In his newspaper column of November
29, 1949, entitled “On Heywood Broun and Quentin Reynolds,” the journalist
Westbrook Pegler asserted that “Reynolds and his girl friend of the moment were
nuding along the public road [and that] if [the neighbors] saw Reynolds and his
wench strolling along together, absolutely raw, they would call the State
police;” that “as Reynolds was riding to Heywood Broun’s grave with [Broun’s widow] he proposed
marriage to [her]”; that “Reynolds became one of the great individual
profiteers of the war”; that he “cleaned up part of the ill-gotten loot of
persons later convicted of fraud in war contracts”; that he was” a four-flusher
with an artificial reputation as a brave war correspondent, one of the let’s
him and you fight school of heroes”; that he” had a belly filled with something other than guts; and that Clare Boothe had peeled him of his
mangy hide and nailed it to the barn door with the yellow streak for the world
to see.”
The object of these virulent and
provocative words, Quentin Reynolds, had gained fame as a World War II
correspondent. As an associate editor of
Collier’s he wrote and published more than three-hundred articles.
Pegler’s column was written in
response to a book review by Reynolds of a biography of Heywood Broun that
appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and in which Reynolds wrote that ten
years earlier Pegler had called Broun a liar. Reynolds went on to make the implausible claim
that Broun was so distraught over this allegedly false statement that he was
unable to sleep or relax and died as a result. Incensed, Pegler retaliated in his column in
the Hearst Corporation’s New York Journal American. He
dismissed the far-fetched suggestion that he could have been responsible for
Broun’s death and stated that he regarded Reynolds’s suggestion as a charge of
“moral homicide.” Broun was indeed,
Pegler wrote, a “notorious liar” who was a“dirty fighter” who “made his living
at controversy.” Having libeled Broun,
Pegler went on to libel Reynolds in the words quoted earlier.
Pegler was a popular writer whose
column appeared in more than one-hundred newspapers with a readership of more
than ten million. For his work in
exposing racketeering in Hollywood labor
unions, Pegler became the first reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize
He was famous for his outspoken
dislike of all labor unions, the New Deal, and the Roosevelts,
Eleanor as well as Franklin. In its 1969 obituary of Pegler, the New York
Times reported that Pegler had once remarked that he regretted that the
assassin of Chicago’s Mayor Anton Cermak had “hit the wrong man” when he killed
Cermak when attempting to kill Roosevelt. Pegler was a strident
anti-communist. Time Magazine said of
Pegler that he was “invariably irritated, inexhaustibly scornful.” He denounced the civil rights movement and
briefly wrote wrote
for the John Birch Society until he was invited to leave when his conservatism
became too extreme even for that organization.
He was also notoriously thin-skinned.
Pegler’s name surfaced in 2008 when Time Magazine reported that a line
spoken by Sarah Palin in her acceptance speech at the Republican Convention had
been written years earlier by Pegler:
“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and
dignity.”
The upshot of Pegler’s column was the
filing of a lawsuit for libel by Reynolds.
Pegler’s answer to the suit repeated the defamatory matter in his column
and added a counterclaim arguing that the Reynolds’s book review, with its
suggestion that Pegler had somehow been the cause of Broun’s death, was itself
libelous. Reynolds was represented by
Louis Nizer, whose best-selling book, My
Life in Court, featured the Reynolds/Pegler case as Chapter One. Nizer recognized that the difficulty with the
case might be in proving damages, since Reynolds did not appear to have
suffered a monetary damage, as his income subsequent to the defamation was
greater than it was in the years before. It was suggested to Nizer by his associates
that part of the answer could be stricken since it only repeated the libel, but
Nizer, in his smug and know-it-all way, declared “Don’t touch a word of that
answer,” pointing out that Pegler’s repetition of the defamatory statements
would permit him to argue to the jury that the malice and ill-will shown by
that repetition warranted the award of punitive damages.
The trial was held in the United
States District Court in New York City,
jurisdiction being based on diversity of citizenship. It consumed more than seven weeks, during
which the plaintiff proved to the satisfaction of the jury that every
defamatory statement made in the Pegler column was false. The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff
both on the case in chief and on the defendant’s counterclaim. The plaintiff was awarded $1 in compensatory
damages and $175,000 in punitive damages.
