As is true of many communities, the new year in Tombstone brought new hopes and a rosy view of one’s surroundings and prospects for the future. In her January 4 missive that would be published two weeks later in The San Diego Union, Clara Brown noted the beauty of the area in winter and that “patches of snow are visible on the mountains.” She reported, “Three churches and a school house are now ready for occupancy. Miss McFarland will know how to appreciate the latter, for she has been laboring at great disadvantage, having charge of nearly one hundred pupils, cooped up in a shanty of two little rooms, and standing the classes outdoors to recite.”
Churches, a school, and crisp fresh air—perhaps Tombstone had turned a corner from its roughneck past. But things were about to go wrong, and quickly.
For Wyatt Earp, the early months of 1881 would bring him old friends and new enemies and an opportunity to make money now that he seemingly was through with lawing. One friend was Luke Short, who in what was a short life even for that time packed in a lot of living between his birth in Polk County, Arkansas, in January 1854, and his death, at not yet forty, in Geuda Springs, Kansas, in September 1893.
Short grew up in Texas and was only eight years old when he helped his father fight off an attack by Comanches. By age fifteen, he was already working as a cowboy, and not long after that he also served as a scout for the U.S. Army. Several accounts claim that during those scouting years he was in thirty engagements against Plains Indian tribes. His toughest scrape came in 1876, while attached to units commanded by General George Crook. Short was scouting solo when he was ambushed by at least a dozen hostiles. Short jerked his pistols out and killed three of the attackers right away, and in the ensuing mad dash to the nearest army camp, Short shot two more Indians off their horses.
This incident did not persuade him to try a different line of work … but being arrested did. To supplement his scout salary of about $40 a month, Short bought barrels of whiskey and made the rounds of Indian camps, selling the firewater, which was sometimes fatal to Indians. The army arrested him and had an escort take him by train to Omaha. When the train arrived, Short was not on it. He had given the accompanying soldiers the slip and gone in the opposite direction, winding up in Denver. There he turned his talents to gambling. And he hadn’t lost any speed on his draw, reportedly killing two men there and wounding another in Leadville, Colorado.
It has been reported that Luke Short and Wyatt Earp did not meet until Tombstone, but this makes no sense. Short was known to have done some gambling and even owned a piece of a saloon in Dodge City when Wyatt was a peace officer there. Also, Bat Masterson considered Short a good friend, and with Bat and Wyatt being best friends, all three would have spent some time together, with gambling as a mutual interest. And chances were that Wyatt would not have hired Short at the Oriental Saloon without previously knowing he could trust him.
Why was Wyatt hiring anyone there? Because by early 1881, he had a piece of the action at the saloon. One of Milton Joyce’s partners was William Harris, a Long Branch, New Jersey, native who had operated a saloon in Dodge City bearing the name of his hometown. Harris was one of many businessmen who had seen Tombstone as fertile ground for a watering hole and had purchased an interest in the Oriental. It was much more than a place for Doc Holliday to shoot old and new antagonists. To her readers in San Diego, Clara Brown declared that the Oriental was “simply gorgeous and is pronounced the finest place of its kind this side of San Francisco.”
The Oriental was nothing like the standard-issue saloon often seen on screens, where cowboys push through the doors, clap dust off their clothes, knock back shots of cheap whiskey, intimidate the nervous and barely competent piano player, and during fights break cheap wooden chairs over each other’s heads as the bartender ducks down. Here, fine music was offered every night by good piano and violin players, patrons dressed well, and the menu was one of the finest in town. The gambling room was plush and was run by men from San Francisco. Joyce took care of the bar and restaurant.
Harris offered Wyatt an interest in the Oriental in exchange for dealing faro and sort of being head of security. The success of the saloon had caused a decrease in business for some other saloons, and the possibility existed that their resentful owners would cause trouble. The offer came at a good time. Wyatt was no longer collecting a deputy sheriff’s paycheck and the Earp brothers’ mining interests were not producing profits. If generating revenue at the Oriental Saloon—an establishment Clara Brown also described as “respectable”—meant not bouncing around on a stagecoach or wagon the rest of winter as a Wells Fargo shotgun messenger, it was a welcome position. Having Luke Short back him up would be all the better.
