Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (37 page)

As Wyatt Earp was leaving the courtroom, he bumped right into one of the Cowboys, Tom McLaury, at the front door. Earp apologized, but when McLaury bad-mouthed him, Earp smashed him in the head with his pistol.

With trouble brewing, marshal Virgil Earp swore in Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday, giving them the legal authority granted to all US deputy marshals: They could shoot to kill.

Almost two hours later, a local man named R. F. Coleman saw Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury in Dunbar’s corral. At some point, they were joined by another one of the Cowboys, Billy Claibourne. The speculation is that they were planning to ambush Doc Holliday, who normally passed that way each morning. Coleman claimed that he found Sheriff Behan, warning him that those boys were looking for trouble and that it was his duty to disarm them.

Everybody in town knew what was coming: a showdown. Apparently several members of Tombstone’s Citizens Committee volunteered to walk with the Earps. Wyatt turned them down, explaining that it was his responsibility to enforce the law and that’s what he intended to do. But he did allow Doc Holliday to join him. The long trail Doc had been traveling
for so many years had led him to this point. There is some evidence that at first Wyatt told Holliday that this wasn’t his affair. But the result of that conversation was that Virgil Earp gave Holliday a ten-gauge shotgun, the type of double-barreled gun carried by coachmen, which he secreted under his greatcoat. In return, Doc handed Virgil his cane. Virgil planned to carry it as a way of making clear to the Cowboys that he wasn’t armed and, if possible, of preventing bloodshed.

The four lawmen started walking shoulder-to-shoulder down the center of Fremont Street. Officially, they intended to enforce the law prohibiting people from carrying guns within Tombstone, but in fact they were going to get this thing settled. The Earps were dressed all in black; Doc Holliday was wearing gray. Sheriff Behan tried to derail them, apparently telling them that the Cowboys weren’t armed. In response, Wyatt suggested that Behan go with him to talk to the boys. Supposedly Behan laughed and told him, “Hell, this is your fight, not mine.”

Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers confronted the Clantons and McLaurys in a narrow fifteen-foot-wide space behind the O.K. Corral, between Fly’s Photograph Gallery and Jersey’s Livery Stable. For some reason, Claibourne had left the gang. The men faced one another for a few long seconds, then Virgil Earp shouted, “Give up your arms or throw up your arms!”

Another second passed; then it started. Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury went for their guns. Virgil warned them, “Hold on, I don’t want that.” But it was too late.

As eyewitness R. F. Coleman described it to a reporter the next day,

There was some reply made by Frank McLaury, when firing became general, over thirty shots being fired. Tom McLaury fell first, but raised and fired again before he died. Bill Clanton fell next, and raised to fire again when Mr. Fly took his revolver from him. Frank McLaury ran a few rods and fell. Morgan Earp was shot through and fell. Doc Holliday was hit in the left hip but kept on firing. Virgil Earp was hit in the third or fourth fire, in the leg which staggered him but he kept up his effective work. Wyatt Earp stood up and fired in rapid succession, as cool as a cucumber, and was not hit.

Doc Holliday was as calm as though at target practice and fired rapidly.

Thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds; then it was over. Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Billy Clanton were dead. Doc Holliday was credited by the
Tombstone Nugget
with killing
both McLaurys—he blew Tom McLaury away with both barrels at close range—and possibly wounding Billy Clanton. Ike Clanton, who took off running when the shooting started, survived. Morgan Earp was seriously wounded, but he would survive. And, as the
Epitaph
concluded, “Doc Holliday was hit upon the scabbard of his pistol, the leather breaking the force of the ball so that no material damage was done other than to make him limp a little in his walk.”

When the smoke cleared, the mine whistles started whining. The miners rose to the surface, armed themselves, and raced into town to preserve law and order. Armed guards surrounded the jail and would remain there throughout the night. Sheriff Behan approached Wyatt Earp and told him boldly, “I’ll have to arrest you.”

Earp shook his head. “I won’t be arrested today,” he said. “I am right here and am not going away. You have deceived me. You told me these men were disarmed; I went to disarm them.”

Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton were buried in the same grave. The
Tombstone Epitaph
reported, “The funeral … procession headed by the Tombstone band, moved down Allen street and thence to the cemetery. The sidewalks were densely packed for three or four blocks. It was a most impressive and saddening sight and such a one as it is to be hoped may never occur again in this community.”

Big Nose Kate said later that Doc Holliday returned to their room, sat on the bed, and wept. “That was awful,” he said. “Awful.”

Three days later, Ike Clanton filed charges, and Wyatt and Doc were arrested. An inquest into the shootings lasting almost a month concluded, “The defendants were fully justified in committing these homicides, that it was a necessary act done in the discharge of official duty.”

The gunfight turned out to be only the beginning of the bloodletting. Two months later, marshal Virgil Earp was ambushed by three men with shotguns on his way to the Crystal Palace. He was hit twice and suffered permanent injury. The Cowboys believed to be responsible were arrested, but other members of the gang swore that these men were with them at the time of the attack, and they were acquitted.

