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- The History Of Wyatt Earp
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Origin | France |
---|---|
Type | gambling |
Skills required | counting |
Cards | 52 |
Deck | Anglo-American |
Play | clockwise |
Playing time | 10–15 minutes |
Random chance | medium |
Related games | |
Baccarat, Basset, Tempeln |
Faro (/ˈfɛəroʊ/FAIR-oh), Pharaoh, Pharao, or Farobank is a late 17th-century French gambling card game. It is descended from Basset, and belongs to the Lansquenet and Monte Bank family of games due to the use of a banker and several players. Winning or losing occurs when cards turned up by the banker match those already exposed.
![Last Last](/uploads/1/2/5/2/125215893/169112299.jpg)
The History Of Wyatt Earp
Kate was a prostitute and Holliday a gambler. That summer a group of drunken cowboys entered the Long Branch Saloon, where Holliday was gambling, after shooting up the street outside. When Earp, acting as town marshal entered the saloon to arrest the miscreants he found several guns already drawn and pointing at him. 'Wyatt Earp's loyalty to a friend now enters into the story,' Ferguson wrote. Ferguson said that the grand jury would convene in a few weeks, and Wyatt expected his friend to be indicted. Earp went to the telegraph office and asked the operator, named Toplitz, if anyone had contacted Ferguson to warn him of impending trouble.
It is not a direct relative of poker, but Faro was often just as popular, due to its fast action, easy-to-learn rules, and better odds[clarification needed] than most games of chance. The game of Faro is played with only one deck of cards and admits any number of players.
Wildly popular in North America during the 1800s, Faro was eventually overtaken by poker as the preferred card game of gamblers in the early 1900s.[1]
- 1History
- 2Rules
- 3Cheating
- 4In culture
History[edit]
The earliest references to a card game named Pharaon are found in Southwestern France during the reign of Louis XIV. Basset was outlawed in 1691, and Pharaoh emerged several years later as a derivative of Basset, before it too was outlawed.[2]
Despite the French ban, Pharaoh and Basset continued to be widely played in England during the 18th century, where it was known as Pharo, an English alternate spelling of Pharaoh.[3] The game was easy to learn, quick and, when played honestly, the odds for a player were the best[clarification needed] of all gambling games, as Gilly Williams records in a letter to George Selwyn in 1752.[4]
With its name shortened to Faro, it spread to the United States in the 19th century to become the most widespread and popularly favored gambling game. It was played in almost every gambling hall in the Old West from 1825 to 1915.[5] Faro could be played in over 150 places in Washington, D.C. alone during the Civil War.[6] An 1882 study considered faro to be the most popular form of gambling, surpassing all others forms combined in terms of money wagered each year.[2]
It was also widespread in the German states during the 19th century, where it was known as Pharao or Pharo. A simplified version played with 32 German-suited cards was known as Deutsches Pharao ('German Pharo') or Süßmilch. It is recorded in card game compendia from at least 1810 to 1975.
In the US, Faro was also called 'bucking the tiger' or 'twisting the tiger's tail', a reference to early card backs that featured a drawing of a Bengal tiger. By the mid 19th century, the tiger was so commonly associated with the game that gambling districts where faro was popular became known as 'tiger town', or in the case of smaller venues, 'tiger alley'.[7] Some gambling houses would simply hang a picture of a tiger in their windows to advertise that a game could be played there.
![Gambling Gambling](/uploads/1/2/5/2/125215893/658906705.jpg)
Faro's detractors regarded it as a dangerous scam that destroyed families and reduced men to poverty because of rampant rigging of the dealing box. Crooked faro equipment was so popular that many sporting-house companies began to supply gaffed[clarification needed] dealing boxes specially designed so that the bankers could cheat their players. Cheating was so prevalent that editions of Hoyle’s Rules of Games began their faro section by warning readers that not a single honest faro bank could be found in the United States. Criminal prosecutions of faro were involved in the Supreme Court cases of United States v. Simms, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 252 (1803),[8] and Ex parte Milburn, 34 U.S. (9 Pet.) 704 (1835).[citation needed]
Although the game became scarce after World War II, it continued to be played at a few Las Vegas and Reno casinos through 1985.[9]
Etymology[edit]
Historians have suggested that the name Pharaon comes from Louis XIV's royal gamblers, who chose the name from the motif that commonly adorned one of the French-made court cards.[3]
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Rules[edit]
The layout of a faro board
Description[edit]
A game of faro was often called a 'faro bank'. It was played with an entire deck of playing cards. One person was designated the 'banker' and an indeterminate number of players, known as 'punters', could be admitted. Chips (called 'checks') were purchased by the punter from the banker (or house) from which the game originated. Bet values and limits were set by the house. Usual check values were 50 cents to $10 each.
