Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (36 page)

The night on which Holliday and Earp forged the friendship that would last for the rest of their lives began when as many as fifty cowboys just off the trail came galloping down Front Street, raising a holy ruckus. After shooting out most of the shop windows, they ended up at the Long Branch Saloon, where Doc was in the back room, quietly tending to his nightly business. There is no record of how the cards were treating him that night. Soon Deputy Earp walked through the swinging doors, not having the slightest idea what was waiting inside for him. The cowboys were led by Tobe Driskill and Ed Morrison, a man who had been humiliated by Wyatt in Wichita several years earlier and had been itching to get even. Earp pushed open the door and found fifty pistols and rifles pointed at him. As Wyatt Earp told the story years later, Morrison warned him, “Pray and jerk your gun. Your time has come, Earp!”

In 1883, the Dodge City Peace Commission ended the Dodge City War without a shot being fired.

Before anyone could make a move, Holliday got up from his table quickly and quietly, pulled his own gun, and aimed it squarely at the back of Morrison’s head. “No, friend,” he said. “You draw or throw your hands up. Any of you bastards pulls a gun and your leader loses what’s left of his brains.” Fifty guns hit the floor. Earp punctuated the stand-down by slamming Morrison over his head with his Colt before taking him and Driskill to jail. As he later wrote, “The only way anyone could have appreciated the feeling I had for Doc after the
Driskill-Morrison business would have been to have stood in my boots at the time Doc came through the Long Branch doorway.”

Word spreads lickety-split when one man stands up to a saloon full of armed cowhands. Doc Holliday earned himself a reputation that night. People might have wondered if he had been drunk or crazy, but after that, no one ever doubted his courage.

Not surprisingly, Doc and Kate had a tumultuous relationship, breaking up and getting back together several times. Neither one of them liked to stay still for too long. When she took off on him in ’78, Doc decided to join the Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil, in Tombstone, Arizona. Tombstone was one of the West’s last mining boomtowns, built on a mesa above the Tough Nut Silver Mine. By the time Doc Holliday rode into Tombstone in 1880, the town already had an estimated 110 saloons, 14 gambling halls, a plentiful number of brothels, and 1 bowling alley.

Supposedly he’d left several bodies along the trail between Dodge and Tombstone. In Las Vegas, then part of the New Mexico Territory, for example, he got into a shoot-out with an old army scout named Mike Gordon. When Gordon’s former girlfriend, one of the saloon girls, refused to leave town with him, he’d started shooting up the place. As Holliday tried to get out of there, Gordon pegged a shot at him. Doc put two shots into his chest. Likely it was considered self-defense, as the coroner’s jury ruled that Gordon’s fatal wounds “had been inflicted by some person unknown to that jury.”

Doc almost settled another score before heading for Tombstone, trading shots with bartender Charlie White in Vegas’s Plaza Hotel saloon. This feud had started in Dodge. According to the future governor of New Mexico, Miguel Antonio Otero, who was a witness to this duel, “The two men faced each other and began shooting. They shoot and shoot with no one scoring a hit. Finally, Charlie White is down!” A scalp wound had stunned him senseless, but he recovered and left town.

A bad situation was already brewing in Tombstone when Holliday rode into town. Until the Earps arrived there, Tombstone had pretty much been run by a loosely knit gang known as the Cowboys. Mostly ranchers and cowboys who had been living there before the big mining companies came in and staked their claims, the Cowboys consisted of men like the Clantons, the McLaury brothers, Curly Bill Brocius, and Johnny Ringo, all of them known to be handy with a six-shooter. As long as they limited their activities to running across the border into Sonora and rustling Mexican cattle, nobody paid them too much mind, but after the Mexican government had gotten involved, making that too risky, the gang began stealing US cavalry beef. The Earps had been brought in to tame the town and had done a pretty
good job of it. As the
Tombstone Daily Epitaph
reported, “Since the retirement of Ben Sippy as marshal and the appointment of V.W. Earp to fill the vacancy the town has been noted for its quietness and good order. The fractious and much dreaded cowboys when they came to town were upon their good behavior and no unseemly brawls were indulged in, and it was hoped by our citizens that no more such deeds would occur as led to the killing of Marshal White one year ago.”

Hostility simmered between the lawmen and the Cowboys. The county sheriff, John Behan, stood between them, although he tended to lean toward the gang. Doc made his presence known soon after arriving, getting into a drunken brawl with another gambler in the
Oriental Saloon. Milt Joyce, the saloon’s owner, had disarmed Doc, and when he refused to return his gun, Holliday got himself another weapon and walked in shooting. Joyce raised his gun to shoot back, and Holliday shot the weapon out of his hand, then shot the bartender in the toe. When Doc’s attention was diverted, Joyce picked up his gun and whomped Holliday over the head with it, knocking him out cold. Holliday was arrested. He was found guilty of assault and battery and fined $20, plus $11.25 in court costs.

Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881 had a population of 4,000, 600 dwellings—and 2 churches. The large building in the foreground (
opposite
) is the Tough Nut mine hoisting works.

