The upshot of Holliday’s demurral was that Joyce threw him bodily out of the saloon. Holliday returned shortly with a gun (a policeman — probably either City Marshal Fred White or officer James Bennett — had disarmed him when he’d kicked up a fuss with Joyce), and he and the proprietor exchanged shots before Joyce, a bear of a man, threw himself on Holliday and beat him bloody. One of Holliday’s shots struck Joyce in the hand, so severely wounding it that amputation was considered, while another passed through the big toe of William Crownover Parker, Joyce’s 19-year-old partner. Several of Holliday’s biographers have seized on this encounter to exemplify Doc’s courage or mock Tyler’s cowardice. One of them offers an apocryphal tale of Holliday offering to fight and Tyler, ‘deathly pale,’ bolting through the front door. Another refers to Tyler’s ‘public shaming.’ However, primary sources suggest each man was willing to bring the fight to a head. After both were disarmed, Tyler simply walked out of the saloon. Perhaps he was trying to curry favor with Joyce or saw no point doing battle without a weapon. At any rate, it would appear he did not leave because he felt himself outnumbered. The roster of witnesses summoned to Holliday’s October 12 hearing on a charge of attempted murder — Joyce, John Behan, Harry Woods, [West?] Fuller — presents a group who would prove no particular friends to the Earps or those who stood beside them.

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On October 10, 1880, Wyatt Earp had no interest in the Oriental gambling concession. After failing to recover stolen Army mules as a member of Lieutenant Joseph Hurst’s posse on July 25, 1880, Wyatt had ridden back to Tombstone and, on July 27, obtained a deputy sheriff’s commission from Pima County Sheriff Charles Shibell, who happened to have come down from Tucson on business. The sheriff needed to increase the police presence in the area, and Wyatt certainly was a solid choice, given the backing of his brother Virgil, a ‘deputy U.S. marshal.’

Wyatt became one of two deputies patrolling the vast tract of southwest Pima County, but soon after Wyatt received his commission, the other deputy, Newton J. Babcock, was confined to his room with an extended siege of illness. Reports in the local press make it clear that Wyatt was kept busy attending to legal duties from late July to early November 1880. It was only after he had thrown his support to Robert Paul, the Republican candidate and Shibell’s opponent in the general election, that Wyatt resigned his deputy sheriff’s position on November 9, 1880. That done, he continued to prospect, staking claims to mines and water rights, but now he had time to look to other avenues of enterprise as well.

The gamblers who owned the lucrative concession at the Oriental — Lou Rickabaugh, Bill Harris, Dick Clark, and possibly Charles H. Dunlap — had thrown in their lot with the Easterners, even though Rickabaugh and Clark had come to Tombstone from San Francisco. In fact, the relationships in this turf war were far from simple. The Daily Epitaph on October 20, 1880, stated that John Tyler was running a faro game at Danner & Owens Hall, situated across the street from the Oriental, and the Daily Nugget of October 22 identified the owners of the gambling tables at Danner & Owens as Charlie Smith and Robert J. Winders. These two were certainly in competition with Rickabaugh, et al., but Smith and Winders were also close friends of the Earps and Holliday. James Earp had tended bar for ‘Uncle Bob’ Winders in Fort Worth during the late 1870s, and Winders himself was a partner of the Earp brothers in several mining ventures.

Rickabaugh’s partner, Bill Harris, was an old-time saloon man from Dodge City and well acquainted with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Holliday may well have turned up in Tombstone by September 1880, not to reunite with the Earps but at the behest of Harris, to act as an enforcer and fend off Tyler and his troublemakers. This possibility becomes more likely since Luke Short, another former Dodge City gambler handy with a six-gun, arrived in Tombstone at about the same time as Holliday, late fall or early winter of 1880, and not, as generally believed, with Bat Masterson in February 1881.

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