Epitaph (44 page)

T
HERE IS NO SHADE IN THE HIGH CHAPARRAL. CATCLAW
and white thorn and palo verde are rarely taller than a half-grown child. A sizable man can reach the top of many mesquite trees, though he'd pay for that foolishness with an armpit full of thorns. There is barrel cactus and prickly pear, cholla and a lot of ocotillo, but only snakes and rodents can rest in their shadow.

Even in a mild year, the summer heat is ferocious, but 1881 was the hottest anyone could remember. In mid-May, the temperature was well into the nineties by five in the morning. Rats panted in their lairs and lizards were breathless. Dogs dug holes under boardwalks and hid. Draft horses died in their traces. Paint blistered and flaked off wood.

Encased in corsets, wrapped in layer upon layer of flounced fabric, Tombstone's ladies gazed longingly at the white cotton simplicity of a Mexican shift. In woolen suits or heavy denim, lawyers and engineers, accountants and carpenters, blacksmiths and bankers, merchants and mechanics—anyone who worked above ground—envied those who labored in the constant cool darkness of the mines. Those with old and aching wounds—Doc Holliday, James Earp, Milt Joyce among them—experienced some relief from their pains, though not enough to compensate for the malevolence of the weather. Two ice factories ran around the clock but could not keep up with demand. Driven by
a furnace wind, the acrid summer dust was inescapable; laundrymen and housewives despaired. Grit peppered food and tainted drink. It settled in the hair, in the ears. Noses clogged with it, and eyes felt scoured. Consumptives weren't the only ones who suffered from chronic coughs.

Sunset brought little relief. Rainless thunderstorms cracked and boomed and tore sleepless nights to pieces. Dogs were kicked. Women were beaten. Children were whipped. Drinking became a blood sport. Anything could set off a fight. A misheard word, a shoulder brushed. Anything.

On the last day of May, Editor Clum warned, “A high tide of crime threatens to inundate our city's streets.” The stagecoach killers were still at large. Geronimo was stirring up trouble again. Cow Boy raids on cattle herds—foreign and domestic—were bolder by the week. Curly Bill Brocius stayed out of town, but the younger, wilder rustlers frequented Tombstone's bars and brothels after collecting their cut of the summer cattle sales. Drunk and singing, they'd link arms and parade down the center of Allen Street, blocking traffic in both directions: daring someone to complain, hoping Ben Sippy would try to arrest them. Shimmering with belligerence, elated by the prospect of a fight, they broke windows, shattered saloon mirrors, and started brawls with miners. Business suffered. Schoolchildren were at risk. Townspeople were scared to go out at night. An accountant's wife had been accosted in broad daylight.

In early June, Mayor Clum proposed an amendment to the town charter. “Tombstone is a city, not a mining camp,” he argued. “Cities appoint police chiefs who work at the pleasure of the administration and are not subject to the whims of the electorate.” After some discussion, Council agreed and the duties of the police chief were carefully defined. Ben Sippy could continue in the role, but from now on he was to prevent breaches of the peace. He was to suppress riotous behavior and disorderly assemblages. He was to arrest and jail every person found violating any law or ordinance, as well as any person
found committing acts injurious to the quiet and good order of the city, including public intoxication, brawling, quarreling, vagrancy, and the public use of profane or indecent language.

To the mayor's surprise, a majority of City Council went on to pass the ordinance that Virgil Earp had recommended right after Fred White was shot. Carrying guns was now forbidden within city limits. And Tombstone went beyond Dodge City's response to violence. Banned weapons included knives as well as every type of firearm, although permits to carry pistols would be issued, if applied for.

The reaction was immediate.

The
Nugget
condemned the ordinance with a furious editorial that began, “Our forefathers gave us the right to carry arms” and ended with a list of ways its readers could circumvent the law. Sales figures at Spangenberg's gun shop tripled, and a shooting range was added to the back of the store where customers and “sporting folks” could test their purchases.

Scrawled death threats began arriving at the mayor's home. “Clum you are a ded man” was typical, but one neatly written letter showed evidence of education. “You have stepped beyond your legal bounds, Mayor Clum, and you shall pay the price.
Sic semper tyrannus!
” Upon opening that one, the mayor's first thought was of Doc Holliday but as Tombstone's postmaster, John Clum had access to samples of his handwriting on envelopes the gambler regularly posted to Savannah and Atlanta. Holliday used an elegant Spencerian script, not the plainer McGuffey style of the death threat.

“Dr. Holliday, what do you make of this?” Postmaster Clum asked the next time the Georgian came in to mail a letter.

“
Tyrannis
is spelled wrong. I would judge this the work of a literate man who has come across Latin now and then, but who has not studied the language in a formal way.”

“Any idea who might have sent it?”

“A southerner might be more inclined than most to quote Mr. Booth in this context, and while I hope never to stoop to slander . . . I
have seen Mr. Ringo at the library. You might check his handwritin' on the records there against this note.”

It was a match.

A few meditative hours later, Mayor Clum decided that it might be a good time to take that trip up to St. Louis he'd been considering.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING
as whiskey too bad to drink. That was the prevailing attitude on the American frontier, but on the afternoon of June 22, 1881, the owner of the Arcade Saloon reluctantly concluded that common wisdom was sometimes in error.

Cursing his supplier for a villain and a thief, he told one of his boys to roll the offending cask of god-awful rye into the alley behind the bar and dump it.

The workman took that opportunity to have a quiet smoke. When he was done—not wanting to take a chance on setting anything ablaze in a town constructed from tinder-dry pine—he carefully dropped the smoldering stub of his cigarette into the enormous puddle of spoiled whiskey. It was an innocent mistake. Never having seen a chef flambé food, he believed that any liquid would put out the ember. Fifty gallons of alcohol burst into flame.

