While Wyatt Earp was marshal, Dodge City was as rough a village as ever welcomed the old, wild breed of Texas cowboys storming in after hard weeks on the trail to refresh and enjoy themselves in riotous pleasures. Among the notable fighting men whose exploits sent the town’s fame swirling to the frontier skies in clouds of six-shooter smoke were Sheriff Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, Mysterious Dave Mather, Charlie Bassett, Bill Tilghman, Luke Short, Ben Thompson, Clay Allison, Pat Shugrue, Prairie Dog Dave Morrow, Neil Brown, Bob Wright, Ben Daniels, Dave Black, Charley Coulter, and Shotgun Collins. A man was a man who in such fighting company managed to escape the oblivion of Boot Hill. But during his three years as a peace officer in this toughest town of the Kansas prairies, Wyatt Earp became famous for personal force and desperate courage. After Dodge City, he was ready for Tombstone.
When the glories of Dodge began to fade and the fame of the bonanza silver strike at Tombstone was spreading over the West, Wyatt Earp set out for the new boom camp in Arizona. At Prescott, where he stopped to visit his brother Virgil, he met C. P. Dade, United States Marshal of Arizona, who, impressed by the veteran’s record at Dodge City, offered him an appointment as federal deputy marshal for the Tombstone district. Wyatt Earp declined. He had had enough, he declared, of a frontier peace officer’s thankless hardships. But, under Marshal Dade’s persuasion, he at length accepted, and when Wyatt Earp first set foot in Tombstone, , he wore the badge of a United States deputy marshal pinned on his breast. He held this position from first to last during his Tombstone career.
Wyatt Earp was thirty years old when he arrived in the city of silver and six-shooters. His face was long and of pronounced pallor; his deep-set eyes were blue-gray; his chin was massive; a heavy, tawny moustache hid his mouth and drooped beneath the edges of his jaws. His hair was as yellow as a lion’s mane, his deep voice was a booming lion-like brool, and he suggested a lion in the slow, slithery ease of his movements and in his gaunt, heavy-boned, loose-limbed, powerful frame.
He had been roughly moulded by the frontier and he had the frontier’s simplicity and strength, its sophistication and resourcefulness, its unillusioned self-sufficiency. He followed his own silent trails with roughshod directness. He was unaffectedly genuine. Whatever he did, he did in deadly earnest. He was incapable of pretense or studied pose; he had no genius for the heroic gesture. He was cold, balanced, and imperturbably calm. If whirlwinds slumbered deep in the soul of him, no hint of emotion showed in his face, which had the cold stillness of sculptured stone. There was no swashbuckler bluster about him. Nothing marked him as a desperate man. But in his blue-gray eyes was a calm unafraidness, as of a man not to be frightened by phantoms or realities or anything else in the world.
With the turbulent conditions Wyatt Earp found in Tombstone, he had been familiar all his life. He was a natural master of such conditions. Probably no man of his day in the West was more logically fitted to become the man of Tombstone’s hour. Brains, courage, and dominant qualities as a leader carried him quickly to the top; a myriad enemies pulled him down. He rose to power in romance and fell from power in tragedy, and the story of his rise and fall is one of the most dramatic in the history of the frontier.
Doc Holliday, the fighting ace of the Earp faction and considered by connoisseurs in deadliness the coldest-blooded killer in Tombstone, had accompanied Wyatt Earp from Dodge City. He was a rather tall, extremely slender, ash-blond, gray-eyed fellow, immaculate in attire, fastidious in his habits, temperamental, hot tempered and cold-blooded, querulous and sometimes a little quarrelsome, a wit as well as a desperado. He might become quite excited if his breakfast eggs were not just so, but no man was cooler when bullets were flying. He was a consumptive, and the malady had left his face emaciated and very white and given it a look of refinement that might have passed for spirituality. One might have been tempted to suspect that this quiet, pale man with the fine gray eyes was a poet or a scholar who pored over erudite volumes under midnight lamps. But except for a few elegies done with finished elegance with his six-shooter, the doctor never displayed any poetic or literary leanings.
He was, after a kind, a cynical philosopher, and his passing observations were spiced with a dry, acrid humour. Life seemed a bitter joke to him. He was reconciled to tuberculosis, he said, because it had left him so thin that it took mighty good shooting to hit him. He was still ready to bet, however, that in the homestretch drive, a bullet would nose out consumption at the wire.
He was an excellent shot. Buckskin Frank Leslie was the only man in Tombstone credited with being his equal in quickness and accuracy with a six-shooter. When deputized to assist the Earps in any little emergency that happened to arise, the doctor appeared with a sawed-off shotgun, deadliest of weapons, swung to his shoulder under his coat; he was not one to waste time, energy, or ammunition; when any shooting was to be done, he shot to kill.
He had been educated as a dentist. He sometimes dug out of his trunk to show to an intimate friend a souvenir that he had carried through all his peregrinations in the West. It was an old tin sign on which was painted “Dr. J. D. Holliday—Dentist,” and it had once swung in front of his office in Dallas. The doctor often laughed to think that a true knight-errant and adventurer like
