00:00:00 Speaker 1: So, of all the tales that make up the origin story of the great Wyatt Earp, my favorite comes out of Wichita. It's from 1874. It's an unconfirmed tale told years later by a local who claimed he was there. The story goes that a struggling madam had fallen behind on payments on the piano in the parlor of Hoard Bordello, which, of course, is a fancy word for whorehouse. Earp. Then a stern 26-year-old deputy in Wichita was sent to repossess this piano, we're told, and while inside, he took pity on the woman. He actually chastised a group of cowboys in her parlor for failing to help pay their hostess's debt. Reluctantly, we're told, the Texans passed a hat and took up a sizable collection to help cover her bill. But at some point during the confrontation, Earp also issued a warning, quote, not to head into something they couldn't buy themselves out of. I would love to tell you here, if only for the sake of variety, that the Texans took a few deep breaths, thought things over, and went back to a lovely night enjoying the, um, piano. They did not. Rather, a crowd of maybe 60 of them gathered afterwards, presumably that night, promising to teach this sassy young deputy a lesson, and rode toward downtown Wichita. They were led by, and talk about a small world, John Wesley Harden's cousin, Manon Clements, a dark, strong cattleman from the coastal plains east of San Antonio. Earp and a group of townspeople met them at the Arkansas River Bridge that connected the downtown area to the vice district south of it. Earp, we're told, stood on the bridge, armed I'm guessing, and called for Manon Clements and his men to turn around and leave. Clements were fused. Earp warned him, quote, mind me now, man, put up those guns and go on home. It was a tense moment. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Takova's. Good boots for good times. Hey, y'all, this is Brian Burra, and welcome to Episode 8 of Gunfighters. Thanks so much for dropping by. I'll finish that Wichita story in a minute. But first, I just want to get you up to speed on the current thinking around Wyatt Earp, who is, after all, a crucial figure in the gunfighter era. In some ways, you could say he's actually the central figure, a man who links up any number of gunfighters and famous locales. After Wichita, he was hired as marshal of the most famous gunfighter town, that would be Dodge City, at the height of its notoriety, and he later passed through some pretty scary areas of New Mexico before moving on down to Arizona, where he became the central character in the most famous gunfight of them all, the gunfight at, or actually beside, the OK Corral. And his friends included a number of the era's other great gunfighters, men like Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, and Luke Short. Today, thanks to the Hollywood movies and documentaries that play endlessly on Netflix and other streaming platforms, Wyatt Earp has become the best-known gunfighter of all. What you might not appreciate, because I know I certainly didn't, is he's long been among the most controversial as well. The controversies, and we'll get into all this later, are basically twofold. The first set deal with who Wyatt Earp and his brothers were before they all got famous. Yeah, so long story short, they were pimps. Like men who manage prostitutes and brothels. So yeah, there's that. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but Wyatt, for his entire career in the law, in fact, was also, wait for it, an escaped federal prisoner. It was his biggest single secret. The second part of the controversies revolve around what happened in Tombstone, when he was ostensibly working for the federal government. Wyatt killed men there outside the law. We know it. He did it to avenge attacks on his brothers, one of whom you may remember died in in an ambush-style shooting. There are those who believe this makes Wyatt Earp heroic. The movies certainly portray him that way. But there's others who believe Wyatt's revenge on what's called his infamous Vendetta Ride was an early example of blatant government overreach. There are folks on the right end of the political spectrum who say that was exactly the kind of thing federal authorities did at Ruby Ridge or, more famously, at Waco. And I get that. I mean, I guess. Anyway, so yeah, there's a lot to unpack. But let me say something first about why I think Wyatt Earp matters so much to this story. To the gunfighter era, sure, but really to the entire Old West and to American history. It's about what he represents. Because alone among gunfighters and rare among major figures from