While a lawyer, “noted for his eloquence,” is soaring in a flight of spellbinding oratory before a jury in Judge Wells Spicer’s court, a burro beneath a window sets up a tremendous braying. Lawyer Marcus A. Smith, afterward United States Senator from Arizona, arises gravely. “If it please the Court,” he says, “I object to the two attorneys speaking at the same time.”
A visitor ships a burro to his home in Philadelphia for his small son to ride. The animal is billed as a burro, but the shipping clerk in Philadelphia, never having heard of such a beast and finding no furniture in the consignment, thinks a mistake has been made and turns in a report which reads: “One bureau short, one jackass over.”
Mayor James R. Leatherberry of Tucson calls a meeting to celebrate the completion of the first telegraph line and the inauguration of wire service between his city and the outside world. This is early in . A delegation of Tombstone citizens journeys to Tucson to be present on the memorable occasion. Mayor Leatherberry reads telegrams of congratulation from many distinguished men. President Hayes send greetings. Mayor Leatherberry invites the crowd into the Palace Hotel bar and buys a round of drinks. Senators and Congressmen wire their compliments. After each message, Mayor Leatherberry buys another round of drinks. The crowd grows hilarious. But messages become fewer, rounds of drinks less frequent. Suddenly, congratulations begin to pour in mysteriously from all over the world. There is a message in French from the President of France. Mayor Leatherberry is a bit puzzled but buys again. Another message reads:
Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, feels honoured at the opportunity to felicitate the Hon. James R. Leatherberry, mayor of the ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson, upon the enterprise that has at last connected this famous city with the world at large and expresses the hope that this will be one more tie binding together the two great English-speaking nations.
This is signed “Beaconsfield.” There is tremendous cheering. Mayor Leatherberry, without batting an eye, orders up champagne. Mayor Leatherberry is game. Then comes this message, signed “Antonelli,”
His holiness the Pope desires to convey to the Hon. James R. Leatherberry, Mayor of Tucson, the assurance of his apostolic joy that communication by telegraph between the pueblo and the Eternal City has been established. But the Holy Father, in hope of further enlightenment, desires to learn of the Hon. James R. Leatherberry where in hell Tucson is anyhow.
The hill back of Tombstone was now thickly dotted with mines, workshops, and office buildings, and smoke boiled into the sky from towering chimneys. Mining machinery had been hauled in from Yuma across deserts and mountains by teams of thirty mules to a wagon, and an army of miners was busy night and day working three shifts. Companies organized by Eastern capitalists had acquired control of the mining properties—the Contention Consolidated, Grand Central, Tombstone Mining and Milling, Vizina, Empire, and Stonewall companies. Charleston and Contention, on the San Pedro River, had grown about stamp mills into booming towns. Benson, twenty-six miles to the north, came into existence early in , when the first railroad was built through Arizona. With a rich copper strike in the Mule Mountains to the south, Bisbee, in its deep, narrow canyon, developed with the miraculous speed of Tombstone.
The Southern Pacific reached Tucson in , and the following year established connection with the Santa Fe at Deming, opening a new transcontinental route. The first train went through . Meanwhile, Tombstone had become the largest town in Arizona. At the end of its second year, it had a population estimated by some at 15,000, by others at 12,000. Tucson, its nearest rival, had at this time only 7,000, Prescott 2,074, and Phoenix 1,800.
III
Glad Hand and Trigger Finger
Wyatt Earp, who was to achieve sinister eminence as the six-shooter boss of Tombstone, and whose name, for good or bad, was to be bruited more widely, perhaps, than that of any other man in Tombstone’s history, was born in Monmouth, Illinois, . He went West as a youth, when Kansas and Nebraska were the frontier and Omaha and Kansas City were border towns. As a freighter, he drove bull teams on the Overland and Santa Fe trails. He hunted buffalo for a living when the prairies were black with the wild herds. He had experience as an Indian fighter. He became a professional gambler in the days when euchre was giving way to faro and draw poker on the frontier. He served as a policeman from to in Wichita, when that town was as hard boiled as any west of the Missouri. He was town marshal of Dodge City from early in to late in .
Dodge City was then in its palmy days. It was the last of a succession of Kansas railroad towns that rose to lurid prestige at the end of the cattle trails from Texas. Abilene, Caldwell, Wichita, Newton, Ellsworth, and Hays had had their crowded hour and passed into peaceful obscurity. Farmers had spread over eastern Kansas and the old Texas trails were blocked by fenced fields of corn and wheat. Texas, still without railroads, was the West’s only great cattle preserve. The cattle business in New Mexico and Arizona was still in its infancy. Northern ranges in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, in later years to swarm with cattle, were still wilderness. Millions of longhorns pastured half wild over the vast pampas between the Rio Grande and