Pegler and the Hearst papers, the
co-defendants, naturally appealed. The
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed in an opinion notably hostile
to Pegler. One issue was whether the
defendants were entitled to have the jury decide the issue of whether the libel was justified
by way of defense as a reply to a prior attack by the plaintiff, Reynolds, upon
the defendant, Pegler. The Court of
Appeals held that the trial judge properly ruled that the jury could not
consider this issue because the content of Pegler’s libel was not related to
any matter contained in Reynolds’s book review.
The court also held that there was sufficient evidence of malice and
ill-will to justify the award of punitive damages. As the court dryly
observed: “There is always a certain
risk in the pleading of truth as a defense, since . . . the jury may infer
malice from the fact that a defendant repeats the defamatory matter, which is
later found to be false. In this
case, the answer “not only repeated but elaborated upon the matters set forth
in the original defamatory publication; even the tone and characteristics of
the pleading are reminiscent of the style of the column in suit.” Thus was Pegler hoist by his
own petard.
Not all feuds are resolved without
violence or bloodshed, as was the Pegler/Reynolds dispute. All of you will have recognized that the title
of this paper—“A plague o’ both”--is a truncated version of the line “A plague o’
both your houses” spoken by Mercutio after he has been fatally stabbed by
Tybalt, who was sympathetic to the Capulets.
Romeo, a Montague, then kills Tybalt.
By the end of the play, Romeo and Juliet are also dead, so the feud
between the Montagues and the Capulets has claimed four lives. This is the most famous feud in fiction. Other fictional feuds include the
Grangerford-Shepherdson feud in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and the Corleone-Tattaglia feud in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
In the late nineteenth century,
numerous feuds erupted in the southern Appalachian
Mountains. Most are
forgotten today, the exception being the feud between the Hatfields and the
McCoys. The two families lived in an
area called the Tug
Valley, a valley formed
by the Tug Fork, a tributary of the Big
Sandy River. One family—the Hatfields—lived on the West Virginia side, in Logan County
(now Mingo County); the other—the McCoys—lived on the Kentucky side, in Pike County. The McCoys fought for the Union,
the Hatfields for the Confederacy. Asa
Harmon McCoy joined the Union army during the Civil War and was discharged
early because of a broken leg. He was
warned by Jim Vance, an uncle of the leader of the Hatfield family and a member
of ex-Confederates called the Wildcats, that he could expect a visit from one
of the Hatfields. In January 1965 that
visit was made and Asa Harmon McCoy was murdered. The Hatfield family leader, “Devil Anse”
Hatfield, was suspected, but it turned out that he had an alibi, having been
confined to bed on the day of the shooting.
Ultimately Vance himself became the prime suspect but no one was ever
charged, and anger between the two clans continued to seethe.
Thirteen years later, in 1878, a
dispute arose about the ownership of a hog.
Floyd Hatfield and Randolph McCoy both claimed ownership. Randolph McCoy claimed ownership because the
notches on the hog’s ears were McCoy marks; Floyd Hatfield claimed the hog was
his because it was on his land. The
dispute was taken to a Justice of the Peace who happened to be a Hatfield; he
decided in favor of Floyd Hatfield based on the testimony of a man named Bill
Staton, a relative of both families. In
1880, Staton was killed by two McCoy brothers, who were tried but acquitted
based on the ground of self-defense.
The tension between the two clans
flared in 1882 when an argument erupted between a McCoy and a Hatfield about a
debt of $1.75 owed for a fiddle. Two
McCoys backed up one of their brothers and a Hatfield backed up his
relative. The three McCoys stabbed the
Hatfield and one of them then shot him.
The McCoys then fled but were quickly overtaken and captured by
constables, to whom they willingly surrendered, preferring the mercy of the law
to the wrath of the Hatfields. Devil
Anse Hatfield, however, organized a posse that seized the three McCoys. When the posse learned that the badly-wounded
Hatfield had died from his wounds, the three McCoys were marched across into Kentucky and murdered. A Kentucky
grand jury returned indictments against twenty men but no immediate arrests
were made.
