Wyatt Earp’s Lost Year

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Two months afterward, on April 24, the prostitute who had turned state’s evidence against the Earps — Minnie Randall — committed suicide by swallowing six grains of morphine. The Peoria Daily Transcript noted that she had been an inmate of the McClellan building on Main Street, a house of ill fame within several blocks of Jane Haspel’s. It further remarked that the deceased had been stopping at McClellan’s with the notorious prostitute Sally Haspel.

Less than three weeks later, Wyatt and Morgan Earp were again jailed by Captain Gill’s police force, as reported in the May 11, 1872, issue of the Daily Transcript: ‘That hotbed of iniquity, the McClellan Institute on Main Street near Water was pulled on Thursday night [May 9], and as usual quite a number of inmates transient and otherwise were found therein. Wyat [sic] Earp and his brother Morgan Earp were each fined $44.55 and as they had not the money and would not work, they languish in the cold and silent calaboose….’ The newspaper went on to editorialize: ‘It does seem strange that the owner of the house in question can not find a more respectable lot of tenants than he usually has there. Complaints arise from the whole neighborhood, and some of the merchants nearby there are annoyed by the inmates even during the day.’

The madam of the McClellan Institute was Jennie Green, whose previous residence had been a hovel situated in an alley near the corner of Washington and Hamilton streets, within spitting distance of Jane Haspel’s backdoor. The amount of the fines levied against Wyatt and Morgan suggests that the arresting officers considered them to be pimps and charged them as such.

The brothers cannot have relished the time spent in the city jail, however refractory they chose to be about working off their fines. A report in the Peoria Daily National Democrat of January 6, 1872, describes the jail in these terms: ‘The calaboose is in a wretched condition, and it is absolutely cruel to confine prisoners in it. In corners of the men’s and women’s departments are vaults, which are left uncovered, and the stench arising from them is horrible. There are ventilators, but these being obstructed, besides being poorly constructed, they are of no avail to carry off the effluvium. In addition to the deadly atmosphere of the apartments, there is not a sufficiency of bedding to render prisoners comfortable.’

It may be that after serving their sentences, Wyatt and Morgan left Peoria — Wyatt temporarily and Morgan for good. In a memoir, their sister Adelia recounts how on her 11th birthday, June 16, 1872, they visited her at the family farm in Missouri and gave her ‘a whole package of pretty clothes.’ By Adelia’s account, Wyatt and Morgan had returned from buffalo hunting with ‘quite a heap of money.’

Adelia’s memoir has yet to be authenticated, but Stuart Lake, author of the biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, also claimed that Wyatt was buffalo hunting in the spring of 1872. According to Lake, Wyatt brought his hides into Caldwell, Kan., in April 1872 and sold them for $2,500. It is evident that the buffalo-hunting story is incorrect. Lake’s notes, in the Huntington Library collection, suggest the story came directly from conversations with Wyatt Earp the year before his death. The generally accurate recollections given by Earp when he had nothing to hide lead one to believe he concocted a plausible tale to account for the time he lingered in Peoria. Still, he and Morgan may have returned to his father’s farm in June 1872 and made a memorable appearance at their young sister’s birthday party. How they could have flashed ‘quite a heap of money’ when neither could stump up enough to pay a $44.55 fine a month earlier is another matter.

If Wyatt did return to his family, the visit was a brief one, for probably no later than August he was back in Peoria or Beardstown or points in between. Somewhere he had to have teamed up with John T. Walton, owner of the floating brothel.

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