By this time, Doc’s consumption had taken hold and was beginning to affect him. He’d lost considerable weight and ended most nights drunk. He was on a sure path to a sorry end. It turned out, though, that the Cowboys thought they might help that along just a bit. On
the Ides of March (March 15) 1881, four masked bandits held up the Kinnear & Company stagecoach. The driver and one passenger were killed during the robbery. The Cowboys claimed Doc Holliday had been one of the bandits, and as evidence, they offered an affidavit that had been signed by a very drunk Big Nose Kate during one of their fights. On July 5, Doc Holliday was arrested and charged with murder and stage robbery; Wyatt Earp and a local saloon keeper put up his five-thousand-dollar bail, then set out to prove his innocence. When Kate sobered up, she insisted that Sheriff Behan and Milt Joyce had supplied the drink as well as the pen and paper and that she hadn’t known what she was signing. Other people testified that they had been with Holliday at the time of the robbery. After hearing all the evidence, the district attorney called the charges “ridiculous,” and Holliday was released from bond. It didn’t take Doc long to find out that Cowboy Ike Clanton was behind the ruse. He knew that one day soon, they would be settling up.

Ike Clanton knew that the real killers were some of the boys he was riding with. Wyatt Earp was especially interested in putting the cuffs on them; the election for sheriff was coming up, and he intended to replace the slippery Behan in that job, which paid a handsome sum. The story is that Wyatt made a deal with Clanton: If Clanton told him where the robbers were hiding out, Wyatt would let him keep the whole $3,600 reward, content in the knowledge that capturing those killers would just about guarantee his election. Ike Clanton agreed and provided the information, but before Earp could act, three of those men were caught rustling cattle and killed. That set Ike on edge; he began getting paranoid that Earp might reveal his double-dealing, which for him would be a death sentence.

In July, several Mexican smugglers were attacked and killed in Skeleton Canyon, and the silver they were carrying was stolen. The perpetrators were never identified, but Mexicans living near the border felt sure this was the work of the Cowboys.

A month later, the head of the Cowboys and Ike’s father, Newman Haynes Clanton, better known as Old Man Clanton, and six of his men were driving a herd to market in Tombstone through Guadalupe Canyon, the main smuggling route over the border. After making camp, they were ambushed; five men died, including Old Man Clanton. Although the evidence pointed to Mexicans seeking retribution for the Skeleton Canyon attack, the Cowboys believed the Earps and Doc Holliday were somehow involved. It was not an unreasonable assumption: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday eventually showed up in town wounded, Doc using a cane.

By the fall, the relationship between the law and the Cowboys was about as dangerous as tinder in a drought, just waiting for a spark. The Cowboys were openly threatening to
“clean out the Earps,” along with Holliday, if they didn’t clear out of town. Ironically, in his friendship with the Earps—especially with Wyatt and Morgan—Doc Holliday had finally found the thing worth living for, and for which he was willing to put his life on the line.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place on October 26, 1881. It took about thirty seconds to write a chapter in American history that will never be forgotten. As the
Epitaph
reported the next day, “Stormy as were the early days of Tombstone nothing ever occurred equal to the event of yesterday.”

The stage had been set the night before outside the Alhambra Saloon, when Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday, both having far exceeded their alcohol limit, staggered around threatening to kill each other. Clanton supposedly promised that he was going to kill an Earp, and allegedly Doc responded by claiming to have killed Old Man Clanton and to be looking forward to adding Ike to his count. Virgil Earp had broken up the fight.

The thirty-second-long gunfight at the O.K. Corral has been the subject of numerous books, pieces of art, television shows, and Hollywood films in which Doc Holliday was played by Walter Huston, Stacy Keach, Victor Mature, Kirk Douglas, Jason Robards, Val Kilmer, and Dennis Quaid.

Meanwhile, Clanton had met up with Wyatt and supposedly told him flat out, “Your consumptive friend … he’s a dead man tomorrow.”

To which Earp responded, “Don’t you tangle with Doc Holliday. He’ll kill you before you’ve begun.”

The morning of the twenty-sixth was gray and windy. Ike Clanton showed up early at Fly’s Boardinghouse, demanding to see Holliday. Doc wasn’t there, but later, when Big Nose Kate told him about Clanton’s visit, he responded, “If God will let me live long enough, he will see me.”

About one o’clock in the afternoon, tired of his threats, Virgil and Morgan Earp went looking for Ike Clanton. They found him walking on Fourth Street, carrying a Winchester rifle with a revolver on his hip. Virgil Earp approached him cautiously, then banged him on his head, taking both his weapons. He hauled him off to Judge Albert O. Wallace’s courtroom. Wyatt found Clanton there and warned him: “You damn dirty cow thief. You have been threatening our lives, and I know it. I think I would be justified in shooting you down any place I would meet you. But if you are anxious to make a fight, I will go anywhere on earth to make a fight with you.”

“Fight is my racket, and all I want is four feet of ground,” Clanton supposedly replied. But he backed down from a fight right there, making it clear he didn’t like the odds. Instead he was fined $27.50 and released.