As the feud simmered, the Hatfields
occasionally rode into Kentucky
but always in heavily armed companies, and when the McCoys ventured into West Virginia, they took
the same precautions.
In 1887, a McCoy relative named Perry
Cline made a deal with the Simon Bolivar Buckner, the Democratic candidate for
governor of Kentucky. Cline promised to deliver the McCoy votes to
Buckner and in return Buckner agreed that, if elected, he would use the powers
of his office, to bring the Hatfields to justice for the murder of the three
McCoys. The Hatfields had no intention of submitting
their fate to a Kentucky
court. After Buckner was elected, Cline
pressed him to fulfill his promise and Buckner made a formal request to Emanuel
Wilson, the governor of West Virginia,
for the return to Kentucky of Devil Anse Hatfield and the nineteen others named
in the indictment. Wilson announced that he would honor the
request but did nothing to take the men into custody. On New Year’s Day 1888 Devil Anse and fellow
clansmen decided that they must eliminate Randolph McCoy and members of his
family who might present damaging evidence against them if they were extradited
to Kentucky. Nine men surrounded the McCoy house. The Hatfields demanded that the McCoys surrender. Shots were fired and the Hatfields set fire
to the house. Two McCoys were killed and
one seriously injured but the main object of the raid, Randolph McCoy, managed
to escape.
The events of New Year’s Day 1888
prompted Governor Buckner to inquire of Governor Wilson whether there was any
reason why the men indicted for the 1882 murders should not be extradited to Kentucky. The two governors exchanged correspondence,
each taking the position that the clan in the other’s state had the greater
responsibility for the violence. By this
time, a Pike County Deputy Sheriff had made forays into West Virginia and seized nine members of the
Hatfield clan, who were being held in the Pike County
jail. Governor Wilson demanded the
release of the nine men. and dispatched a lawyer to
initiate habeas corpus proceedings in the United States District Court in Louisville. After a hearing, the judge issued the writ
and ordered the jailer of Pike
County to produce the
nine men in court at Louisville. After hearing arguments, the judge ruled that
the issue involved a controversy between two states and, therefore, only the
United States Supreme Court had jurisdiction.
The matter reached the Supreme Court in a remarkably short time. On May 14, 1888, only 72 days after the
decision of the trial judge, the Court held that although the arrest and
abduction of the men taken to the Pike County jail was lawless and
indefensible, neither the Constitution nor any federal law provided that a
person accused of a crime in one state could be turned over to the authorities
in another state. Two Justices
dissented.
In the meantime, West Virginia authorities obtained
indictments of several McCoys, and Kentucky
indictments were returned for several Hatfields not already in custody in Pikesville. Kentucky offered rewards
for the apprehension of members of the Hatfield clan and West Virginia offered rewards for the
apprehension of members of the McCoy clan.
These rewards attracted vigilante private detectives hoping to earn the
rewards, and to elaborate precautions by those hunted. Only one person was captured, an unfortunate
member of the Hatfield clan named Ellison Mounts. He was taken to Kentucky where he joined the other members
of the clan already in the Pikesville
jail. Mounts confessed to having taken
part in the 1882 murders and named several others, including the leader, Devil
Anse, as responsible. He also confessed
to having taken part in the New Years Day 1888 massacre. In August 1889 trials were held and all
defendants were convicted. Mounts was
sentenced to death, the others to life imprisonment. In February 1890, Mounts was hanged.
After the execution of Mounts, the
feud was allowed to die out. Although
the outstanding indictments were never dismissed, the two states made no
further attempts to capture or bring any one else to trial, and the two clans
showed signs of becoming weary of the feud, although the press did its best to
keep it alive. The two principal
feudists—Randolph McCoy and Devil Anse Hatfield—lived out their lives in
relative quiet. McCoy died in 1914, aged
88, and Hatfield in 1921, aged 82.
A feud that entertained and at the same
time horrified the literary world erupted between the playwright Lillian
Hellman and the novelist Mary McCarthy in 1980.
