THE TRUTH? HE WAS DAMAGED. SHE WAS DIFFICULT. Tombstone would dog them wherever they went, no matter what new dream they chased.
Silver, gold, real estate, oil, gas. Another boom, another bust. There was always another place to try their luck, but even when things were going well, Wyatt could get restless and irritable. Drinking more, talking less.
She’d ask, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he’d snap.
Maybe he’d run into somebody from the old days who wanted to talk about Arizona. Maybe a reporter from the local newspaper had come at him with a notebook and pencil, asking a bunch of questions about the gunfight. Soon—a week or month later—he’d be lying on his back, staring at the ceiling or the stars.
“Suppose . . .” he’d begin. “Suppose we try Utah next.”
Or Idaho, or Colorado, or Texas.
And they’d move on.
JUST ONCE IN THEIR TRAVELS, it was Sadie who ran into an old friend. They were passing through Leadville and had stayed overnight in a modest hotel. In the morning, Wyatt walked right past an elderly gentleman sitting in the corner of the lobby, but Sadie thought there was something familiar about him and turned back to take a second look. Intent on going to the front desk to pay their bill, Wyatt didn’t realize she’d left his side until he heard Sadie call, “Wyatt! Look who’s here!”
“Doc?” Wyatt said, coming closer. “Is that you?”
“What’s left . . . of me. Still on the sunny . . . side of the grass.”
The crooked smile was the same as always. The hollow-eyed, fleshless face looked like a Mexican death’s-head with a neatly trimmed mustache.
John Henry Holliday was thirty-five. He looked sixty.
Wyatt offered his hand. Doc would not take it. Before Wyatt could bristle, he explained, “Forgive me. I must keep my distance. We know now. The disease is contagious.” He paused, breathless, chest laboring. “I am pleased,” he continued, “to see you are both well.” He looked away. A long, wordless stare. “I never meant to harm anyone,” he whispered, but his voice was stronger when he asked, “Miss Louisa?”
“She’s got bad rheumatism,” Wyatt told him, “but she’s getting married again. Fella name of Peters. Kate?”
“Well. Last I heard. We have not spoken in some time. My fault.” That crooked smile again. “I don’t believe I shall mind bein’ dead. Gettin’ there has been a trial.” He sat a while, catching his breath. “I heard that Mattie Blaylock is gone.”
“Laudanum,” Wyatt said.
“Poor soul,” Doc murmured.
“Virgil is doing well,” Sadie told him, changing the subject. She never liked to think about Mattie. “Allie is fine, too. So is James.”
“Bessie’s dead,” Wyatt said.
“It wasn’t tuberculosis,” Sadie said quickly. “She had tumors.”
“So I recall. Please, give James my condolences.” Looking at Wyatt, Doc asked, “You ever go back to Arizona?”
Wyatt shook his head. You were right about the pardons, he meant. They cut me loose.
“I was arrested,” Doc told him without rancor. “Colorado tried to extradite me. Bat Masterson pulled some strings. He was very kind. I would not have thought it of him. But he was very kind.”
Wyatt glanced at the lobby clock. “I’m sorry, Doc. We got a train to catch.”
“Of course,” Doc said. “I am going up to Glenwood, myself. The sulfur springs are believed helpful for my condition.”
Sadie stood, leaning over to kiss him on both thin cheeks before he could protest or pull away. “Well, now. Aren’t you the sweetest thing!” he said, with something of his old charm. “Take good care of each other, y’hear?”
Wyatt offered his hand again. This time Doc took it.
Even then, a few months before he died, his grip was surprisingly strong.
THEY MOVED ON, and kept on moving.
Emil and Hattie backed a series of saloons and hotels in mining towns, but Wyatt’s big break came when he heard that the Santa Fe Railway was about to begin service from Los Angeles to San Diego.
“Suppose . . .” he said. “Suppose we try California?”
Sadie liked the idea of living on the coast again. Wyatt had built up enough capital to look his father in the eye. So they moved to San Diego, and for once in his life, Wyatt Earp got into something big right from the start. When the rumored railway arrived, the town exploded, filling up with entrepreneurs and shipping magnates, lawyers and bankers, thugs and criminals, musicians and writers, gamblers and whores.
San Diego never slept in the heedless, restless years that would be remembered as the Gay Nineties. There was ragtime in the dance halls, vaudeville in the theaters, band concerts every night. Everywhere you looked, something exciting was happening.
Wyatt Earp rode that town, thriving on the action and distraction. With forty thousand people looking for rental houses, you could charge sixty dollars a month for a shabby little shack, but the real money was downtown. He plowed cash into lots along the streetcar lines and sold them a year later for ten times what he’d paid. At the city’s peak, he was grossing $7,000 a week: turning real estate deals by day, running high-stakes faro games in fancy saloons by night.
He wasn’t concerned when Sadie took to gambling to fill the long hours he spent managing his many businesses. She was an idiot about games—indifferent to odds, ignorant of strategy—but she was having fun and he didn’t count the cost. Admittedly, she sometimes seemed a little blue. When he noticed, he’d take her dancing or they’d go to see a show. And she brightened up considerably when Wyatt won a racehorse on a bet, for Sadie liked the track as much as Wyatt did. He’d always dreamed of breeding horses and with money rolling in from his real estate holdings and the gambling halls, he could afford to invest in good bloodlines. She loved the beautiful animals he bought, the gorgeous silks, the betting and the screaming excitement of the races themselves. Together, they traveled the western race circuit—Santa Rosa, Santa Anita, and Santa Ana; Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati—staying in glamorous hotels and eating at fine restaurants. It was fun for Sadie to rub shoulders with high society and there was always an illicit thrill when she was introduced as Mrs. Earp to some big shot. Miss Josephine Marcus, she’d think with a secret smile, now starring in the role of Wyatt Earp’s wife!