The faro table was typically oval,[10] covered with green baize, and had a cutout for the banker. A board was placed on top of the table with one suit of cards (traditionally spades) pasted to it in numerical order, representing a standardized betting 'layout'. Each player laid his stake on one of the 13 cards on the layout. Players could place multiple bets and could bet on multiple cards simultaneously by placing their bet between cards or on specific card edges. A player could reverse the intent of his bet by placing a hexagonal (6-sided) token called a 'copper' on it. Some histories said a penny was sometimes used in place of a copper. This was known as 'coppering' the bet, and reversed the meaning of the win/loss piles for that particular bet. Players also had the choice of betting on the 'high card' bar located at the top of the layout.
Procedure[edit]
- A deck of cards was shuffled and placed inside a 'dealing box', a mechanical device also known as a 'shoe', which was used to prevent manipulations of the draw by the banker and intended to assure players of a fair game.
- The first card in the dealing box was called the 'soda' and was 'burned off', leaving 51 cards in play. The dealer then drew two cards: the first was called the 'banker's card' and was placed on the right side of the dealing box. The next card after the banker's card was called the carte anglaise (English card) or simply the 'player's card', and it was placed on the left of the shoe.[6]
- The banker's card was the bettor's 'losing card'; regardless of its suit, all bets placed on the layout's card that had the same denomination as the banker's card were lost by the players and won by the bank. The player's card was the 'winning card'. All bets placed on the card that had that denomination were returned to the players with a 1 to 1 (even money) payout by the bank (e.g., a dollar bet won a dollar). A 'high card' bet won if the player’s card had a higher value than the banker’s card.[7]
- The dealer settled all bets after each two cards drawn. This allowed players to bet before drawing the next two cards. Bets that neither won nor lost remained on the table, and could be picked up or changed by the player prior to the next draw.
- When only three cards remained in the dealing box, the dealer would 'call the turn', which was a special type of bet that occurred at the end of each round. The object now was to predict the exact order that the three remaining cards, Bankers, Players, and the final card called the Hock, would be drawn.[6] The player's odds here were 5 to 1, while a successful bet paid off at 4 to 1 (or 1 to 1 if there were a pair among the three, known as a 'cat-hop'). This provided one of the dealer's few advantages in faro. If it happened that the three remaining cards were all the same, there would be no final bet, as the outcome was not in question.
Certain advantages were reserved to the banker: if he drew a doublet, that is, two equal cards, he won half of the stakes upon the card which equaled the doublet. In a fair game, this provided the only 'house edge'. If the banker drew the last card of the pack, he was exempt from doubling the stakes deposited on that card.[11] These and the advantage from the odds on the turn bet provided a slight financial advantage to the dealer or house. To give themselves more of an advantage, and to counter the losses from players cheating, the dealers would also often cheat as well.[2]
A device, called a 'casekeep' was employed to assist the players and prevent dealer cheating by counting cards. The casekeep resembled an abacus, with one spindle for each card denomination, with four counters on each spindle. As a card was played, either winning or losing, one of four counters would be moved to indicate that a card of that denomination had been played. This allowed players to plan their bets by keeping track of what cards remained available in the dealing box. The operator of the case keep is called the 'casekeeper', or colloquially in the American West, the 'coffin driver'.