McCarthy is largely forgotten today, even though
her novel, The Group, was on the New York
Times best seller list for almost two years in the sixties. Hellman has remained in the public eye. Several biographies of her have appeared and
her 1939 play, The Little Foxes, was revived in New York earlier this year.
The two women held each other in
mutual contempt. McCarthy thought
Hellman invented facts to make herself appear heroic
and Hellman, for her part, believed McCarthy was nothing more than “a lady
writer, a lady magazine writer.” In
today’s world, Hellman might have said to McCarthy, “Man up, Mary
McCarthy.” Another source of their antagonism
was ideological, as Hellman was slower than McCarthy to denounce Communism,
which had at one time attracted both of them.
Hellman wrote the screenplay for the
1943 film The North Star, a story
about the Nazi invasion of Russia
that depicted the invaded country as a nation of peace-loving, idyllic
peasants. McCarthy criticized the film
as “a picture of falsehoods woven of every variety of untruth.” Hellman partially agreed and later published
her original script to show that Samuel Goldwyn and the film’s director had mangled
it almost beyond recognition.
Nevertheless, McCarthy’s savage criticism was not appreciated. Somewhat ironically, the screenplay was
nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, losing out to Casablanca.
In 1956 the musical Candide opened with much fanfare. This was a collaboration
among McCarthy, the poet Richard Wilbur, and the composer Leonard
Bernstein. The show proved to be a huge
disappointment. Most critics had praise
for Bernstein’s music but disliked the the writing. McCarthy criticism was the most wounding; the production, she
wrote, was more like “a high school pageant than a social satire.” It closed after seventy-three
performances. Chicago’s Goodman Theater revived the show
for six weeks through the end of October.
A critic for the New York Times wrote, “When the music stops . . . so
does most of the fun. . . The result is
a punishing three-hour ride.”
McCarthy appeared in 1980 on the Dick Cavett Show and denounced Hellman
as dishonest. When Cavett asked what was
dishonest about her, McCarthy replied:
“Everything. . . . [E]very word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and
‘the.’” Hellman sued McCarthy, Cavett,
and the Public Broadcasting Corporation for $2.25 million. The literary world was aghast. Norman Mailer and others attempted to act as
peacemakers, Mailer writing in the New
York Times that “all writers are liars, we always
make up things—what Mary said was too strong—but ladies, let’s not cheapen
literature by going to war over this one.”
Neither woman, however, would back down.
McCarthy’s defense was based
principally on Hellman’s three memoirs, An
Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. In
McCarthy’s view, Hellman had distorted the events described and aggrandized her
relationship to those events. Her
account of her activities during the Spanish Civil War in An Unfinished Woman had confusing and contradictory chronology, inflated her own
importance, and distorted the role of Ernest Hemingway In Scoundrel
Time she glorified her own appearance before the House Un-American
Activities Committee and slighted those who had taken braver positions than she
in their appearances. And in Pentimento Hellman’s story (later made
into the award-winning 1977 movie Julia,
starring Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards) not only fictionalized
her own experiences but in effect appropriated the life story of another
woman. In the Julia segment of Pentimento,
Hellman tells the harrowing tale of her journey into Germany in 1937 to locate a
childhood friend who has joined the resistance against the Nazis. The purpose of the visit was to smuggle money
to the friend to assist in the anti-Nazi cause.
There was a real Julia, a woman named Muriel Gardiner, who never met
Hellman, and Gardiner did have a friend, not Hellman, who smuggled money to her. Hellman was probably not even in Germany in
1937.
McCarthy of course took the position
that her use of the phrase “every word, including ‘and’ and ‘the’” was
rhetorical hyperbole and that her defense would be established if she proved
that some quantity of Hellman’s published work was dishonest. Both McCarthy and Hellman gave
depositions. McCarthy repeatedly
characterized her statements as opinions, knowing that expressions of opinion
cannot be libelous. She and her lawyers
also took the position that Hellman was a public figure; if that were the case,
Hellman would be held to a higher standard of proof, the “actual malice” test
announced in the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The defendants moved for summary judgment and
in May 1984 the New York
State trial judge denied
the motion. The judge ruled that
McCarthy’s statements were statements of fact, not opinion, and that Hellman
was not a public figure. The latter
holding astonished first amendment lawyers such as Floyd Abrams. The case was slated for trial on the
merits. A month later, Hellman died and
with her the lawsuit. It would have been
a fascinating trial. How many lies, if
any, and how
much dishonesty, if any could be proved, would have persuaded a jury to rule in
favor of McCarthy? The feud ended with
Hellman’s death, but the controversy engendered by the charges and
countercharges survives.
