John Flood and Wyatt Earp

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“Hold! There’s something wrong here!” and the animal slowed to a walk.

Cautiously now, the six riders approached the brink of the wash, fifty feet in front. Opposite, fifteen feet below the level of the plain, a growth of emerald willows mingled with the gray of the mesquite; bunch grass, rank and gone to see [seed], covered the ground beneath; buck bush and purple sage.

Five paces closer, and the dazzling whiteness of a canvas tent flashed into sight just under the bank; if the occupants were anywhere close by, they must have sought refuge within. The only evidence of life was the canvas doorway flapping back and forth in the fitful breeze in front, the sparkling, dancing brook away across the other side and the—–[sic]

“Curly Bill!” shouted McMasters.

“Curly Bill” shouted Holliday.

And there was the sound of sudden hoof beats retreating down the mesa. [Signifying that most of his posse has fled.]

Just beyond a shallow pool where the brook trickled forth, a spiral of thin gray smoke ascended straight in the air above the camp-fire glowing in the shade. A coatless individual, clothed in a woolen shirt and breeches, had just dipped a large metal spoon into a steaming kettle that swung above the blaze; he was stirring something that was cooking.

At the sudden shout, at the sound of his name, the man looked up. Then he dropped the spoon as if it had been coals of fire in his hand. And, almost losing his balance in his haste to reach something beyond him by the pool, he seized a shotgun lying on the ground, a sawed-off shotgun, the messenger’s shotgun which he had stolen from the Bisbee Stage.

Bang! And the wind of it carried away the frock coat of a lone deputy [Earp] looking down at him from the mesa fifty feet away.

Silence!

Bang! Bang! Two shots but one report—a puff of smoke from the mesa. And the man beside the fire pitched forward at the edge of the pool. There was a rush of crimson, and the man on the mesa saw it staining all the sand….

Thus Curly Bill was dead and the fight at Iron Spring was joined as Curly Bill’s gang tried to escape.

The trackdown of Johnny Ringo shows re mark able similarities. He’s found alone after a long search, beside a campfire at Turkey Creek Canyon . While Earp’s six-man posse keeps Ringo pinned down, Earp circles behind his quarry. In Flood’s version, that episode concludes this way:

There was no doubt now, in the mid of the deputy, as to the identity of the man; the profile of Ringo was towards him in the full light of the sun.

“Now!” said Earp to himself, and he straighted up.

“Ringo!” he shouted.

Crack! And the smoke spurted from the muzzle of Ringo’s rifle as he wheeled about.

Crack! And Earp started down the slope. “I know we were on the right trail,” he said.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Despite its flaws, Flood’s manuscript remains a land mark contribution to the voids in the lore of Wyatt Earp. Sadly, though, as with its chief character, it didn’t make the grade in giving us chapter and verse of how it all really happened.

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