Cheating[edit]
In a fair game the house's edge was low, so bankers increasingly resorted to cheating the players to increase the profitability of the game for the house. This too was acknowledged by Hoyle editors when describing how faro banks were opened and operated: 'To justify the initial expenditure, a dealer must have some permanent advantage.'[2]
By dealers[edit]
Dealers employed several methods of cheating:
- Stacked or rigged decks: A stacked deck would consist of many paired cards, allowing the dealer to claim half of the bets on that card, as per the rules. A rigged deck would contain textured cards that allowed dealers to create paired cards in the deck while giving the illusion of thorough shuffling.[2]
- Rigged dealing boxes: Rigged, or 'gaffed', dealing boxes came in several variants. Typically, they allowed the dealer to see the next card prior to the deal, by use of a small mirror or prism visible only to the dealer. If the next card was heavily bet, the box could also allow the dealer to draw two cards in one draw, thus hiding the card that would have paid.[2] This would result in the casekeep not accounting for the hidden card, however. If the casekeeper were employed by the house, though, he could take the blame for 'accidentally' not logging that card when it was drawn.
- Sleight of hand: In concert with the rigged dealing box, the dealer could, when he knew the next card to win, surreptitiously slide a player's bet off of the winning card if it was on the dealer's side of the layout. At a hectic faro table he could often get away with this, though it was obviously a risky move.
By players[edit]
Players would routinely cheat as well. Their techniques employed distraction and sleight-of-hand, and usually involved moving their stake to a winning card, or at the very least off the losing card, without being detected.[2] Their methods ranged from crude to creative, and worked best at a busy, fast-paced table:
- Simple move of their bet: The most basic cheat was simply to move one's bet to the adjacent card on the layout while avoiding the banker noticing. While the simplest, it also carried the greatest risk of detection.
- Moving with a thread: A silk thread or single horse hair would be affixed to the bottom check in the bet, and allowed the stack to be pulled across the table to another card on the layout. This was less risky, as the cheating player would not have to make an overt action.
- Removing the copper: A variant on the use of the thread was to affix it to the copper token used to reverse the bet. If the losing card matched the player's bet, the copper made it a winning bet and no cheat was needed. If, however, the winning card, dealt second, were to match the player's bet the copper would ordinarily make it a loser, but quickly snatching the copper from the stack with the invisible thread turned it into a winner. This held the least risk, as once the copper was yanked from the stack, there was no thread left attached to the bet.
Being caught cheating often resulted in a fight, or even gunfire.[2]
In culture[edit]
Etymology[edit]
- The old phrase 'from soda to hock', meaning 'from beginning to end' derives from the first and last cards dealt in a round of faro.[12] The phrase evolved from the better known 'from soup to nuts'. In turn, 'soda' and 'hock' are probably themselves derived from 'hock and soda', a popular nineteenth-century drink consisting of hock (a sweet German wine) combined with soda water.
Geography[edit]
- The town of Faro, Yukon was named after the game.[citation needed]
History[edit]
The well-known author of Regency romances, Georgette Heyer, wrote a novel titled 'Faro's Daughter'; it tells of a young lady forced to deal faro to support her family and her ensuing romance with one of the gaming hall patrons (written 1941).
- The 18th-century adventurer and author Casanova was known to be a great player of faro. He mentions the game frequently in his autobiography.
- The 18th-century Prussian officer, adventurer, and author Friedrich Freiherr von der Trenck makes mention of playing faro in his memoirs (February 1726 – 25 July 1794).
- The 18th-century Dutch cavalry commander Casimir Abraham von Schlippenbach (1682–1755) also mentions the game (as Pharaon) in his memoirs. Apparently, he was able to win considerable sums of money with the game.
- The 18th century Whig radical Charles James Fox preferred faro to any other game.
- The 19th-century American con man Soapy Smith was a faro dealer. It was said that every faro table in Soapy's Tivoli Club in Denver, Colorado, in 1889 was gaffed (made to cheat).
- The 19th-century scam artist Canada Bill Jones loved the game so much that, when he was asked why he played at one game that was known to be rigged, he replied, 'It's the only game in town.'
- The 19th-century lawman Wyatt Earp dealt faro for a short time after arriving in Tombstone, Arizona having acquired controlling interest in a game out of the Oriental Saloon.[13]
- The 19th-century dentist and gambler John 'Doc' Holliday dealt faro in the Bird Cage Theater as an additional source of income while living in Tombstone, Arizona.[14]
In popular culture[edit]
Wyatt Earp Photos
The film Bucking the Tiger (1921) took its name from an alternate name for Faro
- Literature and its adaptations
- In Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat, the gambler Gaylord Ravenal specializes in the game of Faro.