Feuds among rival Mafia gangs are
staples of popular lore. The best-known
of them culminated on February
14, 1929, in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Seven people were murdered that morning in a
garage of the SMC Cartage Company at 2122
North Clark Street in Chicago.
Five of those killed were members of the Bugs Moran gang—one of the
other two was a gangster although not a member of the gang and the seventh was
a mechanic who happened to be in the garage.
The massacre captured the imagination of the public not only because of
the scope of the slaughter but because of the brilliance of its execution.
Bugs Moran was the boss of the North
Side Irish gang formerly and famously led by Dion O’Banion, who had been killed
in 1924 by, it was believed, a member of the South Side gang led by Al
Capone. Just as Moran was the successor
to O’Banion, so Capone was the protégé of an older leader, in his case Johnny
Torrio, who succeeded James “Big Jim” Colosimo, the latter having been murdered
supposedly for refusing to enter into the profitable area of bootlegging. Torrio was severely wounded in an
assassination attempt by the Moran gang and in fear for his life turned over
his empire to Capone and departed for his native Italy. The murder of O’Banion led to several retaliatory
hits on members of the Capone gang by Moran’s thugs.
The North side
Moran gang and the South side Capone gang competed for the lucrative liquor
business for several years. Truces were
arranged from time to time but invariably peace would be shattered by an
assassination, followed by a retaliatory killing. Attempts were made on Capone himself, who
surrounded himself with as many as fifteen bodyguards and had bulletproof glass
installed in his car. The Moran gang
repeatedly hijacked liquor shipments from Detroit
to Chicago
intended for Capone’s gang. On a
personal level, Moran insulted Capone publicly, calling him “scarface” and “the
Behemoth,” and implying that Capone’s outfit was more ignoble than Moran’s
because it trafficked
in prostitution.
Capone then orchestrated a final
solution to the feud. The plan was to
lure Moran and his men to the garage on North Clark
and kill them. Some historians of the
event speculate that the bait was the promise of a shipment of bootleg whiskey
from Detroit’s
purple gang, but others consider this unlikely since all of the men, other than
the garage mechanic, were dressed in their best clothes, hardly suitable for
unloading crates of whiskey. The Capone
gang had stationed two lookouts in an apartment across the street from the
garage. Once the Moran men were inside,
the signal was given and four men, two of them dressed as police officers,
entered the garage. The lookouts apparently
believed that one of the Moran gang men was Moran himself, having confused one
of the men who resembled Moran for the real Moran. However, Moran was not there, either because he arrived late or, having arrived, smelled a
rat and fled the scene. Once inside the
two men in plainclothes and the two fake policemen ordered the occupants to
line up against the wall and then opened fire with two sub-machine guns and two
shotguns, killing all seven. A total of
seventy machine-gun bullets and two shotgun blasts were fired. One of the murdered men, despite having been
hit by fourteen bullets, survived for three hours. When asked who shot him, he replied, “Nobody
shot me.” To trick bystanders, the men
in street clothes came out with their hands in the air, prodded by the two fake
cops. When the real police arrived, they
heard the mechanic’s dog howling.
The investigation first focused on the
police itself but it soon became clear to investigators that the men dressed as
policemen were not authentic. The car
used by the killers was found a week later but could not be traced to a suspect. Police suspected that the killings may have
been outsourced to a St. Louis gang and months after the shooting police in
Berrien County, Michigan, arrested Fred “Killer” Burke, a member of the St.
Louis gang, in connection with an unrelated murder of a police officer. In Burke’s house they found two machine guns
that were determined to have been the machine-guns
used in the Massacre. Burke was tried
and convicted of the Michigan
killing but never confessed to the Chicago killings and was
never tried in Illinois. In fact, no one was ever tried for the St.
Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Al Capone himself had no direct involvement
in the Massacre, having conveniently been in Florida in the day in question. Speculation has at one time or another
focused on dozens of suspects, including, improbably, Tony Accardo (twenty-two
at the time) and Sam Giancana (twenty at the time). The garage at 2122 North
Clark was demolished in 1967 and the space is now a parking lot
for a nursing home.
In 1931 Capone was indicted for income
tax evasion. He was convicted after a
long trial and sent to prison in 1932.
He spent the last years of his sentence in Alcatraz
and was released in 1939. He returned to
his home in Florida,
suffering from the effects of syphilis, and died of cardiac arrest in
1947. After the repeal of prohibition,
Bugs Moran left Chicago
for Ohio,
where he was arrested several times for bank robbery. He died penniless in 1957.
The famous Gunfight at the OK Corral
grew out of a feud between the Earp brothers and the Clanton and McLaury
brothers. The fight occurred on October 26, 1881, and did
not actually take place at the OK Corral, but in a vacant lot a block away. The Clantons and the McLaurys had
rendezvoused at the OK Corral and had they remained there on that afternoon
there is reason to think there would have been no shootout.
Tombstone,
Arizona, is a sleepy town thirty miles
from the Mexican border, population approximately 1,500. In 1881, after silver was discovered, it was
a thriving boomtown of 6,000. The mines
have long-since been abandoned, having become inoperable because of
flooding. The Clantons (Ike and Billy) and
the McLaurys (Frank and Tom) were Cowboys.
In Tombstone
in 1881, men who drove cattle for a living were called stockmen or drovers; the
term “Cowboy” was a derisive term that meant, roughly, outlaw, robber, rustler. The Earp
brothers—Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan—were lawmen, but at the gunfight they were
joined by Doc Holliday, a notoriously truculent and trigger-happy adventurer
who was anything but a lawman.
Politics probably played a small role in the
feud. The Earps were staunch
Republicans. Virgil was a veteran of the
Union Army and Wyatt had tried to enlist but was turned down because he was
underage. The Cowboys, most of whom had
been sympathetic to the Confederacy, were Democrats. There were two newspapers in town—imagine two
newspapers in a town of 6,000;—one—the Tombstone
Epitaph, espoused the Republican
point of view; the other—the Tombstone
Nugget—was sympathetic to the Democrats.
In the aftermath of the gunfight, the Epitaph was to be the staunchest defender of the Earps and the Nugget their fiercest accuser.
The first confrontation between the
Cowboys and the Earps came in1880 after some mules were
stolen from a U. S. Army outpost near Tombstone. The commander of the post enlisted the aid of
Virgil Earp, the deputy federal marshal for the region, who enlisted his
brothers, Morgan and Wyatt, to track down the thieves. The posse found the mules at the ranch of the
McLaurys but no arrests were made.
Instead, a compromise was reached, whereby the mules were to be
returned. Wyatt later claimed that he
had been opposed to the compromise. The
mules were not returned and the infuriated post commander posted notices in Tombstone accusing the
McLaurys of being the thieves. Frank
McLaury reacted by publishing a rejoinder in the pro-Cowboy Nugget, denying having stolen the mules and accusing the army commander, and by
implication the Earps, of cowardice.
Later in 1880 a group of Cowboys went
on a drunken shooting spree that ended with the death of the town Marshal, not
to be confused with the position of deputy federal marshal, the position held
by Virgil. This prompted the city
council to enact an ordinance prohibiting private citizens from carrying
firearms. It was this ordinance that the
Earps were insisting on enforcing at the time of the shoot-out with the
Clantons and the McLaurys.
In 1881 Pima County
was divided into two counties and a new county, Cochise, was created, which
included Tombstone. The sheriff was to be appointed by the Governor
until 1882, at which time there was to be an election. Wyatt Earp aspired to the appointment but it became
apparent that a man named Johnny Behan would get the post. Behan, who was an ardent
Democrat and sympathetic to the Cowboys, made a deal with Earp. Wyatt would abandon his campaign in exchange
for Behan’s promise to appoint Wyatt undersheriff. When Behan got the appointment he ignored his
promise to Wyatt, infuriating the Earp brothers and deepening the animosity
between the Earps and the Cowboys. Behan
was to play a major role in both the prelude to the shootout and in its
aftermath.