And Wyatt had a new friend in town by the name of Fred Dodge, whose gun he had used to buffalo Curly Bill Brocius after Marshal White was shot. Dodge was a gambler as well as a bartender. He had roomed with Morgan before Louisa had arrived. But what no one, including the Earps, knew then was that Dodge was employed by Wells Fargo and was in the area as an undercover detective. The company had become alarmed by recent robberies and general lawlessness, and they wanted eyes at ground level. The man from Sacramento, then twenty-six years old, befriended the Earps, partly because he and the gregarious Morgan had hit it off and partly because he saw the brothers as supporters—and probably more than that—of law and order. Dodge would become an essential ally of the Earps, before and after the O.K. Corral gunfight.1
Cheerful visions of Tombstone’s immediate future indicated by Clara Brown’s words were soon dashed by a new outbreak of violence. Curly Bill was on the warpath. Apparently not giving much thought that it was his drunken escapade that had led to the death of Fred White the previous October, he was instead dwelling on his mistreatment by Wyatt and subsequently the prison guards and court in Tucson. He had lost two months of valuable rustling and carousing time, and somebody had to pay for that. Curly Bill, alcohol, firearms, and innocent victims were a bad combination.
The first venue where he “celebrated” his release was a social hall in Charleston, nine miles southwest of Tombstone. A dance was under way, with most or all of the revelers being Mexican. Brocius and another man leaned against the wall for a time, then they took out their six-shooters and shouted, “Stop the music!”
The band quit and the dancers stared at the armed intruders. Some may have recognized Curly Bill and understood how volatile he could be, especially when drunk, which he obviously was. Their eyes widened and their jaws dropped when Brocius ordered them to remove their clothes. Threatening gestures with the pistols persuaded them to start stripping. Curly Bill then told the musicians, “Strike up a tune.”
The band played, and encouraged by the guns aimed at them, the revelers resumed dancing, though all feelings of fun had gone out of the room. For close to a half hour, Brocius enjoyed the dancers’ humiliation. It could have continued all night, except a local peace officer on his rounds glanced in the window. At first, he must have thought he was dreaming, seeing dozens of naked bodies cavorting, then he spotted the armed cowboys. He quietly retreated and recruited several men to hide out in the corral next to the hall and make sure that Curly Bill’s cruelty would come to an end.
The trap was set, and when Curly Bill and his companion left the social hall they weaved toward the corral. The gun of one of the ambushers accidentally fired. Alerted, the two cowboys began firing into the corral. Terrified, the men inside escaped out the back way. As they got on their horses inside the corral, Brocius noticed that a few of the horses had been hit by bullets. The next day, he sent a messenger to Charleston to pay for the horses’ care.
Contention City, fourteen miles west of Tombstone, was the next town to experience Brocius’s peculiar sense of humor. First, though, on their way there, Curly Bill and his companion stopped at a church three miles out. Did they want to atone for the previous night’s debauchery with a Sunday-morning service? Not likely. With guns drawn, the two men interrupted the sermon being given by the Reverend Joseph McCann. They told him not to move, then started shooting, each man trying to see how close he could come to the minister without striking him. McCann remained stock-still, gazing upward and praying.
Next, the poor preacher was told to step down from the pulpit. As the appalled congregation watched, he was forced to dance a jig. Whenever he tried to stop, the guns were trained on him. Finally, Brocius had enough. “Now go right on with your gospel chin music,” he said, “and proceed with your Bible lessons to the kids.”
