Wyatt Earp

One hundred and thirty years ago today, citizens in Charleston, Arizona were up in arms over the shooting death of W.P. Schneider. Schneider was the chief engineer of the Corbin Mill. He was well-liked and considered an honorable man, but not great at poker. A miner and card-shark named Michael O’Rourke ended Schneider’s life prematurely. O’Rourke had been working around the Tucson area when news of a great silver strike in the Tombstone bluffs reached the town. O’Rourke and hundreds of others headed for the silver boom in quest of fortune. There, O’Rourke labored as a miner for four dollars a day in the excavations of the Tough Nut and Lucky Cuss among others. O’Rourke began visiting the gambling halls and became a tinhorn gambler. Because of his habit of betting heavily when he held a no more than a deuce as his hole-card, he earned his everlasting pseudonym: Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce. Sometime in 1880, he pulled up stakes and crossed the San Pedro River into Charleston, an untamed boom town where the day-to-day routine consisted of gambling, visiting “houses of ill fame,” fighting, swearing and drinking. The Deuce made no specific impression upon the denizens of Charleston—that is, not until Friday, January 14, 1881. That day, Quinn’s Saloon was crammed with miners and cattlemen and with soldiers from nearby Fort Huachuca, when W. P. Schneider, the chief engineer of the Corbin Mill, decided to cash in, after losing a fortune in an all night poker game. As he left the table he made a disdainful remark about the winner cheating, directing his attention to Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce. One word led to another. Both men went for their pistols. When the smoke cleared, Schneider lay sprawled on the floor, blood oozing from a hole in his chest. The event would provide newspaper fodder, and it would stamp Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce as something more than a tinhorn gambler. Irate miners, most of them employees of the late Schneider, began drinking and talking about a lynching. As a result of their wheedling, a wrathful crowd, led by a man named Johnny Ringo, gathered at Quinn’s Saloon. Someone brought a rope. Men with six-shooters felt satisfied that they could overwhelm the local police force, which consisted of only one man, George McKelvey. On the other hand, McKelvey, with visions of an angry mob stringing up the hapless gambler to the nearest cottonwood, was too good a lawman to knuckle under to a bunch of drunks. He hitched up a team of mules to a springboard, loaded Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce into the vehicle, and galloped for the distant mountains of Tombstone, the mob in pursuit. Although McKelvey utilized the whip vigorously, the mob gained on him. About two miles outside Tombstone, the mob pulled into rifle range. Bullets whizzed around McKelvey and the Deuce all the way into the silver camp. By the time they reached  Jack McCann’s Last Chance Saloon, the exhausted mules collapsed. McKelvey, with the Deuce in tow, crashed through the batwing doors of the nearby Oriental Saloon, where none other than Wyatt Earp, the famed Tombstone lawman and gunman, was playing poker. McKelvey yelled that an angry lynch mob of two hundred was on his heels. “Take the prisoner to Jim Vogan’s bowling alley,” Wyatt told his two brothers, Morg and James Earp. “If they get past me, give him a gun and turn him loose.” The angry mob surged up to the Vogan’s adobe bowling alley with its high walls. Wyatt Earp, cradling a scatter gun, stepped in front of the men. They stopped in their tracks. “Drag him out!” someone yelled, anxious for the Deuce’s blood. “Don’t make any fool plays, boys,” Wyatt replied coolly. “The price you’ll have to pay won’t be worth that tinhorn inside.” “Earp can’t stop us all!” a man urged from the rear ranks. Wyatt cocked both hammers of his shotgun. The wide bores made an impression on the men in the front ranks. Two barrels of buckshot would cut quite a swath through the tightly packed mob. According to Tombstone legend, Earp turned away the maddened lynch mob while Marshal Ben Sippy, Virgil Earp and Johnny Behan loaded Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce into another springboard. There was no one quite like Wyatt Earp.