In March of 1881 a band of outlaws
attacked the stagecoach traveling between Tombstone
and Benson, Arizona, during which two men were
killed. A posse divided into two groups;
one included the Earps and Doc Holliday, the other was led by Sheriff
Behan. The Earp group rode for three days
and captured a man who confessed complicity, claiming he had only held the
horses for three others, who were known Cowboys. The Earps turned this man over to Behan and
set off after the three bandits but abandoned the hunt after several more days
and returned to Tombstone
only to discover that the thief they had captured had escaped from the
jailhouse under circumstances that led the Earps to believe that Sheriff Behan
had allowed it to happen. Behan
antagonized the Earps further by refusing to pay then any part of the money the
county supervisors had appropriated to cover the expenses of the posse. Behan then persuaded Doc Holliday’s girl
friend to sign an affidavit charging Doc with taking part in the holdup. He arrested Doc and charged him with
murder. At the preliminary hearing the
case collapsed. The girlfriend recanted
and several witnesses supported Doc’s alibi that he had been elsewhere on the
night of the robbery.
Wyatt Earp now embarked on an
ill-advised scheme in the hopes of enhancing his prospects to be elected sheriff
of Cochise County.
He approached Ike Clanton and offered to give Ike the reward offered by
Wells-Fargo for the capture of the three Cowboys who had attacked the Benson
stagecoach if Ike would lure his fellow Cowboys into an ambush. Amazingly, Ike Clanton agreed, provided, of course, that the deal remained a secret. As it turned out, Ike had no opportunity to
fulfill the bargain as all three of the men were killed before Clanton could
spring the trap. Despite that, Ike
realized that his life was in danger if word leaked that he had agreed to
betray the three men.
On October 25, 1881, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury
arrived in Tombstone
with a load of beef. Ike headed to the
Alhambra Saloon, where he encountered Doc Holliday. Ike was terrified that his deal with Wyatt would
become known and had come to believe that Wyatt had told Holliday about
it. Ike accused Doc and Doc denied
knowing of any deal. Tthe meeting
dissolved into insults. Morgan Earp, who
was working as a “special deputy” in the Alhambra,
managed to persuade the two to leave. A
few hours later,
incredibly, Ike, Tom McLaury, Holliday, Wyatt and Virgil Earp,
and Sheriff Behan, all gathered at another saloon for an all-night poker
game. When morning came, the others went
to bed but Ike began to roam the streets carrying a gun and threatening to fight Holliday and any
of the Earps who appeared in the streets.
When word of this reached the Earps they confronted Ike and arrested him
for carrying firearms within the city limits.
Ike was taken before a judge and was fined twenty-five dollars; his
rifle and revolver were deposited with the clerk of a nearby hotel. Shortly afterward, Wyatt encountered Tom
McLaury and the two had angry words. By
this time Ike’s brother, Billy, and Tom’s brother, Frank, had ridden into
town. After visiting a gun shop where
they were seen loading ammunition into their gunbelts, and at which the
proprietor refused to sell a gun to Ike, the four repaired to the O.K. Corral. Sheriff Behan got word of the potential
confrontation and approached the scene, where he conferred with Virgil Earp
about a block from the corral. Behan
then set off to persuade the Cowboys to hand over their guns. The Cowboys refused. By this time Virgil had learned that the
Cowboys had left the corral and were standing on Fremont Street. Virgil had decided not to confront the
Cowboys if they remained in the Corral, since the common understanding of the
ordinance prohibiting the carrying of firearms was that it did not apply to
persons “immediately leaving the city” and the O.K. Corral was a place from
which persons left Tombstone. Virgil decided he had to act. As the Earps and Holliday (Wyatt, Morgan, and
Doc had been deputized by Virgil) marched toward the vacant lot, Behan rushed
up to them and shouted, or so Wyatt and Virgil believed he shouted, “I have
disarmed them all.” Behan later denied
having said this. When the Earps and
Holliday were about ten feet from the Clantons and McLaurys, Virgil shouted
“Boys, throw up your hands, I want your guns.”