- Faro is mentioned extensively in John D. Fitzgerald's semi-autobiographical Silverlode/Adenville trilogy, which consists of the books Papa Married a Mormon, Mama's Boarding House, and Uncle Will and the Fitzgerald Curse. It is one of the primary games played at the Whitehorse Saloon, owned by the character Uncle Will. In Mama's Boarding House the character Floyd Thompson, one of the tenants in the boarding house, is a Faro dealer.
- Faro is also occasionally mentioned in Fitzgerald's corresponding Great Brain series, which focuses on the children of Adenville.
- In Oliver La Farge's story 'Spud and Cochise' (1935), the cowboy Spud plays Faro when he is in a very good mood. Aware of the widespread dishonesty of American Faro dealers in his time, he nevertheless bets heavily, viewing his gambling losses as a form of charity.
- In Jack London's novel White Fang, the owner of the bulldog, Tim Keenan, is a faro dealer.
- In the second act of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann (based on three short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann), Giulietta invites Schlemil to take his place at the table of Pharaoh.
- Lord Ruthven in John William Polidori's 'The Vampyre' plays Faro in Brussels.
- The miners in Puccini's opera La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), based on David Belasco's play The Girl of the Golden West, play a contentious game of Faro in Act One.
- Faro is central to the plot of Alexander Pushkin's story 'The Queen of Spades' and Tchaikovsky's opera adaptation, The Queen of Spades.
- In Wesley Stace's Misfortune, the character 'Pharaoh' is named after his father's profession, a Faro dealer.
- In Thackeray's novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, the main character runs a crooked faro bank, alternatively to his great fortune or ruin.
- In its film adaptation, Barry Lyndon, one of the famous candlelit scenes shows Barry and his employer cheating at Faro. In the background a Moorish servant holds a casekeep showing which cards have been played.
- In a famous scene from Leo Tolstoy's book War and Peace, Nicholas Rostov loses 43,000 rubles to Dolokhov playing Faro.
- Games
- In the video game Assassin's Creed Unity (2014), the main character Arno Dorian, in the early stages of the game, plays a game of Faro with a blacksmith but loses after the blacksmith cheats. Arno loses his deceased father's pocket watch and breaks into the blacksmith's house to steal it back.
- Radio and motion pictures
- In the HBO TV series Deadwood, Al Swearengen mentions Faro, rather than poker, is played in his Gem Saloon, and Faro The game is referred to frequently throughout the series.
- Numerous references to Faro are made in both the Westernradio drama Gunsmoke, starring William Conrad, and the television drama Gunsmoke starring James Arness.
- The Murdoch Mysteries episode 'Staircase to Heaven' involves a murder during a game of Faro.
- In the American western The Shootist (1976), Jack Pulford (Hugh O'Brian) is a professional gambler and a Faro dealer at the Metropole Saloon.
- When planning The Sting on New York gangster Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw), one of the conmen researching their mark mentions that he 'only goes out to play Faro', making him a hard target for the big con.
- In the film Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, played by Kurt Russell, becomes a Faro dealer after arriving in Tombstone.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^Johnson, Karl (2005). The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist (Adapted ed.). New York: Henry Holt and Co. ISBN978-0-8050-7406-2.
- ^ abcdefgh'Faro card game - Cheating at faro'.
- ^ abScarne, John Scarne on Card Games: How to Play and Win at Poker, Pinochle, Blackjack, Gin and Other Popular Card Games pg. 163 Dover Publications (2004) ISBN0-486-43603-9
- ^Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine vol. 15 pg. 176 London 1844
Our life here would not displease you, for we eat and drink well,
and the Earl of Coventry holds a Pharaoh-bank every night to us,
which we have plundered considerably. - ^Oxford Dictionary of Card Games, p. 16, David Parlett – Oxford University Press 1996 ISBN0-19-869173-4
- ^ abc'How to play faro'. Bicycle Playing Cards. Archived from the original on 2013-12-14.
- ^ ab'Faro, or Bucking the Tiger'. Legends of America.