The costumes her role required were splendid. Elaborate broad-brimmed hats; elegant wasp-waisted dresses with immense leg-of-mutton sleeves; bustles and high-buttoned shoes. When their horses lost, there was always tomorrow; when they won, Wyatt would buy her lavish jewelry. A ruby bracelet. A diamond brooch. An emerald ring.
But never a plain gold band.
Of course, she never asked for one. She had her pride.
For all anybody knew, she and Wyatt were married, though that didn’t stop other women from throwing themselves at the famously dangerous Wyatt Earp. Tall and straight in tailor-made suits, he was broad-shouldered and square-jawed, with a silent aura of physical confidence few modern males could match. By the 1890s, the Wild West had become something you paid admission to see at Buffalo Bill’s show, but Wyatt Earp was the real deal. Men were impressed, but women were enthralled. They’d watch him demurely through their lashes or stare at him with frank curiosity. Sadie knew exactly what they were thinking, for she had once thought it herself.
My, my, my . . . what would that be like in bed?
I taught him everything he knows, she’d think bitterly, and it maddened her to imagine other women enjoying the benefits of her tutelage.
“I love him, Doc, but he’s not the same man!” That’s what she said back in Leadville when she and Doc had those few minutes alone. “What happened after I left Arizona? He used to be so . . .” So shy, she thought. So awkward. Capable of blushing, for heaven’s sake! “So upright,” she said. “So—so—”
“So Methodist?” Doc suggested.
“Yes! But he drinks now, Doc, and he . . . well, he does things. And he doesn’t seem to care about—about what others think.” About what I think, she meant.
Doc fell silent for a time, trying to decide how much to say. In the end, he simply took her hand. “Try to remember him as he was, sugar. Try to remember the man Morgan looked up to.”
Now Doc was dead and here she was—five years later—living with someone she hardly recognized. She hated his drinking. She hated the endless wheeling and dealing. She hated being shut out of his life. Most of all, she hated the other women.
Oh, she could have taken lovers. She was still beautiful. She still had admirers in those days. Rich men, important men. But she didn’t want them. She wanted Wyatt. And she wanted him to want her, only her.
He’d given her fair warning. “I am not a good man,” he’d said, and he meant it, but she’d thought he was just being modest, or Methodist, or something.
He’s only human, she would tell herself when he disappeared for an hour and came back smelling of someone else’s perfume.
Then she’d hit the roulette table, blow two grand, and make him pay her debts.
“IT WASN’T JUST SAN DIEGANS,” a journalist wrote later. “The whole world experienced a sort of money insanity in those days. Any financial scheme that merely promised a return drew international crowds of eager gamblers who liked to call themselves investors.”
The first sign that the fun was over came when a few downtown properties were offered at a small discount to their initial asking price. Within a week, the real estate market shifted from “Grab it now, before the price goes up!” to “Wait a little while. It’ll go down more.”
Property values dropped, and kept on dropping. Being mortgaged to the hilt seemed to make sense during the boom, but now everybody owed more on their property than it was worth. Buildings recently bought for a hundred thousand dollars couldn’t scare up ten grand. New construction stalled. Ambitious projects were abandoned, half-finished. Why put up another lavish home or impressive office block when so many others already sat empty?
It wasn’t just the big shots who were getting killed. When credit was easy, working men with families bought their own little piece of the dream, and lost everything when they lost their jobs.
Foreclosures clogged the courts. There were burglaries in the dark and holdups in broad daylight. Before long, people were packing up, sneaking out of town at night, leaving homes and mortgages behind. Whole sections of the city were abandoned. Arson became epidemic. Small stores failed. So did big ones. Banks went over the edge and took depositors with them.
And exactly twenty years after the Crash of 1873, the whole dismal catastrophe repeated itself.
IF ANYONE HAD ASKED WYATT EARP for financial advice in those days, he would have said, “Invest in sin.” Vice is always the last to leave a dying town, for desperate men will rent female solace for an hour, slam down a shot of whiskey, and throw their last five dollars onto a craps table, hoping for a miracle.
On paper, his real estate investments were hit hard, but he had income from a whorehouse and saloons. He owned his horses outright and continued to race them. Like his father-in-law before him, he stayed solvent longer than most, and he was pretty sure he could ride the downturn out.
“Good times always end,” he’d learned to say, “and bad times never last.”
But the depression dragged on, year after year. One by one, he sold the properties and the horses off. Sadie’s gambling debts mounted—a fair measure of his own drinking and philandering, which did not achieve the level of Johnny Behan’s but were nothing to be proud of, either. They had a real battle once. He caught her stealing cash from his wallet. She laid into him for the women.
By that time, San Diego’s business district was a ghost town. And there was a lawsuit over a promissory note that Wyatt was likely to lose. Then they got word that Sadie’s father was sick.
“Suppose . . .” Wyatt said one night. “Suppose we move up to San Francisco. Might be nice for you. Living closer to your family.”
So they moved on.