Two shots were fired almost simultaneously. After one or two beats, at least thirty more shots
were fired during a thirty second shootout.
Did one or more of the Cowboys reach for a weapon, at which point the
Earp party opened fire, or did the Cowboys attempt to surrender and returned
fire only after the Earp party begin the shooting? Dozens of citizens witnessed the encounter
but their accounts did not agree.
Virgil and Morgan received serious but
not life-threatening wounds and Doc Holliday a superficial one. Wyatt was not hit. One McLaury was killed instantly and the
other, and Billy Clanton, were badly wounded and died within an hour. Ike Clanton, who had
previously been disarmed, and whose threats and bragging were the immediate
cause of the shootout, fled the scene and escaped unharmed.
There ensued three separate legal
proceedings. There was first an inquest,
at the close of which the coroner delivered the strange and unsatisfying
verdict that the three dead men had died from the effects of gunshot wounds
inflicted by the Earps and Holliday. Ike
Clanton then filed first-degree murder charges and, in accordance with Arizona law, a
preliminary hearing was held. Such
hearings were typically short, since their only purpose was to decide whether
further proceedings were warranted. In
this case, however, the preliminary hearing became in effect a full scale
trial. Thirty witnesses gave testimony
over a period of almost a month. The
Justice of the Peace who conducted the hearing ruled that the evidence indicated
that the defendants had acted within the law.
He invited the grand jury to reevaluate his decision. The grand jury declined to indict. Had it done so, a fourth proceeding (and
possibly a fifth, sixth and seventh) would have taken place-- murder trials of
the individual defendants.
The preliminary hearing that
effectively ended the case against the Earps and Holliday was notable for the
testimony of Ike Clanton and Wyatt Earp that likely led to the decision to
exonerate the defendants. In accordance
with the Arizona
law relating to preliminary hearings, Wyatt was permitted to read a prepared
statement but was not subject to cross-examination. He claimed, of course, that his side had
fired in self defense. Ike Clanton testified
that Holliday and Morgan Earp had fired the first two shots but then destroyed
his own credibility by making the preposterous claim that the Earps and
Holliday had been complicit in the Benson stagecoach robbery and murder, and
that all of them had confessed their role to him.
The exoneration of the Earps and
Holliday did not end the feud. Less than
a month after the decision of the Justice of the Peace, Virgil Earp was
ambushed by several men and struck by several loads of buckshot. His left arm was barely saved from amputation
but was rendered useless for the rest of his life. Wyatt was certain that Ike Clanton was one of
the shooters but the charges against Ike were dismissed for lack of any direct
evidence. Then, three months after the
attack on Virgil Earp, Morgan Earp was killed by a rifle shot fired from
outside a saloon where he and Wyatt were enjoying a game of pool. Virgil Earp thought it prudent to depart for California, which he was
able to do safely. Wyatt, assisted by
Doc Holliday and several others, embarked on what came to be known as the Earp
vendetta ride. Within a week, the posse
killed three men Wyatt thought were responsible for the assassination of his
brother Morgan. Believing that his work
was done, and rightfully afraid that he would be brought to justice, lawfully
or unlawfully, for the killings, Wyatt, together with Holliday, left Arizona for good. Holliday died of consumption in Colorado in 1887 at age
thirty-six. Ike Clanton was shot to
death that same year when he was caught stealing cattle. Wyatt Earp eventually
settled in Southern California where he became
an unofficial adviser on the sets of early cowboy films. He died in 1929 at age eighty. Among his pallbearers were cowboy stars Tom
Mix and William S. Hart.
Feuds eventually end, but usually not
happily. An exception was the
Hatfield-McCoy feud. More than a century
after the fighting actually stopped, a mock peace treaty was drawn up and
signed by representatives of the two families.
One wonders whether Randolph McCoy and Devil Anse Hatfield would have
signed this document.
.