- ^'United States v. Simms 5 U.S. 252 (1803)'. Justia. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
- ^Murphy, Jim. 'Faro Card Game'. RealMoneyAction.com. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
- ^The hand-book of games, p. 336, H.G. Bohn – Bell & Daldy, London 1867
- ^The book of card games, p. 121, Peter Arnold – Barnes & Noble 1995 ISBN1-56619-950-6
- ^Soda to hock: The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Oxford Reference. 2005. doi:10.1093/acref/9780198609810.001.0001. ISBN9780198609810.
- ^William M. Breakenridge, Richard Maxwell Brown Helldorado: bringing the law to the mesquite Pg. 171 University of Nebraska Press (1992) ISBN0-8032-6100-4
- ^Wesley Treat, Mark Moran, Mark Sceurman Weird Arizona: Your Travel Guide to Arizona's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets Pg. 190 Sterling (2007) ISBN1-4027-3938-9
Further reading[edit]
- Boussac, Jean. The Faro: Gameplay and Rules. (1896) Transl. from French, 2017.
- Dawson, Tom and Dawson, Judy. The Hochman Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards, Stamford, Connecticut: US Games Systems Inc., 2000. ISBN1-57281-297-4 (Gives historical account of Faro cards in the US, extensively illustrated.)
- Maskelyne, John Nevil. Sharps and Flats, (London: 1894; reprint, Las Vegas: GBC). ISBN978-0-89650-912-2
- Russell, Gillian. 'Faro's Daughters': Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain.' Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.4 (2000): 481-504. Online
- Sanders, J. R. Faro: Favorite Gambling Game of the Frontier, Wild West Magazine, October 1996.
External links[edit]
- How to Play Faro on YouTube - Demonstration of how the game is played.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Faro (card game). |
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Faro_(card_game)&oldid=924069770'
Gambler. Saloon-keeper. Faro banker. Boxing referee. Policeman. Pimp. Sheriff.
The man-legend Hollywood crafted in reams of movies and TV shows reinvented himself over and over as he moved from one dusty boomtown to the next. Aspen. Bodie. Denver. Dodge City. Goldfield. Gunnison. Prescott. San Francisco. Tombstone.
As these cities grew, so did the number of gambling saloon operators looking to relieve fistfuls of dollars from a population of men rotating in and out of the backwoods, mineshafts, and cattle trails.
In all these cities, Wyatt Earp was there, hustling as a faro table banker, providing muscle for bordellos and shooting dead cowboys who crossed him. Wherever Earp traveled, vice and violence followed him, defined him, and infested him until his last years, years spent as an unpaid film consultant trying to convince Hollywood biographers and
directors to tell favorable tales about his unfavorable life.
directors to tell favorable tales about his unfavorable life.
Range Life
Born in Monmouth, Illinois in 1848, Earp’s life began unsettled and remained so for his eighty years on earth. When he was sixteen, his family joined the half a million Americans that moved west during the Gold Rush years. Earp’s parents and three brothers (Virgil, James, and Newton) followed the wagon wheel ruts to San Bernadino, California where they rented a 60-acre farm, staying for only four years.
Here, Earp transported cargo from California into the Great Basin for a stagecoach line Virgil drove for. These four years exposed him to gambling saloons and molded Wyatt into a skillful boxer, champion target shooter, and heavyweight drinker.
Wyatt stood out from the pack of ordinary dirt farmers that landed in the new west. From Andrew Isenberg’s Wyatt Earp, A Vigilante Life: “As he approached adulthood, he grew to an imposing size… weighing in the neighborhood of one hundred and sixty pounds, all of it muscle.
He stood six feet in height. The Earps towered over most other men in the mid- 19th-century America, where the average man was five feet eight inches tall. Tall and muscular, the Earp brothers were not only physically imposing but…handsome: dark blond with high foreheads and deepset blue eyes.”
The family next moved to Lamar, Missouri. Here, Wyatt would marry, lose his wife to typhoid fever, become a town constable, be accused of stealing $200 in taxes, and then flee the charges and head into the Cherokee Nation, now Oklahoma, where a combustible mix of outlaws, Indians, and government scouts lived amid constant chaos. Wyatt was accused of stealing horses, apprehended, and sentenced to prison. During a daylight escape with six prisoners, he broke free and bolted to Peoria, Illinois to join Virgil in the city’s impressive bordello trade. Peoria’s red light district, Bunker Hill, was said to have 400 brothels and 7,000 prostitutes.