In March of the following year, Morgan Earp was shot and killed while playing pool at Hatch’s Saloon and Billiard Parlor. When Doc learned that the cowards had shot Morgan in the back, he apparently went ripping through the town, kicking open locked doors, hunting the killers. But they’d gotten away. Morgan was laid to rest wearing one of Doc’s finest blue suits. The Doc and the Earps now understood that they could not depend on the law to protect them. That was the beginning of what has become known as “the Vendetta Ride.”

Tombstone had become much too dangerous for the Earp family. All the women and children were packed up and, along with Morgan Earp’s body, put on a train for California. Doc, Wyatt, and several others rode along to protect them. As the train pulled into Tucson, a lookout spotted Ike Clanton and Frank Stilwell, believed to be lying in wait to finish the job on Virgil. Stilwell had been bragging that he had fired the fatal shot into Morgan Earp’s back, so no one was much surprised the next morning when Stilwell’s thoroughly ventilated body was found lying in the dirt near the tracks. As the newspapers reported, he was buried the next day “unfollowed by a single mourner.” Doc and Wyatt were named as his killers but suffered no repercussions for that act.

The bodies continued to pile up. Deputy Wyatt Earp’s posse heard that some of the Cowboys were in the Dragoon Mountains; they found one of the gang, Florentino Cruz, and dispensed western justice upon him. Two days later, nine Cowboys led by Curly Bill Brocius ambushed the posse. Doc was quoted as telling a newspaperman, “… eight rustlers rose up from behind the bank and poured from thirty-five to forty shots at us. Our escape was miraculous. The shots cut our clothes and saddles and killed one horse, but did not hit us. I think we would have been killed if God Almighty wasn’t on our side. Wyatt Earp turned loose with a shotgun and killed Curley Bill.” After that, it turned out to be open season on the Cowboys: Johnny Barnes, who was also involved in the attack on Virgil, suffered wounds that
eventually would kill him. A couple of months later, the body of Johnny Ringo—with a bullet hole in his right temple and his gun dangling from one finger—was found propped up in the trunk of a large tree in West Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona Territory. Local authorities speculated that it might have been suicide, but there were serious hints that it was the work of Wyatt Earp. Within a year after the murder of Morgan Earp, at least five more Cowboys were killed by people unknown. The gang was decimated.

Doc Holliday was arrested in Denver, although once again, no charges stuck. Reporting his arrest, the
Denver Republican
wrote, “Holliday has a big reputation as a fighter, and has probably put more rustlers and cowboys under the sod than any other one man in the west. He had been the terror of the lawless element in Arizona, and with the Earps was the only man brave enough to face the bloodthirsty crowd which has made the name of Arizona a stench in the nostrils of decent men.”

In 1883, Holliday settled in the mining town of Leadville, Colorado, the highest city above sea level in the country and a questionable place for a man with tuberculosis. The British writer Oscar Wilde had visited it a year earlier on his national lecture tour and remarked that it was there that he saw the only rational method of art criticism he’d ever encountered, on a notice hung in a saloon. It read, “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.” Although some believed Doc Holliday was completely broke and given to borrowing money, he worked as a faro dealer at the Board of Trade Saloon, drawing players from all around who wanted to say that they’d sat at the table with the great Doc Holliday.

Holliday spent a good deal of his time fighting reality with alcohol and the opiate laudanum. In 1884, he was involved in one of the last gunfights of his storied career, when a kid named Johnny Allen challenged him. Apparently Holliday ignored him as long as he could, but when Allen drew on him in Hyman’s Saloon, Doc fired twice, hitting the kid in the arm. The bartender jumped on him to prevent him from shooting again. That was the seventeenth and final arrest of his life. A jury found him not guilty of attempted murder.

In the winter of ’86, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp met for the last time, in the lobby of Denver’s Windsor Hotel. Wyatt’s wife, Josephine, wrote that the two men sat together and laughed and cried, and that she had rarely seen a man as happy as Doc Holliday was that day. She described him as frail, unsteady on his feet with a persistent cough.

Holliday eventually made it to the sulfurous Yampah Hot Springs near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a place that supposedly had healing powers. But the tuberculosis had him wrapped. He spent the last two months of his life in bed, delirious at least some of the time. Doc had always told people that he intended to die with his boots on, the western way of saying he was going to
die fighting, but in fact his boots were off as he lay in bed. On November 8, 1887, he supposedly awoke and asked in a clear voice for a glass of whiskey. Like so much else in his life, some reports say the nurse gave it to him; other reports claim she refused. But it is generally believed that he sighed, looked down at his bare feet, and commented, “Damn, this is funny,” and died.

Doc Holliday’s grave in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, has become a popular tourist destination. To his own surprise, and perhaps disappointment, he died in bed, with his boots off.

After years of gunfights in which he was responsible for piling up a slew of bodies, Doc Holliday died with his boots off—but his reputation as a man who had found a friendship worth living and fighting for was intact. A few days after he was buried, the Leadville
Carbonate Chronicle
printed his obituary, which read in part, “There is scarcely one in the country who had acquired a greater notoriety than Doc Holliday, who enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most fearless men on the frontier, and whose devotion to his friends in the climax of the fiercest ordeal was inextinguishable. It was this, more than any other faculty that secured for him the reverence of a large circle who were prepared on the shortest notice to rally to his relief.”

SHOOTING DOWN A LEGEND