The propeller boat S.P. Carter churned through the choppy waters of the Illinois River three miles below Peoria. Aboard, Captain Samuel Gill and eight stalwarts of his city police force peered into the darkness of the September night. Glimmers flitted like fireflies off the port bow not far ahead. The captain whispered, ‘That’s her,’ and signaled the pilot to cut the engine. Silent now but for the soft lapping of the water against her sides, S.P. Carter glided to shore some yards above the outline of a common keelboat about 50 feet long, moored to the bank. It was what the natives called a ‘gunboat,’ familiar to the officers of the law. On the deck perched a house with four doors — one at each end, one on each side. There was no one to be seen, but gleams of light slanted through windows in the house, and the squeals of catgut and thumps of dancing feet rose and fell on the wind.

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Captain Gill gathered his men around him and drew up a plan of action. With Officers O’Connor, Wason and Strong at his heels, he stole along the weed-strewn riverbank and slipped aboard the gunboat, his men fanning out, posting themselves next to three of the doors. The crew of S.P. Carter, which had drifted down on the current and anchored next to the other boat, guarded the last exit. Captain Gill edged up to a window and ran his eye over the scene within, illuminated by smoky lamplight. The bar, the dance floor, the revelers, the warren of sleeping quarters — all confirmed his suspicions.

For some days complaints had reached his ears about this boat tied up at Wesley Bend, beyond the city limits but by ordinance still within his jurisdiction. A young man from the lower end of Peoria had gone there night after night to carouse and then stagger home and abuse his mother; one of the denizens of the boat had marched into the uproarious Bunker Hill section of town and boldly stoned a house, settling old scores. And as if these scenes from Donnybrook Fair were not alarming enough, intimations even more troubling to civic rectitude had become public knowledge. It would not do. In Captain Gill’s mind, the gunboat had overstayed its welcome. He put a patrol whistle to his lips and blew a sharp blast. His men charged through the four doors. The fiddler and the dancers scattered, but there was no escape. In one of the eight bedrooms, a man cursed and threw on his clothes, while the woman with him broke out in knowing laughter and told him to give up. He was well and truly caught. The police shouldered open other bedroom doors and pounced on the dazed and startled inhabitants of the floating brothel. Among them were the owner, an experienced pimp from Beardstown, 90 miles downriver, and in another room the owner’s bartender and right-hand man, a roughhouse slugger named Wyatt Earp, who’d brawled his way through the tie camps of the transcontinental railway a few years earlier, and Earp’s wife, Sarah.

Events make clear that this was the Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp of O.K. Corral fame and enduring Western legend — a man in his mid-20s who was already acquiring a reputation, though of dubious prospect. And the gunboat incident of September 7, 1872, was not the first collision between him and the Peoria police that year.

On February 24, he and his brother Morgan had been seized in a raid on Jane Haspel’s brothel, in the city’s red-light district, close by the train yards, transient boardinghouses and hotels catering to commercial travelers. At a hearing shortly afterward, a prostitute nabbed with the Earps cinched their guilt, giving testimony to the effect that they had not been entrapped but had knowingly consorted with her, and each man paid a fine of $20 and costs. The raid was part of a campaign launched by the new mayor and his superintendent of police — Samuel Gill — to placate the ‘moral element’ among their constituents by putting well-publicized pressure on the flesh trade. On this occasion, the amount of the fine suggests the Earps were convicted of being nothing more than ‘johns.’ However, Root’s Peoria City Directory for 1872-73 lists Wyatt Earp living at the same address as Jane Haspel — Washington Street near the corner of Hamilton. Since the city directory went to press on March 1, 1872, and canvassing for it would have taken at least several months, it is probable Wyatt was residing in the Haspel brothel, not merely patronizing it, at the time of his arrest.

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