Wyatt settled in with Jane Haspel — a well known Peoria madam — in a house where police later arrested him for consorting with prostitutes, resulting in a $20 fine.
In 1875, Wyatt headed to Wichita, Kansas. The terminus for Texas cattle hands bored and flush with cash after three months of pushing cattle packs to the city’s railroad is where Earp first banked faro.
This gambling trade would, off and on, sustain him for the rest of life.
Faro “just as legitimate a business enterprise as the savings bank down the street,” according to Earp biographer Stuart Lake, was the action game that kept the west’s saloons humming in 19thcentury.
Last Photo Of Wyatt Earp
The game used a 52-card deck, bets were placed on a green cloth playing surface called a layout (with images of the 13 cards in a suit), the dealer drew two cards with the first “banker” card being a losing card that would see the dealer collect all bets on that number, and the second “winning card” paying even money for bets on that number. If both cards had the same value (called a split) the dealer collected half of players’ bets on that card.
The simple luck game also offered other bets (coppered, whipsaw, high cards, squares) so the layout, similar to a modern roulette table, was a mess of wager towers and usually required a dealer assistant and a casekeeper who kept a scorecard, usually on an abacus, of the numbers drawn.
The only reason faro flourished in the Gold Rush boom years (the house edge in a straight game of Faro is only 0.23 percent on a straight winning/losing card bet) was due to the rigging of the dealer box, which ensured profits for operators like Earp.
Earp was deputized Wichita’s city marshal after helping arrest a band of wagon thieves. Two years later, he was run out of town. Earp beat a mayoral candidate, Bill Smith, senseless during a heated election.
From Wyatt Earp, A Vigilante Life: “Wyatt, Smith implied, was nothing more than a jumped-up pimp. Smith knew both that his words would be relayed to Earp, and that such a provocation could only be met with violence.” Wyatt did indeed seek out Smith, intending, according to Wichita’s Beacon, to “mutilate and disable” him, which brought an arrest, a $30 fine, and dismissal from the police force.
When the railroad hit Dodge City, Kansas it was no longer just a destination for buffalo-bone traders, but it was also the end of the line for the Great Western Cattle Trail and the next big come-up town with money to burn. Earp jumped there next, acting as assistant marshal, dealing faro, and taking gambling road trips to Texas, where he met lifelong friend Doc Holliday.
In Dodge City, Earp killed his first man, a drunk cowboy who lit up a dance hall in the middle of the night with gunfire. Earp chased the fleeing horsemen across the Arkansas River and shot him dead.
Tombstone, Arizona
Again and again, Wyatt and Virgil Earp wore badges in frontier towns. In 1880, Wyatt joined Virgil, then acting as Tombstone city marshal, as deputy sheriff of Pima County.
But Tombstone was the most wideopen hardscrabble they had yet to pull into. Its population doubled every few months as more than $80 million in silver was pulled from the ground. One hundred and ten saloons. Gambling halls everywhere. Fertile ground for Wyatt’s faro expertise.
From Wyatt Earp, A Vigilante Life: “The centrality of faro to Wyatt’s life in Tombstone became clear on June 22, 1881 when a fire that ultimately destroyed four city blocks broke out in the city. When the alarm was raised, Wyatt was dealing faro in the back of a saloon. ‘Seemingly instantaneously with the explosion and the busting of the flames,’ the Epitaph reported, ‘the alarm spread and people rushed to the scene.’ Wyatt, however, was not among those. With thousands of dollars spread before him on the faro layout, Wyatt risked his life not to fight the fire but to rescue his money.”
But faro soon took a back seat to surviving. The conflagration that came to define Wyatt Earp’s legacy and life — the gunfight at the O.K. Corral — took place after Virgil Earp confronted a group of five cowboys that had threatened to kill the brothers for trying to arrest a gang of back-country stagecoach robbers.
