1873 farming, not buffalo hunting and making an impression in Ellsworth. Given his lifelong antipathy to plowing, harvesting, and other farming chores, it isn’t likely that this was what Wyatt was doing.
In any case, when Wyatt had arrived in Wichita, he had Sarah, the real Sarah Haspel, with him, not Mattie, who had been left behind with Newton and Jennie on the farm. Supposedly, the plan was that Wyatt would settle in with James and Bessie, establish himself as a gambler, and send for Mattie. By November 1873, she still hadn’t heard from him. One can conjecture that Sarah’s position was that Wichita wasn’t big enough for her and Mattie at the same time. Wyatt had to choose who would be his wife.
Walking the streets to patrol Wichita at night—either boisterous or quiet ones, depending on whether a cattle drive had just concluded—probably offered relief to Wyatt. Whatever his women issues, they did not deter his law-enforcement efforts. An account in The Wichita Beacon of May 12, 1875, tells of Wyatt’s no-nonsense practice of policing. It had been reported that a man named W. W. Compton had stolen two horses and a mule in nearby Coffey County, and the previous Tuesday evening the misspelled “Erp” spied a man matching the thief’s description: “Erp took him in tow, and inquired his name. He gave it as ‘Jones.’ This didn’t satisfy the officer, who took Mr. Jones into the Gold Room, on Douglass avenue, in order that he might full examine him by lamp light. Mr. Jones, not liking the look of things, lit out, running to the rear of Denison’s stables. Erp fired one shot across his poop deck to bring him to, to use a naughty-cal phrase, and just as he did so, the man cast anchor near a clothes line, hauled down his colors and surrendered without firing a gun. The officer laid hold of him before he could recover his feet for another run, and taking him to jail placed him in the keeping of the sheriff.”
Contradicting his previous restlessness, Wyatt did not seem of a mind to be on the move again. However, other Earps were. As usual, it began with Nicholas. Though over sixty, he again wanted to wander, thinking of giving California another try. Newton said he and his family would go along. Farming in Kansas had lost its allure in the summer of 1874, when a grasshopper plague of biblical proportions had wiped out the crops on many of the farms in and around Hutchinson. Virgil and Allie decided to go along, with the latter hankering to see what the West Coast was like. The Earps were part of an eleven-wagon train that rendezvoused at what was left of Newton’s farm. (Also along was a man named Bill Edwards, who would later marry Adelia Earp.) Nicholas gave the order, and the wagon train headed west.
For a time, Wyatt had done pretty well for himself in Wichita, whatever his domestic situation actually was. Being a member of the police force, he no longer had to pay fines for the activities of his wife … or wives. As a lawman, he was an important part of Marshal Meagher’s pretty successful effort to tame Wichita’s tougher elements and help the business district to grow. In just a couple of years, the city became somewhat civilized.
There were still colorful characters who passed through, though. Abel Head “Shanghai” Pierce, for example, was one of the most successful cattlemen of the era. After a stint as a butcher in the Confederate Army, he wound up owning a ranch on Matagorda Bay in Texas (though he hailed from, of all places, Rhode Island). He and his nephew introduced the American Brahman breed of cattle, which were immune to tick fever. At six feet five, Pierce was especially tall for the time, and he carried 220 pounds. He sported a white beard and a voice that people claimed could be heard half a mile away. He called his cattle sea lions, contending they had been bred in the bay, and in the 1870s he sold tens of thousands of them in the Kansas cow towns. In 1875, Wichita was a favorite watering hole, and he enjoyed raising hell there.
One night in a saloon, Pierce was drunk and wearing a gun, an ominous combination. Wyatt walked in and ordered the cattleman to leave town and not return until he was sober. Pierce obeyed, but his unhappiness must have been more than evident back at camp, because soon after, twenty or so of his cowboys rode into Wichita demanding to see Wyatt. He presented himself, and a loaded shotgun, and Wyatt must have been accompanied by others, because the reported outcome was that all twenty were disarmed, escorted to jail, and fined. (This may have been the only time that James Earp stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother and holding a gun.) The next morning, a rueful Shanghai Pierce, twirling a walking cane, arrived at the jail and paid to bail his cowboys out to the tune of two thousand dollars.
Such extravagances were not unusual for the charismatic cattleman. A few years later Pierce paid ten thousand dollars for a twenty-foot-tall bronze statue of himself. It now overlooks his grave in Blessing, Texas.
Wyatt must have kept his nose clean and done a good job, because there were several additional mentions of doing his duty and keeping the peace in the Wichita newspaper. The December 15, 1875, issue of The Beacon tells of Wyatt finding a man so drunk he was just lying in the street. “He took him to the ‘cooler’ and on searching him found in the neighborhood of $500 on his person.” The drunk slept it off in the city jail, and, as the newspaper reported, when he faced a judge the next morning, he could pay his fine from the bankroll Wyatt had returned to him.
Sarah Earp may have questioned Wyatt’s integrity and found it wanting, because she apparently left town. Perhaps Wyatt and Mattie, now the sole Mrs. Earp, would have remained where they were for years to come. But the end for Wyatt in Wichita was the 1876 election, in April. This time Bill Smith hoped to unseat Meagher. He watched the counting of votes on election day while nursing some bad bruises.
During the heated campaign, Smith had accused Meagher of having a plan to pack the police department with Earps, meaning Morgan and James or Virgil would be appointed to serve alongside Wyatt, and the citizens of the city would have to foot the bill for these extra and unnecessary officers. Wyatt was furious that his family was being used in this way. The next time he encountered Smith on the street, Wyatt gave him a good beating and was arrested for disturbing the peace. Reluctantly, Meagher had to follow the wishes of the city council and fire Wyatt for conduct unbecoming an officer.
Meagher prevailed in the election. He wanted to rehire Wyatt, but the city council vote on the matter was a tie. Feeling betrayed by them, Wyatt considered his options, and instead of requesting a new vote, he and Mattie began packing. James and Bessie had established a brothel elsewhere in Kansas. In May, Wyatt and his wife set out for Dodge City.
There, he would renew his friendship with Bat Masterson, and together they would clean up the “wickedest town in the West.”