The Gamblers’ War in Tombstone

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It raged during the fall and winter of 1880-81, and if the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday had lost it, they’d have had no choice but to clear out of Tombstone, Arizona Territory. The blood feud with the Sheriff John Behan–Cowboy faction would never have happened. No O.K. Corral. No Vendetta. No The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp TV series starring Hugh O’Brian.

The rivals in Tombstone’s ‘Gamblers’ War’ were the ‘Slopers,’ sporting men who had operated on the Pacific Coast, in and around San Francisco and the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas — Aurora, Bodie, Virginia City — and the ‘Easterners,’ men who in the 1870s had run the faro layouts, keno rooms and poker games at the end of the cattle trails in Kansas, the beginning of the trails in Texas and points in between. The Earps and Holliday were prominent Easterners.

Each side had kept to its own territory and formed its own cliques, the massive barrier of the Continental Divide minimizing contact between them — until 1879. That’s when the home turf of each was playing out and the neutral ground of Arizona Territory and its newly minted riches beckoned. Once the run on silver was in full gallop, the Slopers and the Easterners soon collided in Tombstone. Gambling parlors sprang up first in tent saloons, then in jacals, adobes and, finally, board-and-brick edifices of several stories and towering pretensions. By June 1880, Tombstone was ready, indeed was clamoring, for an elegant gambling den in which it could see its prosperity, both real and anticipated, mirrored. Jim Vizina and Ben Cook, mining men and entrepreneurs, owned a substantial structure at the corner of Fifth and Allen streets in Tombstone and agreed to lease the premises to Milton E. Joyce and Co., a California concern. Joyce was to run a bar and restaurant he named the Oriental, while a consortium that included portly San Franciscan Lou Rickabaugh and the one-time partner in Dodge City’s Long Branch Saloon, Bill Harris, took possession of the adjoining gambling parlor.

The Oriental was all the brand-spanking-new town with lofty dreams could have hoped for. On July 22, 1880, The Tombstone Daily Epitaph told its readers:

Last evening the portals were thrown open and the public permitted to gaze upon the most elegantly furnished saloon this side of the Golden Gate. Twenty-eight burners suspended in neat chandeliers afforded an illumination of ample brilliancy and the bright rays reflected from the many colored crystals in the bar sparkled like a December icing in the sunshine. The saloon comprises two apartments. To the right of the main entrance is the bar, beautifully carved, finished in white and gilt and capped with a handsomely polished top. In the rear of this stand a brace of sideboards….They were made for the Baldwin Hotel, of San Francisco….The back apartment is covered with a brilliant body brussels [sic] carpet and suitably furnished after the style of a grand club room, with conveniences for the wily dealers in polished ivory….Tombstone has taken the lead and [to] Messrs. Joyce and Co. our congratulations.

In a land where men were intoxicated with the prospect of limitless wealth, and suckers galore were eager to spend their silver on a spree, this was a franchise worth having — fighting for if need be.

Rickabaugh, Harris and partners began dealing pasteboards and raking in loose change on July 21, 1880. At this point, there is no indication the Earp brothers were more than casual players in the Oriental. For the time being they were placing their bets elsewhere, most heavily in mining properties. In addition, James Earp was tending bar at Vogan & Flynn’s saloon, Virgil serving as deputy U.S. marshal when needed, Wyatt riding shotgun for Wells Fargo for a few months until he became deputy sheriff of Pima County on July 27, 1880, and handed his express messenger job over to brother Morgan.

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