What Wyatt Earp Knew

Public order must be enforced with rigor and fearlessness. 

F or the first time in more than 100 years, train robberies are a big thing again, drawing loose comparisons to the Wild West era.

Of course, this is overwrought. Jesse James isn’t boarding trains with his gang to make off with whatever loot they can grab, before inevitably disappearing only to — maybe after writing a self-valorizing letter to the newspaper — strike again.

If current conditions are totally different than in the late-19th-century West, the public dereliction is arguably worse — Los Angeles isn’t a boomtown surrounded by vast ungoverned spaces and overrun by drunk cowboys in the warm months. It is a 21st-century city, with all the advantages of a lavishly funded, well-established, completely legitimate system of public order.

It is choosing, however, to create ungoverned places through its own decadence and ideologically driven folly. Or to put it in Old West terms, it is ignoring what Wyatt Earp, that most famous of American lawmen, knew.

This didn’t take much insight, but the jurisdictions that hired Earp realized that without public safety, their communities would fail. As one reporter described 19th-century Dodge City, “The arm of the law is palsied and hangs powerless by the side of Justice, who stands away in the background like the statue of a forlorn and helpless exile. Horse thieves, burglars, peace disturbers and even murderers go at large.”

In his excellent biography, Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend, Casey Tefertiller points out that the goal of the political and business leaders in such places wasn’t to make their boomtowns into paragons of virtue. The idea was to keep the peace at night so the saloons and brothels could stay busy and everyone would wake up in one piece the next day to patronize the town’s other establishments.

Nor was Earp himself a paragon of virtue. He was a gambler and had, at the very least, connections to the brothel business through his family. But he was truly extraordinary at “lawing.” He worked at it in a number of places, most famously in Dodge City and Tombstone. By the end of his career, few people so thoroughly exemplified the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

As a lawman, he was honest, fair-minded, and utterly fearless and resolute. He brought, above all, a seriousness of purpose to the enterprise of enforcing the law and creating public order.

Except when things went haywire at the end in Tombstone, which gave us the shootout at the O.K. Corral and the Vendetta Ride (still argued about to this day), it was a hallmark of his career that he avoided killing unnecessarily and often didn’t even carry a gun. “He never at any time in his career resorted to the pistol excepting in cases where such a course was absolutely necessary,” his friend and partner Bat Masterson said later. “Wyatt could scrap with his fists, and had often taken all the fight out of bad men, as they were called, with no other weapons than those provided by nature.”

A lawman wasn’t any use if he scared easily and could be overwhelmed. This was the problem with the town marshal of Wichita, Kan., Bill Smith, who was held at gunpoint and rendered useless by a group of Texans after one of their compatriots carried out a revenge hit on an African-American resident. According to Tefertiller, the fallout from that incident may have led to the hiring of Earp as a deputy there.

Nor was a lawman any use if he couldn’t control himself. In his book on Dodge City, Tom Clavin cites an estimate that the first marshal of Dodge City shot about a dozen men during his first month on the job. Even if you admired his, ahem, diligence, this was not a sustainable model.

Earp avoided both extremes. He was a rock in threatening situations, and yet judicious. His equivalent of broken-windows policing was the practice of “buffaloing” or knocking out troublemakers with a pistol before situations got out of hand. This method avoided gunplay and then, as now, rigorous policing sent a salutary message.

An old hand is recorded as advising younger, fellow cowboys to control themselves in Dodge lest they have an unwelcome brush with the law. He told them that they had better stow their guns somewhere when in town, and then continued, “And when you leave town, call for your pistols, but don’t ride out shooting; omit that. Most cowboys think it’s an infringement on their rights to give up shooting in town, and if it is, it stands, for your six-shooters are no match for our Winchesters and buckshot; and Dodge’s officers are as game a set of men as ever faced danger.”

Earp didn’t brook political interference in the enforcement of the law. He told the story of a local businessman who tried to browbeat Earp into releasing a misbehaving cattle boss who gave Dodge City a lot of business. After getting an earful of abuse and threats, Earp slapped the local businessman in jail, too.

He’d presumably be shocked that, more than a century after his career, the robbing of trains has been allowed to run out of control as a function of law enforcement and prosecutorial laxity. Back in his day, trying to make conveyances secure was a major concern. Earp chased train robbers and rode shotgun as a guard on Wells Fargo stagecoaches. Along one dangerous route, he noticed men on horseback riding parallel to the road. Rather than waiting for them to take the initiative, he blasted away with his Winchester and the group decided not to approach.

Clavin quotes another Earp biographer Allen Barra for the proposition, “However much Earp later exaggerated his position in Dodge, he did exactly what he was hired to do. In effect, after Wyatt Earl’s arrival Dodge City ceased to be Dodge City.”

As Tefertiller notes, Earp’s subsequent posting in Tombstone was a different animal. In Dodge, the problem hadn’t usually been hardened criminals, rather rowdy drunks. Tombstone, in contrast, had no-kidding criminals — cattle rustlers and border raiders — existing on the outskirts of society and sometimes backed by well-heeled ranchers. This outlaw element came to be referred to generically as the Cowboys. The town factionalized between supporters of the Cowboys and supporters of the more respectable forces, with the Earp brothers firmly arrayed against the Cowboys. This dispute lay at the bottom of the impossibly cinematic events at the O.K. Corral and the famous (or infamous) Vendetta Ride after the assassination of Wyatt’s brother Morgan.

The resulting controversy from those events ended Earp’s time in Arizona and, having always hoped to make a big score, he moved on to business ventures in places ranging from Alaska to California. But at considerable personal risk, he had made an outsized contribution to the West’s moving from the era of the six-shooter to a time when law and order became the norm.

Now, with the thefts from Union Pacific and in cities around the region, disorder is on the rise and needs to be confronted. In clawing back what’s been lost, a little more Wyatt Earp would go a long way.