So hail and farewell to the lion of Tombstone. Strong, bold, forceful, picturesque was this fighter of the old frontier. Something epic in him. Fashioned in Homeric mould. In his way, a hero. Whatever else he may have been, he was brave. Not even his enemies have sought to deny his splendid courage. The problems of his dangerous and difficult situation, he solved, whether wisely or foolishly, with largeness of soul and utter fearlessness. No halo is for this rugged, storm-beaten head. He was a hard man among hard men in a hard environment. What he did, he did. The record stands. But, weighed in the balance, he will not be found wanting. Judged by all the circumstances of his career, the verdict in his case is clear—Wyatt Earp was a man.
Doc Holliday, as picturesque a desperado as the West ever produced, and as witty and companionable a fellow as ever smiled over the barrel of a murderous six-shooter, died of tuberculosis at Cottonwood Springs, Colorado, fifteen years after his Tombstone career ended. The “coldest-blooded killer in Tombstone” had wasted to a corpse-like fragility, and death seemed merely an incidental and completing detail in the tragedy of his long illness. As the curtain rolled down upon the drama of his stormy career, Holliday looked death in the face, as he had looked life in the face, with his old calm courage and humorous cynicism.
“I used to offer odds of eight to five,” he said, “that in spite of consumption, I’d cash out some day at the end of a six-shooter when I happened to run foul of a man an eighth of a second quicker on the draw. It seems almost like tough luck to lose that bet.”
Holliday’s last words were, “This is funny.” The friends watching at his bedside thought his mind wandering. But, with his sense of humour strong to the last, the doctor doubtless considered it a choice joke that, after all his desperate adventures and narrow escapes, he should be dying in bed with his boots off.
Virgil Earp was for many years chief of police of Colton, California. He died in Goldfield, Nevada, in , of pneumonia, and was buried in Portland, where he had a daughter living. He was sixty-three years old. His widow, who was his second wife, lives in Los Angeles. James Earp died in , in Los Angeles.
Warren Earp, youngest of the five Earp brothers, returned to Arizona and was killed in Willcox in by Johnny Boyet, a cowboy, in a quarrel that grew out of a card game. Though the circumstances of the killing indicated that it was premeditated and deliberate murder, there were no eyewitnesses, it is said, and Boyet was acquitted. Warren Earp had been driving stage between Willcox and Globe, but at the time of his death was a sanitary inspector for the Arizona Cattlemen’s Association and made his headquarters at Hooker’s Sierra Bonita ranch. Morgan and Warren Earp were the only ones of the Earp brothers to die by violence.
Wyatt Earp, after leaving Arizona, spent some time in Denver and the Gunnison country. He kept a saloon in Nome, Alaska, in the flush days of the Klondike gold excitement. He was later in Goldfield and Tonopah, towns that sprang from the Nevada desert overnight in the last great Western gold stampede, and for a brief while gave back to this modern day a vivid picture of the wild boom camps of the old frontier.
Now, at the age of seventy-eight, with a wife at his side, Wyatt Earp is enjoying his declining years in peace, comfort, and prosperity. He owns a gold-mining property in the Mojave country and oil wells near Bakersfield. His home is in Oakland, but to be near his business interests, he lives the greater part of his time in Vidal, near San Bernardino, and in Los Angeles.
XVI
John Ringo Cashes In
John Ringo was drunk. For ten days he had been morosely, broodingly, tragically drunk. As straight as an Indian, he stalked about Tombstone streets, a tall, silent, sombre figure, looking a little more like Hamlet than ever, his hollow black eyes clouded and melancholy. As a toper, he was not hilarious. No antic impulse moved him to shoot out the lights or indulge in whooping cowboy deviltries. The intellectual outlaw took his pleasures quietly. He played a little faro and a little poker and of an evening dropped in at the Bird Cage Opera House. But chiefly he mellowed the acerbity of life by steeping himself in great quantities of pleasant liquors. He was in Tombstone frequently in these piping summer days of . The Earps had been gone for months, and the old town gave him friendly welcome.
Ringo’s boon companions on this ten-day drinking bout were Buckskin Frank Leslie and Billy Claibourne. Buckskin Frank still tended bar at the Oriental. Like Ringo, he went on sprees which sometimes lasted a week or two. Claibourne was himself a fairly stiff tippler, but he had the elasticity of youth in his favour. Ringo was now thirty-eight and Leslie forty. Hard drinking had begun to tell on both. Ringo’s periods of hopeless despondency had grown upon him, and he frequently threatened suicide. Leslie was the same lighthearted desperado he had been in earlier days, but liquor now brought the devil in him close to the surface, and his drunken mood was murderous.
On a blazing hot day in the latter part of July, John Ringo, with two bottles of whisky in his pockets, rode out of Tombstone on a drunken trail to mysterious death. Buckskin Frank Leslie and Billy Claibourne followed him. The three met again at Antelope Springs, nine miles from Tombstone, and continued their spree for
