Reign of the Rough-Scuff: Law and Lucre in Wichita

The discrepancy between the two years is notable. Certainly the city treasurer thought so, as did some members of the council as well. Behrens is not listed on the city payroll for November 1875, in what may have been a disciplinary action, and on April 7, 1876, councilman James Fraker, complying with the program of the moral reform element in Wichita, presented an ordinance titled ‘To abolish the office of assistant marshal and regulate the fees of certain officers therein named.’ Later in the month, the Committee on Jail and Police recommended withholding Behrens’ scrip until he gave an accounting of the missing monies. What followed was lengthy litigation and finally a compromise in October wherein Behrens, identified as ex-assistant marshal, was awarded $58.

His business association with prostitutes did not end there, however. During the heyday of the cattle trade, another madam, Mattie Wilson, had run a brothel called ‘The Old Ozark Dollar’ on Douglas Avenue, between Main and Water streets, the very heart of downtown. Under pressure from the reformers, this nuisance was shuttered in the late summer of 1876. That she did not long remain out of business is evident from a filing in the Sedgwick County District Court on August 12, 1876. In this, John Behrens implored the court to restrain Mattie Wilson from paying monies she earned at the Gold Rooms, one of the premier gambling houses in Wichita, to anyone but himself. It seems he’d come to realize that being a landlord and a legitimate rent collector was the surer route to riches.

The case of Wyatt Earp was a family affair. From January 1874 to May 1875, Bessie and Sallie Earp regularly paid the $10 monthly fines that were assessed of prostitutes. In June 1874, based on a complaint from one Samuel A. Martin, they were arrested and charged with keeping a bawdy house, the location of which turned out to be right behind Doc Black’s hotel. It was, in fact, suspiciously reminiscent of the ‘temporary jail’ in which Wyatt said he was incarcerated the day of Charley Sanders’ murder.

Bessie Earp was reputed to be the wife of Wyatt’s brother James, who was employed as a bartender in several saloons during the two years he spent in Wichita. On a Civil War pension application, James claimed to have married a woman named Nellie Bartlett Ketchum, familiarly known as Bessie, in Illinois in April 1873. She was described as a ‘beautiful brunette,’ and she and James rolled into Wichita the first week of September 1873, having come from Ellsworth. She was 31 years old — James 33 — and it is improbable that she had no experience in the oldest profession.

Bessie’s partner in crime, Sallie Earp, would also have had experience, in spades. Recent research makes it likely she was Sarah Haspel, from Peoria, Ill. (See ”The Peoria Bummer’: Wyatt Earp’s Lost Year,’ by Roger Jay, in the August 2003 Wild West.) Twenty years old in 1874, she had been an inmate of various brothels since at least age 15 and is known to have been arrested on three occasions prior to Wichita, twice in the company of Wyatt. Her acquaintance with him probably dated from as early as 1868, when evidence suggests he spent time in Peoria with his cousin Dow Earp and brother Virgil and there formed some sort of a relationship with a brothel-keeper he’d met that year while grading the Union Pacific track.It can hardly be a coincidence that the first full month Wyatt served on the Wichita police force, May 1875, Bessie, Sallie and other women using the name Earp stopped paying monthly fines. This seems to have been a professional courtesy extended to the newly fledged officer, overlooked by everyone in city government until Wyatt plunged himself into a mess of trouble.

The election of 1876 saw William Smith attempting to regain the position of city marshal. On the stump, Smith made it a point of attack that Marshal Meagher, if he were returned to office, would place Wyatt’s brothers Morgan and Virgil on the force. Nepotism was not particularly frowned upon in Wichita, so why this should be a detriment is not clear, unless Smith was appealing to gathering reform sentiment and making a connection of the family to elements of vice, namely Bessie and Sallie’s establishment. In this regard, it is worthy of note that Morgan Earp was arrested in the brothel of Ida May, the most infamous of Wichita’s madams, some months before the election.

Whatever the provocation, Wyatt Earp went after Smith with ‘fight on his brain,’ as the Wichita Beacon of April 5, 1876, put it, charging into a room and pummeling Smith while he was holding a confab with Meagher. Wyatt was arrested for violation of the peace and fined $30, but even worse he was dismissed from the police force. While Earp stewed in political hot water, his accounts were scrutinized along with Behrens,’ and he too was found to be in arrears. As with Behrens’ pay, Wyatt’s scrip was withheld until he made up the shortfall in fines collected. This he never did, leaving Wichita by mid-May, as the City Council decreed that the Vagrancy Act should be enforced to evict the entire Earp family.

By the close of the 1876 season, Wichita was no longer a cattle emporium. Grangers and their allies pressured the Kansas Legislature to move the so-called deadline to the west, placing the entire Arkansas River valley out of bounds to Texas cattle. Nor did Wichita need the herds any longer. An influx of farmers spread over the rich grazing land where the herds had roamed free, and Wichita became the mercantile hub for this new base of consumers. By and large, the gamblers, saloon men and prostitutes moved on to more verdant territory, many to the latest incarnation of the cattle town, Dodge City.

There, Wyatt Earp again became a lawman, adding to his laurels. Kate Elder, who had walked the streets of Wichita under the name Kate Earp, became a dance hall girl. There would be repeated the dynamic of merchants-cattlemen-lawmen-sporting class that had played out in Wichita, and once again, for a brief while, the prostitutes, gamblers, saloonmen and their hangers-on — the rough-scuff — would hold sway.

This article was written by Roger Jay and originally appeared in the October 2005 issue of Wild West.

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