The Short-Storms affair appears to have been no more than a drunken brawl with a fatal outcome. But the National Police Gazette of July 21, 1883, gives the story a different color. Reporting on the latter-day ‘Dodge City War,’ which saw Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson team up to secure Luke Short the right to run a saloon in their old Kansas stomping grounds, the Gazette said, ‘The main factor in the affair was Luke Short, a Texan, well known as one of the most fearless men in the Lone Star state. He fought a duel some years ago in Tombstone, Arizona with one Storms, the fighter of the ‘Slopers,’ who had been imported to kill him. Storms himself, however, was killed in the duel, and Short became the ‘cock of the walk.’ ‘

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In February 1881, the Tombstone papers did not mention Storms being a hired gun, but they may not have been in the know or else did not wish to scare off potential capitalists with the gory details of a gang war raging in town. The National Police Gazette correspondent in Dodge City was attorney Harry Gryden, a man with connections to Masterson, Earp and Short, and no doubt they filled him in on what Storms was really doing at the Oriental.

Although Storms may have drunk to excess the day of his death, it was perhaps to give him the courage necessary to do what the Slopers — John Tyler’s gang — had called him up from El Paso for: rid them of Luke Short, Rickabaugh’s protector. The Gazette version — that Storms was a hired killer — would make sense, since he arrived in Tombstone so soon after Tyler’s expulsion from the Oriental. Facing a phalanx of Short, Earp and Holliday, recently reinforced by Masterson and Dan Tipton, Tyler and the rest of the Slopers must have felt desperate measures were called for. But their plan backfired — the death of Storms writing finis to their dreams of controlling the Oriental.

Whether Wyatt Earp profited right away from his side’s victory is not certain, however. There is some evidence that Milt Joyce took control of the gambling rooms after Storms was killed. Parsons recorded on March 1, 1881, that Joyce had shut down the games following another shooting, in the a.m., and went on to describe the Oriental as ‘a regular slaughter house now.’ Possibly closing the saloon would have been enough to put the games out of business. Neither of the duelists on March 1, ‘One-Arm’ Kelly and [Alfred?] McAllister, had an obvious affiliation with the Slopers or the Easterners. Kelly may have been a member of a third gang, led by Big Ed Burns. A chronic hell-raiser, Burns had fled Leadville, Colo., on April 6, 1880, one jump ahead of a noose, after igniting an election-eve fracas that unleashed pandemonium in that silver camp. He subsequently gathered up a gang of rounders, thugs and confidence men and took over the railway depot of Benson, north of Tombstone. He and his cohorts appear to have been out solely for themselves, though one newspaper report does identify Morgan Earp as Burns’ associate.

Milt Joyce gave up his lease on the Oriental saloon in July 1881, when Vizina and Cook rebuilt the structure following a disastrous fire that ravaged downtown. From July 1881 to January 1882, Lou Rickabaugh was in complete control, and Wyatt Earp continued to collect his quarter interest in the games, free of outside interference.

John Tyler remained in Tombstone until at least late May 1881, when the Tucson Daily Citizen printed a dispatch telling of the highest-stakes poker game yet seen in the camp. The players, according to the newspaper, included Tyler, Napa Nick, Dick Clark and a man named Frees (possibly Frederick ‘Fritz’ Bode, a suspect in the murder of Morgan Earp in March 1882). That flourish is the Sloper chief’s last recorded gesture in Arizona. When next he turns up, it is almost a year later in Leadville, still plying his trade as a faro dealer and still nursing a grudge against Doc Holliday.

This article was written by Roger Jay and originally appeared in the October 2004 issue of Wild West.

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