the Old West, Wyatt Earp exerts a real serious pull on the American imagination. At a time when men like Wild Bill Hickok and John Wesley Harden have pretty much faded from our collective memory, Earp's fame has actually grown. The movies, as I say, have certainly helped. But I think it's more than that. As I said in the book, unlike Hickok and Harden and so many others, we have a clear sense that Wyatt Earp not only fought for something, his family, the rule of law, justice, but he stood for something. In a Wild West where thievery and murder and the worst imaginable crimes can seem commonplace, White Earp is the moral center the legend of the Old West requires. There are few major figures from this era who enjoy anything like his moral authority. Sitting Bull, maybe? Chief Joseph, maybe? Sure, yeah. If the Old West is to stand as it always has, though, it's America's adopted creation myth. It needs White Earp. We need him to fill that void. We need him to be our good guy. This is the place where you're probably expecting me to start tearing him down. I mean, that would be the provocative thing to do, right? And after all, as we've said, he had been a pimp. He was an escaped federal prisoner, a man who took lives outside the law. And for all his skills with the gun, for all the hoopla about him as a gunfighter, there's maybe two men we're sure he actually killed. Two. A handful of others maybe, but nothing will ever confirm. So as just a killer of men, he doesn't rank very high on anyone's list. Still, tear him down? Sorry, I can't do it. At a time when so many frontier lawmen were drunk, corrupt, or both, Wyatt Earp was a beacon of rectitude. Seriously. Not perfect. Not by any means. But the fact is, if you've read everything out there, you know in your bones he was the real deal. Wyatt Earp really was a genuinely good guy. Oh, and before we get going, though, one last word about those movies, especially the two you probably know, the one with Kurt Russell and the one with Kevin Costner. Please, just skip the Kevin Costner one, the one called Wyatt Earp. It's pretty slow. Not awful by any means, not even inaccurate, just really slow. Tombstone, though, the one with Kurt Russell as Wyatt and Val Kilmer as the greatest Doc Holliday ever, That's the one you want to make sure to see. It's not Wyatt Earp's whole life story. It's just the events surrounding the OK Corral shootout. And while there's some stuff in there that had me rolling my eyes, a made-up massacre of Latino villagers at the very beginning, and a token gay character in a what-were-they-thinking bit of casting, still, it's the very best of modern non-fiction gunfighter movies. Just excellent. You really should see it. The Wyatt Earp of history, though, his story, it's every bit as good as the movies. He was born on the family farm outside the town of Monmouth in Illinois, the fourth of eight children, including five boys, three of whom would be at his side at times later in Tombstone. His father, Nicholas Earp, was a wandering striver, always on the lookout for the next best thing and, frankly, never quite finding it. When Wyatt was still a baby, The family moved over into Iowa, where he mostly grew up. The Civil War broke out when Wyatt was 13. His older brothers joined the Union Army. Wyatt, we're told, ran away several times trying to enlist himself, but he was far too young. His father dragged him home more than once, it's said. Then, in 1864, when Wyatt turned 16, the family moved again, this time all the way to California, to a new farm outside San Bernardino. Wyatt hated farming, though. I mean, hated it, and soon began taking jobs on freight wagons, eventually spending much of the next four years crisscrossing the Southwest as far afield as Salt Lake City. He grew to be a man during this period, a sinewy six-footer with dirty blonde hair, tough guy on the quiet side. He learned to drink. There were thousands of young guys in the West like him at the time. He didn't really stand out. Then in 1868, the Earp family suddenly left California and returned to the Midwest, settling this time in the town of Lamar, Missouri, where Nicholas Earp took a job as a constable. At age 21, without much formal education, but with an even temper and a certain maturity, Wyatt replaced his father, taking his first job as a lawman. Was this his ambition all along, or just the best job he could get in a small town? I kind of think the latter. Anyway, everything went well enough at first. He might have lived out his life in pleasant small-town anonymity. In short order, Wyatt got married, bought a house, and won