The night before Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Billy Clanton would die in the dusty lot adjacent to the O.K. Corral, another cowboy, Ike Clanton, left an all-night poker game belligerent and drunk. He parked his buzzed frame on a Tombstone street corner, slurring to every passer-by of his intention to kill the Earps and Holliday. He was disarmed, pistol whipped by Virgil, and arrested.
When released next morning, Wyatt confronted Ike: “You dirty cow thief, you have been threatening our lives. If you are anxious to make a fight I will go anywhere to make a fight with you, even over to San Simon, among your people.” Ike rearmed and joined the other cowboys who had fortified themselves between two buildings and the corral. Virgil took Wyatt, Morgan Earp and Holliday with him to settle the feud.
The Earps would look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
Months later, Virgil Earp was hit with a shotgun blast in his left shoulder and arm. Morgan Earp was killed while playing pool. The gunman hidden outside an open window just missed Wyatt Earp with the shot.
Wyatt sought revenge, and he and a posse killed three or four other cowboys before fleeing the state, blood on their hands, as wanted men.
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Rounder
After this killing season, Earp holed up in Gunnison, Colorado. Despite being “professional gamblers and bad men,” according to a Gunnison cop, the town sheriff offered a year’s residence in town while the heat subsided. Earp ran a faro bank. Always the hustler, he tried to sell a fake gold brick to a German named Ritchie for $2,000.
From Wyatt Earp, A Vigilante Life: “Wyatt’s reputation … was suspect because from the time he left Tombstone in 1882, he slid back into the louche world of gamblers. He became what 19th-century Americans called a rounder: a man who made the rounds of saloons, brothels and gambling halls.”
Over next eight years, Earp rambled from town to town. He returned to Dodge City to settle a violent dispute between two faro operators, opened the White Elephant saloon in Eagle City, Idaho, gambled on mining claims, opened the Fashion saloon in Aspen, Colorado, and heavily speculated on real estate in San Diego (which would eventually break him), where he also started hustling on the horse-racing circuit. In between, he was accused of fixing a horse race ten miles east of Tijuana, and promoted bareknuckle fights.
He moved to San Franciso in 1891, claiming he “owned only the clothes on his back.” Here, he got mixed up in the most dubious scam of his life.
The Fix Is In
On December 2, 1896, Earp was a lastminute referee stand-in for a heavyweight boxing match between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey.
Earp was clearly out of his league. The old gunslinger entered the ring with a Colt .45 tucked into his waistband, and had to sheepishly be disarmed in front of the entire gate.
Wyatt Earp's Funeral
It was the most anticipated fight of the year, a fight Wyatt Earp helped fix, creating the largest sports-rigging scandal America had ever seen, only eclipsed, 25 years later, by the World Series Black Sox scandal.
Fitzsimmons was a 3-to-1 favorite. When word got out that Earp was the eleventh-hour referee choice, the odds dropped in half.
Fitzsimmons dominated the fight in front of the 15,000 fans that packed Mechanics’ Pavilion. Sharkey hit the canvas in the first and fifth rounds. In the eighth round, it appeared to be all over.
Sharkey took a solid jab, body shot, and crushing shot to the jaw that collapsed him to the mat. But Earp ruled that the body shot was a foul, that it hit Sharkey below the belt. That Fitzsimmons, who had owned his opponent, was disqualified.
It’s rumored that Earp pocketed $2,500, enough to clear his debts, for orchestrating the bogus disqualification.
Last Headlines
Wyatt Earp Bio
In his later years, Wyatt chased gold claims in the last boomtowns — managing saloons in Nome, Alaska and Tonapah, Nevada.
Still a tough son-of-a bitch in his old age, in 1910, the 62-year-old was hired as muscle to protect American Trona’s Death Valley borax claims from a rival. Earp shot at the feet of a man and was arrested by U.S. marshals for trespassing.
In 1911, he was arrested one last time, in Los Angeles, for running a crooked faro game. This police blotter, referencing the Fitzsimmons scandal, made the old cowboy a national headline.
The first line of Wytt Earp’s biography, a biography written after he hired and fired multiple writers as he muscled for editorial control to vindicate his legend, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal read “Wyatt Earp was a man of action.”
Earp died January 13, 1929. ♠