Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, just
south of the Quad Cities, on March 19, 1848, the fourth child of Nicholas and
Virginia Earp. He was named for an Illinois cavalry officer who had been
Nicholas Earp’s commanding officer in the Mexican War. Nicholas was the city
constable in the Warren County town when Wyatt was a young boy. But he wasn’t
only a lawman. Nicholas Earp was also among the town’s alcohol suppliers, which
put him at odds with the growing temperance movement of the mid-19th
century.
When Wyatt was 11, his father was tried and convicted of
bootlegging and the family was forced to leave town. They wandered around the
west for several years, including stays in Iowa and as far as California,
before Wyatt and his older brother Virgil made their way back to Illinois in
1869.
For reasons that remain unclear a century and a half later, Wyatt
paid
a visit to Beardstown, in west-central Illinois on the Illinois River.
While he would later gain a reputation (with some help from Hollywood) as a
fearless lawman who cleaned up several western towns, in the 1860s and 1870s
Earp ran with a less reputable crowd. Called the “Peoria Bummer” by one newspaper,
Earp was linked with an infamous local bordello in that city.
Whatever the reason for his visit to Walden’s Hotel in
Beardstown, Earp soon found himself in a confrontation with a local bully,
Thomas Pinard (or Piner, accounts differ), one of the “scavengers, sports and
rowdy laborers,” drawn to the town by the construction of a nearby railroad
line. Heated words were exchanged. Pinard mocked Earp as a “California boy” and
a fight broke out. During the scuffle, Earp threw Pinard out into the street
where guns were drawn. Pinard shot first and missed (something that would come
to be a common theme in Earp’s life: despite his career filled with gunfights,
he was never hit) and Earp returned fire, wounding Pinard in the hip.
The matter surely aroused some local attention, but little
was recorded about it, not even an investigation by the local law. Local
historians know of the story but have been unable to even pin down exactly
where the shootout happened.
Earp soon departed for Missouri where he followed in his
father’s footsteps as a town constable. But he struggled there as well. His
wife Urilla died of typhoid fever and he later found himself in financial
troubles and lawsuits. Moving to Arkansas he was accused of horse theft and
once again had to make a getaway to Illinois.
Wyatt rejoined his brother Virgil who had established his
own shady business in Peoria. Virgil hired Wyatt as a bouncer, which of course
led to more trouble with the law. In at least one of these cases he was in
court along with John Walton, the owner of the Beardstown bordello where the
trouble with Pinard had happened. This time, Peoria police arrested Earp and
Walton in a raid
and both were fined $44, a hefty fine for the time.
After this incident Earp decided he had gotten his fill of
the life of crime in Illinois and set out for the west again, this time as a
lawman.
Hollywood tells the tale of Wyatt Earp storming across the
west fighting crime. And Earp did in fact establish a career and a reputation
as one of the greatest lawmen in American history. But his exploits in Illinois
would follow him for many years to come. Earp would claim that during the
troublesome months of 1872 he was not having scrapes with the law in Peoria,
but was in fact hunting buffalo in Kansas. The pendulum has swung back and
forth over the years as to whether Earp was a hero or a villain.
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| Interior of the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City. |
He was a town marshal in the well-known boom town of Dodge
City, Kansas, and here began his first brush with fame as he pursued an outlaw
all the way to Texas to bring him to justice. In Dodge City Earp also killed
his first man, a horseman who had fired into a crowded theater. During these
years Earp’s path first crossed with other legends of the west such as Bat
Masteron and Doc Holliday.
Like many westerners of the era Earp was known to chase the
occasional get-rich-quick scheme, including time he spent among the legions of
those who moved west in search of gold and silver. It was this pursuit which
brought him to the small town of Tombstone, Arizona, to again rejoin his
brother Virgil, now the town marshal. With things quieting down in Kansas, he
resigned from the police force in Dodge City and headed for the Arizona
Territory.
It was not gold but gambling which made Earp wealthy in
Tombstone. But out-of-control crime called for a response, and local leaders
found someone with Earp’s credentials to be just the man they needed to restore
order. The stage was now set for that famed shootout at the O.K. Corral which
inscribed the name of Wyatt Earp indelibly on the history of the American West
and into numerous books and films in the decades to follow.
In the nearly 100 years since his death, Wyatt Earp’s
historical reputation has been decidedly mixed. But he is known to western
enthusiasts as the heroic lawman who cleaned up one town after another, even if
the truth is a bit more complicated. And for all his fame for that brief
shootout on a dusty street in Arizona, Wyatt Earp’s first known gunfight
happened in a small town in central Illinois.