re-election. But then, and for reasons we still don't quite understand given the thin paper trail, he totally flew off the rails. His wife's death, either from typhus or childbirth, is a likely cause. Some speculate her family blamed Wyatt for her death. That could explain the street brawl between them and a few of their friends and Wyatt along with his brothers Virgil and Morgan. Whatever the reason, by 1871, Wyatt had left Lamar, Missouri, never to return. Heartbreak could explain all this, sure, but I think something else was going on too. Another possible explanation for his disappearance, a couple of lawsuits filed against Wyatt after he left, alleging he ran off with city funds. I have a hard time believing he did that. I mean, it runs counter to everything we know about the man. He lived a long life, after all, and not once was he ever accused of thievery or embezzlement or anything like that. But of course, that's not the worst of it. Worse is what happened next. Thanks to recent discoveries, we know why it headed southwest into Indian territory, what we now call Oklahoma. It's where a lot of men went to hide from things in those days. It was there, in March 1871... that Wyatt and another man were arrested and charged with stealing a pair of horses. Just across the border in Van Buren, Arkansas, he was locked up to await trial. This was serious business. He was facing years in a federal prison. But instead of waiting around to see how a trial panned out, on the night of May 3rd, Wyatt joined a group of seven prisoners who knocked a hole in the roof of that jail and escaped into the night. Few people in his life ever knew about any of this, and as far as we know, Wyatt never spoke once about it. But for the rest of his days, he would remain officially a federal fugitive. The other Earps weren't exactly choirboys either. Wyatt's older brother Virgil, in particular, in his early years, was kind of a thug. After the war, Virgil drifted through Illinois and Iowa, drawing a string of arrests, including one for arson. He worked as muscle for a gang of con men in Omaha for a time. But by 1871, Virgil was back in Illinois, in Peoria, attending Barr. That's where he reunited with the oldest Earp brother, James, who had compiled his own rap sheet across the Mountain West, including an escape from a jail in Montana. By the time he reconnected with Virgil there in Peoria, James was working as, that's right, a pimp. That's where Wyatt found them after his escape from jail, in Peoria. He too, it appears, became a pimp. Arrested twice for it, in fact, once with his younger brother Morgan. After one arrest, the Peoria newspaper actually tagged Wyatt, quote, the Peoria bummer, slang for bum at the time. So, not exactly a solid citizen. It's after that that the Earp brothers appear to have scattered, all going west in different directions. We don't know exactly why. Wyatt disappears from history there for two full years. In the last years of his life during the 1920s, he told a biographer he worked one year as a buffalo hunter and as a surveyor the next year. The year after that, 1874, is when he shows up as a part-time deputy in Wichita, one of those five fabled Kansas cow towns. His brother James, the oldest, was already there, managing his wife who... Let's just say I saw a gentleman for a living. We've already told you about two of these towns, Abilene and Ellsworth. But before I get to Wichita, just to remind you really how crazy the Texas Cowboys in these towns could be, I want to tell you real quick about one more of them. It's the least known of the towns, but also the most over-the-top violent. Its story gives you a flavor of the kind of environment Wyatt Earp was walking into. The town of Newton, Kansas. sprung up out of nowhere in the spring of 1871 on a desolate patch of prairie in central Kansas whose only value was the simple fact that it lay near a passing railroad. Remember, these towns existed only for the delivery and processing of long-horned cattle driven all the way up the Chisholm Trail from Texas. That meant the arrival of hundreds of ornery Texas cowboys, too, as we've seen, who brought to Kansas their state's own penchant for spectacular gun violence. That first cattle season, 1871, Texas trail bosses rushed Newton like starving men to a porterhouse steak. Newton grew like a weed. By that first autumn, while grass still grew in what passed for its streets, it boasted 27 saloons, eight gambling halls, and a round-the-clock red light district. When Abilene banned the cattle trade, Newton, 65 miles south, was ready to welcome those Texas cowboys. and all the