Little seemed to escape the notice of George Parsons, who now had more free time after serving as John Clum’s campaign manager. After commenting on the “bright, clear, grand weather,” his January 10 diary entry continued: “Some bullying by the cowboys. ‘Curly Bill’ and others captured Charleston the other night and played the devil generally, breaking up a religious meeting by chasing the minister out of the house, putting out the lights with pistol balls and going through the town. I think it was tonight they captured the Alhambra Saloon here and raced through the town firing pistols.”
It had been a full weekend for Curly Bill. Not full enough, though, that he was through terrorizing the area. On January 18, he and another the cowboy named George began bothering citizens in Contention City, firing their pistols and pulling cash out of their pockets. Local law was more vigorous than they had been outside the social hall the week before, with T. B. Ludwig, a deputy sheriff, approaching the cowboys to make an arrest. He was met by bullets spitting from the duo’s Henry rifles. Ludwig took cover, and when Curly Bill and George rode out, a hastily organized citizens’ posse gave chase. There was another exchange of gunfire, but the cowboys made good their escape.
Charlie Shibell, as the top peace officer in Pima County, began to feel the heat for what appeared to be an expansion of lawlessness, with Curly Bill as its poster boy. “It is disgraceful that this ‘Curly Bill’ should occupy the gate to Tombstone … after such an outrage as that of the 18th,” groused a letter writer in the Arizona Daily Star. “The time has come to make this community too hot to hold them. The terror these men have caused the traveling public, as well as the residents along the San Pedro, is having a serious influence, and this scab on the body politic needs a fearless operation to remove it. Let the Sheriff and his deputies see to it.” That meant Johnny Behan, too.
Instead of getting tough on crime, Behan appeared to embrace it: after Cochise County became a reality, he hired Brocius as a tax collector. A man who belonged in jail would instead have an official county position. The sheriff sent his deputy Billy Breakenridge to find the king cowboy and offer him the job. “The idea of my asking the chief of all cattle rustlers in that part of the country to help me collect taxes from them struck him as a good joke,” Breakenridge recalled in his memoir, Helldorado.
But after Curly Bill stopped laughing, he accepted the job. Most startling, Brocius took to the work, and after making the rounds, the deputy and the cowboy rode into Tombstone with more than $1,000 in collected taxes. However, this one foray as a Cochise County official did not turn Curly Bill into an altar boy. He was soon back to his rowdy ways.
For the Earps, the killing of W. P. Schneider and its aftermath could not have come at a worse time—in the midst of Curly Bill’s depredations. They may not have cared for the cowboys and their antics and dangerous illegal activities, but the Earp brothers had their own business to attend to. Virgil was a federal lawman, not the first line of defense as the town and county authorities were supposed to be. Then a violent death in Charleston put the Earps in the thick of the Tombstone tensions.
On January 14, Michael O’Rourke, known as Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, had a dispute over cards with Schneider, a local miner. The dispute ended with Schneider suffering a fatal bullet wound. He was well-known in Charleston, and immediately after the shooting a crowd formed, intent on administering swift justice. But before O’Rourke could be strung up, the constable, George McKelvey, pushed him into a buggy and took off for Tombstone.
On the way, there was a handoff. Virgil had been out riding, and after he halted the racing buggy and heard the story, he pulled O’Rourke up behind him on the horse. McKelvey was only too happy to turn the prisoner over to a deputy U.S. marshal. In Tombstone, Virgil stopped in at the Wells Fargo office and was glad to find Wyatt there. The younger brother grabbed a shotgun and rode the rest of the way into town with Virgil. Not trusting the local law, they brought O’Rourke to Vogan’s Bowling Alley, where James Earp worked. The prisoner was stashed there, with James, in one of the few times he used a gun, helping to provide protection. Expecting that angry citizens from Charleston were on their way, Virgil set off to find help.
He returned with Marshal Ben Sippy, Morgan and Warren Earp, Doc Holliday, Fred Dodge, and several other men.2 Soon after, the Charleston crowd rode in. They demanded the guards turn O’Rourke over to them. Sippy, flanked by the other guards, refused. Instead, when O’Rourke was brought out, he was placed on a horse, the others mounted their horses, and the party began the sixty-five-mile trip to Tucson. Behan was a Johnny-come-lately, but he did show up in time to join the group as it left Tombstone.
