Wyatt Earp’s Lost Year

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Wyatt and Walton knew each other before 1872. Stuart Lake’s notes mention Wyatt’s first gunfight. In Beardstown, during the summer of 1869, a bully named Tom Piner mockingly called Wyatt ‘the California boy.’ They came face to face in Walden’s Hotel. They clinched, they scuffled and Wyatt tossed his adversary out the door. Piner was carrying a gun, and he jerked it out of his pocket. Wyatt armed himself, they exchanged shots and Piner fell with a hip wound.

Nicholas Earp, Wyatt’s father, had moved his family to Missouri from California, where they had lived since 1864. Wyatt and his brother Virgil had followed them, working at least part time hauling supplies for railroad construction crews. Instead of joining their father at once, however, Wyatt and Virgil visited relatives in Monmouth, Ill., their boyhood home. Then Wyatt moved on to Beardstown and the gunfight.

Walden’s Hotel, where the fracas occurred, was located near a set of tracks. The Rockford, Rock Island & St. Louis Railroad was in the process of laying rail through the center of Beardstown. The ‘hotel’ was in fact a brothel, operated by Walton, a 34-year-old Virginian. The bully with whom Wyatt battled, called ‘Tom Piner’ in Lake’s notes, was actually a brakeman named Thomas D. Pinard. Although Lake never included this story in Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (not to suggest he was aware of the details unflattering to Earp and suppressed them), it has the ring of authenticity: Records confirm that Walton and his gaggle of prostitutes were present in Beardstown; that Pinard was employed on a rail line between Chicago and western Illinois; and that construction excitement luring scavengers, sports and rowdy laborers was going strong that summer of 1869. And it is doubtful the story as Lake had it — accurate in general terms, deceptive in details — could have originated with anyone but Earp himself.

Did Wyatt seek out John Walton three years later in Beardstown, where the voyage of the gunboat began, or did they meet somewhere along the Illinois River? By late August 1872, the gunboat had passed Peoria and poled at least 35 miles farther upriver before turning and cruising back for its ill-starred rendezvous with Captain Gill and his flying squad.

On September 9, 1872, two days after the seizure of the gunboat, the prisoners lined up before Police Magistrate James Cunningham in Peoria City Hall. Those charged totaled seven men and six women. The officers who had taken part in the raid boasted, ‘They were the quietest set of bawds and pimps they ever handled, they felt so cheap at their unexpected capture.’ The Peoria Daily National Democrat, on September 10, reported: ‘Some of the women are said to be good looking, but all appear to be terribly depraved. John Walton, the skipper of the boat and Wyatt Earp, the Peoria bummer, were each fined $43.15….Sarah Earp, alias Sally Heckell, calls herself wife of Wyatt….’

Could this woman indeed have been the wife of Wyatt Earp? It is generally assumed he was married three times, but a marriage license exists only for the union with his first wife, Rilla Sutherland. They were wed on January 10, 1870, in Lamar, Mo., and Rilla, the daughter of a local hotelkeeper, died less than a year later. No official record has been found uniting Wyatt with either of the other wives — Mattie Blaylock and Sadie Marcus — though he maintained a long-term relationship with each. Was Sarah Earp simply a prostitute who had taken the name of her protector, her pimp, or could she and Wyatt have known each other over a span of years? Who was she?

The newspaper article gives her ‘alias’ as Sally Heckell, but while that name may have been assumed, in whole or in part, it was equally likely to have been her real name or something close to it. During the early months of 1872, Wyatt Earp was in residence at the brothel of Jane Haspel. Minnie Randall was toiling in this brothel in February 1872 when Wyatt and Morgan Earp were arrested there. By April 1872, Minnie Randall had shifted her place of employment to the McClellan Institute a few blocks away, where it was said she was’stopping with Sally Haspell.’ That Wyatt was also living in the McClellan building at that time seems probable from the fact that he was arrested there less than three weeks later, described as an ‘inmate,’ and assessed a fine befitting a pimp.

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