trouble they brought with them. Newton's gunfights made Abilene's look like bridge games. There were four killings just that first July, all involving Texans. As one memoirist put it not long after, quote, The citizens of the town were helpless before the fierce gun-toting Texans. Newton's signature moment of violence arose from its first city elections. town leaders named special policemen to keep order at the polls. Among them, a hard case known as Mike McCluskey and a Texas gambler known as Billy Bailey. One evening at the Red Front Saloon, these two policemen got into a fistfight. It's at that point that they took it outside where McCluskey promptly shot Bailey in the chest. Bailey died the next day. The Texans in town vowed revenge, as of course they were prone to do. Around 2 a.m. on August 20th, a little over a week after Bailey was killed, a bunch of the Texans found that guy McCluskey in Tuttle's Saloon. The leader of this group was a cowboy named Hugh Anderson. All we know for sure is that Anderson shot and killed McCluskey. After that, it was total chaos. I mean, dozens of shots fired, people screaming, Texans and bystanders falling. It ended up being one of the bloodiest gunfights in Old West history. At least five men died of their injuries, among them McCluskey. It went down in history as Newton's General Massacre. Great nickname, just the word general, right? As if to distinguish from a specialized kind of massacre. There's a legend that most of the Texans were shot that night by a quiet consumptive named Jim Riley. There is, however, no evidence, unfortunately, that such a man even existed. Or if he did, he was never seen again. There's a strange little footnote to all this, something I stumbled on while writing the book. I found it on a local history website in Kansas. The man who led the Texans in the massacre that night, Hugh Anderson, it said he was friends with John Wesley Harden and had been with him in Abilene. He survived the gunfight. A few years later, A newspaper in New York published this vivid story of how Anderson finally was killed in a gory gun and knife duel with McCluskey's brother, who was seeking revenge for his brother's death. A number of otherwise credible Western histories repeat the story. I mean, it's just too good not to repeat it, right? But in 2014, a researcher named Douglas Ellison dug deeper and found that the story was totally pure fiction. It had all been concocted back in the day by a discredited stringer for that newspaper. In fact, the real Hugh Anderson went on to a long career as a rancher in Texas and New Mexico. He didn't die till 1914 at the age of 62, when of all things, he was struck by lightning. Newton went the way of all those other Kansas towns. After the massacre, it lasted just one more season, but it probably set some kind of speed record for law enforcement casualties. A month after Billy Bailey and Mike McCluskey were killed, another of the new lawmen, this one named Carlos King, disarmed a drunk Texan in a saloon. A few hours later, the Texan returned with a derringer and shot King dead. Later on, King's partner, his name was Thomas Carson, faced murder charges of his own in Dodge City and disappeared after jailbreak. The following year, Newton's new marshal survived three gunshot wounds in a shooting with several Texans. So yeah, obviously, pretty tough town. No, Wyatt Earp wasn't at Newton. Later in life, he did once claim, though, that he'd been at Ellsworth. If you took in our last episode, you'll remember the Texas gambler Ben Thompson's misadventures there in the summer of 73. Wyatt, in his old age, actually claimed He was one of the deputies who arrested Ben Thompson in Ellsworth. But that's a pretty unlikely story, and I think it speaks to... his shaky grasp of facts late in life. It's possible that Wyatt could have served briefly in Ellsworth in some capacity, but Thompson's arrest is fairly well documented, and Wyatt's name appears nowhere in Ellsworth's public record. For sure, though, Wyatt did service in Wichita in 1874. This is where, as I said, he reunited with his brother James, who'd opened a brothel there with his wife. It's possible that Wyatt was their business partner there for a time, but by that summer he was also serving as a part-time policeman. This was the period when we get one of the first great stories, thinly documented though it is, of Wyatt's heroics as a lawman, the story of Wyatt and those 60-odd Texas cowboys at the Arkansas River Bridge. Mind me now, Madden. Put up those guns and go on home. Mind me, like he was a school principal or something. We're told Mann and