By protecting Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce and making sure he would arrive safely at the Tucson jail, Virgil was simply doing his job as a federal peace officer. In the newspaper accounts, Ben Sippy received most of the credit for the guardians standing up to the vengeful Charleston mob. However, many residents of Tombstone, most of whom had wagging tongues, had witnessed the standoff, with all five Earp brothers and Doc Holliday at the center of it. Surely these men offered a clear example of championing law and order by facing down a crowd bent on hanging a killer and getting that man to where he would be given a fair trial.
So, the first few weeks of 1881 had seen cowboy mayhem, most of it led by Curly Bill, and an unequivocal statement that the rule of law trumps anarchy. If indeed Tombstone was the last American frontier, as some recognized, then like the previous edges of the frontier it, too, would be tamed and civilized, becoming a place to raise children and prosper.
The Clantons and McLaurys and their rancher allies and Johnny Ringo and Curly Bill Brocius and their cowboy cronies took no pleasure in this rosy view, one that endangered their freewheeling way of life. It sure looked to them as though the Earps and their ilk stood in the way of running the new Cochise County.
Wyatt was determined to be the first sheriff of that county. With Virgil still the deputy U.S. marshal overseeing the Tombstone area, the brothers would once again have the upper hand in law enforcement. Presumably, that would mean the cowboys could face their stiffest opposition so far. Wyatt had not come west to be a lawman, but if he was going to be sheriff—the highest office he had held to date—and with the backing of his brothers, he was going to do it right.
But Johnny Behan made it known he wanted the job, too. It would be a step up from being a Pima County deputy, more money and prestige. And maybe he wanted it because Wyatt did. Josephine was back from San Francisco, and one way to best his romantic rival was to beat him out for an important position.
Wyatt would seem to have the upper hand, and not just because of his Dodge City reputation and his previous and lauded service under Shibell. The Earps were staunch Republicans, as were Governor John C. Frémont and John Gosper, the territorial secretary, and, for that matter, U.S. Marshal Crawley Dake. Behan was a registered Democrat. And at first glance, it would seem to help Wyatt’s chances that Gosper had become favorably acquainted with both Virgil and Doc Holliday.
Then the politics of it became more complicated. Frémont and Gosper despised each other, and the latter was actively agitating to get the former’s job. The influential Weekly Arizona Miner, published in Prescott, took a dislike to Gosper and began editorializing against him. Frémont began to figure that by appointing Behan as the new sheriff, he could stick it to Gosper, gain the praise of the popular newspaper, and have an IOU from the Democrats.
Wyatt became aware that the wind across the desert had shifted direction. In what had to be a stomach-churning move, he met with Johnny Behan. Ordinarily, Behan might have wilted under the gaze of the taller Wyatt’s cold blue eyes, but he knew he had the advantage politically, if not domestically. Wyatt offered to remove his name for consideration and to be Behan’s deputy after he was made the new sheriff. They would both earn a salary and share in tax collection fees, license costs, and other steady revenue. What to do about the cowboys could be hacked out later. If at some point Behan found another position—say, moving up to a federal one by replacing Dake—Wyatt would become sheriff.
Behan agreed. On February 3, the Arizona Territorial Legislature passed the required bills and Frémont signed them, creating Cochise County. Behan was appointed the new sheriff, and Wyatt waited to hear news about his own appointment. The news that arrived, though, was that Behan had tapped Harry Woods, editor of Tombstone’s Democrat-leaning Tombstone Daily Nugget, as deputy sheriff. The soon-to-be tax collector Curly Bill and his cowboy colleagues laughed out of both sides of their mouths in the saloons that night.
Wyatt still had his gambling interest in the Oriental Saloon, but with law enforcement, he was once more out in the cold. It had to be some comfort, though, that he could turn to a trusted friend: Bat Masterson had come to Tombstone.