Pushed by a dry, hot desert wind, the blaze spread with stunning speed. Buildings bordering the alley were engulfed even as the workman's screams raised the alarm. Miners boiled out of the pits. Offices and stores emptied. Every able-bodied man ran toward the center of town. Hundreds set to work, dipping buckets into horse troughs, flinging water against forty-foot walls of fire. They might as well have puckered up and spit, for all the good it did.

Frantic, they battled smoke and heat to bring out people trapped inside stores and offices and hotels. They beat burning boardwalks with wet blankets, tore burning canvas awnings down with bare hands, climbed on one another's shoulders to ax away burning balconies. When all that that failed to slow the fire, they hitched mule teams to
chains and pulled down whole buildings, still hoping to contain the blaze, but the conflagration only got fiercer as liquor casks in saloon after saloon added fuel to the flames.

Dark against the afternoon bright sky, a column of black smoke drew the eyes and curiosity of rootless young men who called their saddles home. As the sun went down on what was left of Tombstone, those who'd fought the fire salved blistered skin, coughed soot and ash from seared lungs, and fell exhausted onto whatever makeshift beds were available on the unburned edges of the town. While they slept, Cow Boys from miles around converged on the city, whooped with delight at the entertaining scope of the destruction, and searched through the smoking wreckage for intact bottles of brandy, bourbon, Bordeaux, and beer.

That was the scene greeting Mayor John Clum as he stepped down out of the night coach from Benson, just past midnight on the morning of June 23. Young drunks, celebrating devastation. Laughing. Singing. Dancing in the embers.

Behind him, weary travelers who'd anticipated comfortable rooms in the fine hotels of “the Paris of Arizona” climbed stiffly into the starlight and stared wordlessly at a thin, bent man trudging toward them through the ruins.

Soot-smeared and filthy, he was recognizable only from his exhausted limp and his terrible cough. Out on bail, even Doc Holliday had fought the blaze.

“There are beds in Schieffelin Hall,” he told the passengers, lifting his chin toward a large building that had escaped the fire intact.

The visitors collected their bags and set off for whatever shelter might await them, but John Clum and John Henry Holliday remained side by side, watching the horseplay of reveling Cow Boys.

“Hell is empty. All the devils are here,” Holliday noted hoarsely. “And where have
you
been, Mayor Clum?”

“St. Louis,” John said. Before he could register his own tears,
his unconscious weeping turned to laughter that was just this side of hysteria. “I went there to buy a fire engine and two hose carriages for the city.”

The dentist put a comforting hand on the mayor's shoulder. “Irony rules the day.”

MORNING BROUGHT NO JOY.

Close to seventy businesses had been wiped out. Some $300,000 worth of property had been destroyed in an afternoon. The Cosmopolitan and Grand Hotels. The town's nicest saloons—the Oriental, the Crystal Palace, the Magnolia—were gone, along with the Arcade, of course, where the fire started. Two breweries. A dozen brothels and gambling halls. The Key West Cigar Shop. The ice cream parlor. The bowling alley. The Western Union office. The Tombstone Municipal Court. The Safford and Hudson Bank. The offices of mining executives, lawyers, architects, and engineers with all their records. Restaurants, stores. Gone. All gone.

After the first night's scavenging, there was nothing left to steal except the ground itself. Without landmarks and streets, property lines were once again in dispute and the infamous Tombstone Townsite Company launched a second attempt to seize downtown real estate. Jim Clark and Mike Gray distributed tents to hungover Cow Boys, paying them to sit on newly vacated lots in the cheerful hope that some of the legitimate owners had been killed during the fire. Having been elected largely on his promise to fight the Townsite Company's fraudulent claims, Mayor Clum ordered Chief of Police Benjamin Sippy to clear the lot-jumpers out.

Chief Sippy gave it a try, but the Cow Boys were on him like starlings mobbing a crow. After ten days, he decided that somebody in his family had just gotten terribly, terribly ill and that he himself required “a leave of absence” so he could rush to his unfortunate relative's bedside.

Starting immediately.

City Council met in emergency session as armed property owners confronted armed squatters amid the ruins. The first order of business was to organize a volunteer fire department. (Its grim motto: “Better late than never.”) Second on the agenda: naming a replacement for Ben Sippy, who was unlikely to be seen again.

The motion to appoint Virgil Earp as Tombstone's new chief of police carried without a dissenting vote.

Mayor Clum had just administered the oath to Virgil when a Western Union rider burst into the meeting with news that he'd been unable to convey via telegram because the Tombstone wires were down.

“The president's been shot!” he cried. “Some crazy sonofabitch walked right up to him and put a bullet in his back!”

Anarchy had arrived.

M
AYOR CLUM WAS THE FIRST TO SPEAK. “DEPUTIZE
as many men as you need,” he told Virgil Earp. “Get squatters off the land and guns off the streets. We'll back whatever you do.”

Virgil left the meeting and went to find his brothers. They rounded up twenty-five other men, many of them Union veterans Virg knew he could rely on. Deploying his deputies on the edge of what had been Tombstone's business district, he strode alone to the center of the ruins and announced in a booming, resonant voice, “I am Police Chief Virgil Earp. I intend to enforce all city ordinances and to maintain order. Town lots remain the property of those who held title to them before the fire. All disputes regarding titles will be adjudicated in the courts. Lot jumpers squatting on the property of others are ordered to vacate
now
.”

There was laughter and mockery in response, and a taunt from one self-confident drunk: “Well, come on 'n' git us then, why doncha?”

This was an error in judgment.

On Virgil's word, twenty-seven armed and sober men on horseback swept through the tent camp, jerking canvas shelters up and away, throwing lassos, dragging squatters to the city limits, and driving them out of town.