Clements studied the deputy at length, sizing up his resolve. A long moment passed. And then Mann and Clements holstered his gun and led his cowboys away. This time the Texans actually did leave without a fight. From stories like this, and from a few kind words in the local papers, we get a sense of a young Wyatt Earp was skilled at his job. Over two years working in Wichita, we get glimpses of a disciplined young lawman who went out of his way to avoid violence. As a deputy, he was low man on the Wichita force. Along with keeping the peace when the Texans got rowdy, his responsibilities included inspecting chimneys, sweeping the wood plank sidewalks, and shooing off and probably shooting the wild dogs that infested the town. He engaged in nothing remotely like a gunfight. The only time we know his pistol actually fired in January 1876, it was because it fell from his holster and discharged. It's said the bullet went right through his coat. Today, Earp's name is synonymous with those wild cow towns. But in his time working there, he never found anything like fame. Other than a single mention in the pulpy National Police Gazette, He was utterly unknown outside the places he served, and he only served for parts of five years anyway. Casey Tiefertiller's great book, Wyatt Earp, is 436 pages long. Wyatt's finished with Kansas by page 39. Wyatt's time in Wichita came to an abrupt end after a fight with a candidate in the town marshal's election. The people of Wichita had been growing impatient with the vice trade, and a candidate for marshal, his name was Bill Smith, made an issue of Wyatt's brother and sister-in-law running a brothel. Wyatt was warned to steer clear of Smith, but he didn't. A fistfight ensued and they say Wyatt had to be pulled off the poor guy. Wyatt was fired from his job. As the paper told it, quote, It. 00:22:52 Speaker 2: Is but justice to Earp to say that he had made an excellent officer and hitherto his conduct has been unexceptionable. 00:23:00 Speaker 1: One of Wyatt's pals won the election and tried to hire him back. but the move bogged down in a dispute over back pay. Rather than wait around to see the matter resolved, White left town. He wasn't out of work long, though. Already, the Texas cattle business was moving on to another rugged village, this one in the state's southwestern quarter, a remote spot that would go down, as I've said, as a central theater of the gunfighter era. Its name was Dodge City. Dodge City. Just the name conjures up Every stereotype of the Old West, right? You can close your eyes and picture it. A couple of men facing off in the middle of a sandy street, fingers twitching over their holsters. A bunch of drunken Texans riding through towns, shooting their guns in the air. Clever gamblers in silk vests, racy whores and straight arrow sheriffs. I mean, Dodge City had the whole panoply of Western myth. A lot of those stereotypes today are identified with Dodge City. but less the actual Dodge City of History than the one portrayed in the long-running television series Gunsmoke. It ran on CBS for an incredible 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. And if you're old enough to remember it, well, it was a pretty big deal at the time. Its characters were all completely made up, completely fictional. That line you sometimes hear to this day, you know, get out of Dodge, pretty sure that came out of Gunsmoke. So it probably won't stun you to learn that the actual Dodge City wasn't much like either its television stereotype or the crazy chaotic stereotype you can read about in the more sensational history books. Yes, Dodge really did have a boot hill, a graveyard for those who died with their boots on, but it wasn't the first boot hill nor the most famous. You can make a road trip out of visiting all the boot hills out there, in fact. The first, I'm told, was in Hays, Kansas. I think the most famous one has to be the boot hill in Tombstone, Arizona. But all in all, the point is Dodge City was never really Dodge City. It's strange that this bustling cattle town out on the plains of southwest Kansas got a reputation as this great bloody citadel of sin. Much of it's due to Dodge's later leaders, I think, especially those in the 20th century. Somewhere along the way, they realized that promoting the sleepy town's history as a kind of Sodom of the Plains might draw more tourists than you know. Wheat. It's an image that's long endured. One history from 2017 calls Dodge, quote, This is just ridiculous. In just the first few episodes of this podcast, you've already heard about a few much more violent places. But it's also true that Dodge City's been grappling with this violent reputation almost from its founding. Dodge first appeared as a cluster of tents thrown up on the prairie beside the Arkansas River to sell liquor to buffalo hunters. Soon those tents were serving construction workers laboring on the approaching railroad. The town began to grow. Dodge's bad rap dates to his first years as an unorganized village in 1872 and 1873, when it was the site of a startling period of violence in which 18 men were killed. Newspapers across Kansas kind of had a field day. One said the place was, quote. 