Lady at the O.K. Corral by Ann Kirschner Read Free Book Online Page B

men returning from months on the open range. “Cow-boys” meant cash to the local businesses, but signaled trouble. When they came to town, soaked with alcohol and tense with gambling challenges, their antics destabilized the fragile peace of a gun-toting community.
    Wyatt served in Kansas with distinction as a peace officer. He was paid in cash for each arrest, and mostly he arrested cowboys. Town leaders liked him because he managed to avoid fatalities; most unruly cowboys responded well to a sharp knock on the head, known as buffaloing, and an uncomfortable night in jail. This technique worked nicely because the troublemakers were mostly transients blowing off steam. Things would be different in Tombstone.
    Wyatt’s world of gambling and guns and rowdies brought him into contact with a rising Dodge City gambler, Doc Holliday, a thin, tubercular dentist from Georgia. Their friendship was sealed when Doc Holliday came to Wyatt’s aid in a shootout, tossing a gun to him at an opportune moment.
    Loyalty to friends and family was an absolute for the Earps. “Doc was my friend and I was Doc’s friend until he died,” Wyatt steadfastly declared, although none of his brothers and few of his friends shared Wyatt’s affection for Doc, whose nasty temper was as legendary as his dangerous straight shooting. Bat Masterson detested him. “Physically, Doc Holliday was a weakling who couldn’t have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy,” Masterson recalled, dismissing Doc as high-strung and effeminate.
    Even with Doc around for excitement, Dodge City was, in Wyatt’s words, “losing its snap.” Virgil was scouting the latest boomtown, and urging his brothers to convene there. In September 1879 the Earp caravan set out for Tombstone. Among the party were James and Bessie and her teenage daughter. Doc and his longtime companion and lover, “Big Nose” Kate, had made plans to join them later. Younger brother Morgan Earp—everyone’s favorite—and his common-law wife Louisa were also on the way. And there was a new Mrs. Earp: in place of Sally, Celia “Mattie” Blaylock was now sitting next to Wyatt. She had left home as a young girl and was living on her own until she met Wyatt, probably in Fort Griffin, Texas. No beauty, Mattie was a sturdy, large-boned woman with a sweet square face, a mass of curls hiding a broad brow, and long ringlets down her back. She had the look of someone dependable, shy, and long-suffering.
    Although Nicholas and Virginia Earp had been joined in a traditional marriage, their sons preferred common-law partnerships requiring nothing other than a voluntary declaration that man and woman were living together as a married couple. This was a popular alternative in the western territories, where couples moved between remote and sometimes dangerous locations where clergymen were not always available. “If a man and woman said, ‘We are Mister and Missus,’ they were, that is all there was to it,” recalled one observer of frontier marriage. The self-declared husband and wife could sign legal documents together and were classified as married by the census, but the common-law widow was not eligible to collect her disabled husband’s Civil War pension. And, as Mattie Earp would discover, common-law marriages were easy to create, and could be dissolved just as easily.
    In Prescott, Virgil and his common-law wife Alvira Packingham Sullivan Earp (known to all as “Allie”) joined the caravan. They had been living in the town where Virgil had been appointed deputy U.S. marshal, the highest office that any of the Earp brothers would hold. Virgil and Alvira had been a couple since 1874, when Allie served Virgil a meal in a Council Bluffs, Iowa, restaurant. It was love at first sight: Allie was immediately drawn to this “big blond” who “looked nice on a horse.” Small and spare, Allie adored Virgil and