00:26:35 Speaker 2: Infested principally with gamblers, horse thieves, prostitutes, and murderers who look upon the law as a huge joke. 00:26:43 Speaker 1: In Kansas, at least, Dodge City became this kind of synonym for savagery, a final hurdle in the march of civilization west, a kind of troublesome anachronism. A few stories about Dodge made it into Eastern newspapers to the frustration of the state's civic leaders. And then, in 1876, after Abilene and Wichita and other cow towns enacted ordinances banning the Texas cattle trade, Dodge City raised its hand and announced it'd be pleased to host Texas cattle and cowboys. This is where, given all we've seen about the violence cowboys brought to Kansas, you're probably expecting to hear how they terrorized Dodge City, too. Yeah, I know. It did not happen. Which is where Wyatt comes in. He, too, arrived in 1876, the town's first real cattle season. The town marshal was largely an administrative position. The actual policing in town was handled by the assistant marshal, which is the job Wyatt took. It was a fairly quiet season, 1876, with no gunfights or violent deaths we know of. Part of that, I have to think, was Wyatt and the way he used his new-look police force. He was one of those lawmen, and there were a few like him on the frontier, who realized handguns were actually a pretty poor way of maintaining order in a rough town full of gamblers and prostitutes. If you pulled your gun enough times, at some point, you'd be forced to use it. That would mean consequences. Also, killing people, frankly, was a bad look. For a town that wanted people to come to it, it was just a bad look. So Wyatt used his fists, or more commonly, the butt of his pistol. When challenged by a drum, he tended to draw his gun and just whack the guy hard over the head, what came to be called buffaloing someone. Then he would drag the guy off to sleep it off in jail for a night or two. Wyatt had the discipline and the fistic abilities to make this strategy work. He was responsible for policing a town divided in half by the railroad tracks that ran along Front Street downtown. North of that line lay Respectable Dodge. South lay the Vice District, where Wyatt was responsible for keeping the order, or else. Fire a gun, pee outdoors, get too drunk, and you could expect a pistol butt, a night in jail, and maybe a fine. As in Ellsworth and other cattle towns, The Texans complained about these tactics endlessly, but no one much listened because Wyatt's tactics frankly worked. Dodge was quiet in 1876, and in 1877 too, when Wyatt left town for the cattle season to try and make a go of it mining in Deadwood, the South Dakota boomtown. He couldn't though, and in 1878 he returned to Kansas. Under Wyatt's guy, Dodge remained a rollicking boomtown, but frankly, by the standards of the Old West, it was pretty well behaved. As a Dodge newspaper put it in 1878, and I quote. 00:29:50 Speaker 2: Three dance halls in full blast on the south side. Stables jammed full, hundreds of cowboys perambulate daily, but two cases in police court? Who says we aren't a moral city? 00:30:01 Speaker 1: A lot of that good behavior was thanks to the presence of Wyatt Earp. But even in 1878 and 1879, the eventful years hobbyists and historians tend to focus on There were precisely seven killings in Dodge. More people were killed on a bad Saturday night in Newton. What Dodge did have, though, was star power. In the late 1870s, after all, Dodge was the main town in Kansas still taking Texas cattle. And because of that, it attracted a who's who of gunfighters, cattlemen, and gamblers. Not just Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday, but Luke Short, Rowdy Joe Lowe, Mysterious Dave Mather, and Billy and Ben Thompson, and also the man who may have been the most feared gunfighter of his day, New Mexico's Clay Allison. We'll be telling you about some of these folks in the next episode. I'm Brian Burra, and this has been Episode 8 of Gunfighters. Thanks for coming by. I hope we'll see you next time.