WILD BUFFALO WYATT HICKERODY

( dedicated to and authored by the late Glenn G. Boyer, author of many biographies of the Earp Brothers of Tombstone)

The gosh true ballad of Wild Buffalo Wyatt Hickerody
who was near as pizzen as the bad man from Bodie.

His job was on a bar stool down in sunny Arizoney,
fillin' them funny tourists full of historical baloney.

He rid the pine forest with Custer when his grand dad was a boy,
and camping with the James Boys was his other standard ploy.

He fit Injuns with a Bowie knife, he erred and he bowed,
and you should have seen them pizzened broncs that he hickerode.

Injuns are his specialty, why podner, he knows the oldest one alive.
For sure, he looks, 70, without the balooney, he's only 65!!
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Wyatt Earp in Everyday Life

I was washing dishes yesterday my wife is sick, and thinking about hum-drum things as I often do, this is what LIFE as I know it is really like. 
    Having written and published scores of pieces about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral, it occurred to me his life was punctuated by a dozen dramatic events lasting just minutes but in reality he drifted languorously through 89 years or so of monotonous periods of average time. Just like me.
  Everybody knows he refereed the Sharkey Fitzsimmons fight in San Francisco for a long count. The public raised cain about it. He was carring one of his old .45 single six pistols that night. The police
   He washed dishes, shooed his horses, ironed clothes, bought groceries, entertained the neighborhoods kids, had a drink (never two) at the local bistro, a night out with the Mrs, in short - lived a life. At one point, late  in life, he and Sadie lived in San Francisco around 1906 during the San Francisco earthquake. Records indicate he used to sit in the square in front of that famous hotel and entertain the children that played in the park, Union Square. Wyatt would hand out little Chicklet boxes you remember the ones with two chicklets in each box. He carried handfulls of them every day. The kids called him the " Chicklet Man" and when he was out, he would settle down to read his paper each morning.  
    I thought to share some inside information I knew thanks to my knowledge and friendship with Glenn G Boyer, Colonel, United States Air Force, and inside historian on the " Earp Boys of Tombstone."
   Wyatt was the ringleader, although not the oldest. He ws the roughest, toughest of the bunch. He married or lived with some tough women, one was a call girl. He was, as my grandfather used to phrase - not well liked - by the female side of the family. Once in Tombstone someone came to his home shouting and screaming for him, and he hid behind the kitchen door for 45 minutes while another Earp wife argued with the caller knowing Wyatt was sweating his ears off behind the door. The intruder left, Wyatt collapsed into a chair and the family laughed at the joke.
     Wyatt and Ike Clanton chatted it up in the garden behind the Golden Nugget Saloon one afternoon right before the stage hold-up. Witnesses thought it was collusion, later proved innocent. Wyatt arrested Ike to prove a point.
     Only two people ever frightened Earp: his first wife drunk with a pistol, and the second was one gunman back in Dodge, who, when he walked into the saloon, Wyatt sat with his back against the wall with his Colt cradled on his lap.
    No matter what you hear or see, Wyatt Earp always carried Colts. Winchesters had to be broken apart on the top to re-load. When he cracked guys on the head, that had a tendency to weaken the toggle that snapped the parts of the pistol and eventually, it would break. The Colt single action is one piece - a solid piece of steel.
    Since he was known for cracking guys on the head more than shooting them, that's why he preferred Colt pistols. The longer the barrel, the better. His favorite was " My Little Betsy."
    He married a Jewish dance hall girl who he chased all over the west and caught up with in Denver. She was beautiful. Josephine Sarah Marcus daughter of a wealthy San Francisco Mercantile merchant. Earp was broke. Later, he gained some funds racing horses, buying an dwelling real estate, and various other ventures. He lusted after Gold Mining and came back to western Arizona for a while. Sadie followed him everywhere.
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Wyatt Earp's Guns -- I know where they are......

Glenn G. Boyer told me many years ago, cloistered in the book-filled basement of this then residence in southern Arizona near Tombstone. My friend Glenn and I had become very close in those years, he tutored me in writing skills, and I spent many weekend overnights in his basement spare room, reading volumes of his collected works, doodling on his computers and venturing out over Wyatt Earp Country.
     He passed away just about a year and a half ago, so revealing his secret about Wyatt Earp Guns, kinda, doesn't seem altogether unfaithful on my part. I know where they are.
     Glenn told me that over the years, many, many attempts were made by charletons to " disclose" there whereabouts or discovery by false claims, all of which were false. One such, he said, was a man from Australia who called and made a bid on a "Wyatt Gun" (emphasis mine) which he never even saw, of over $5 grand, site unseen.
     He always had to prove  to me, how close he was to the Earp family.
     As a bomber pilot in World War II, he and his crew flew in the Pacific on some hairy missions. When he got back his passion had been to track down and write about the " Earp Boys from Tombstone." That's a big club he joined, me, too.
     After the war, Boyer bought a giant reel-to-reel tape recorder and searched out all the Earp descendants he could find and spent his Air Force retirement hot roding around the country interviewing them about the Earp family, and the boys from Tombstone. The results were a ton of his books in that basement I was sleeping in during the weekends. And I wasn't the only one, Glenn was generous with his time and talent with a lot of younger writers.  
     On day, to prove a point, or maybe out of frustration, or maybe one of his books weren't selling well, I'm not sure - he just popped. We were down in his cellar/den he picked up the tape recorder and played one of phone recent phone calls he made to a relative of Josephine Marcus Earp's. Remember, Josie was Wyatt's wife, Jewish, and a member of a very rich clothier family from San Francisco.
     The phone call was with a woman, " Oh, hi Glenn, the woman said. " Very familiar with Glenn, the call went on for 30 minutes about family matters, then Glenn broaches Wyatt Earp, " did you see this recent nonsense about Wyatt's guns in the national press?"
     " Oh yes, " she says, " why do they do that. We know that's a lie, Wyatt's guns are up here in the......" and Glenn cuts off the tape so I don't hear the exact location in San Francisco.
     I KNOW where they are, Glenn intones in that deep vibrato of his. And he never told me where. I can guess, I can make an approximation but when it comes down to it.
     I don't know. Glenn died about two years ago and all his " stuff " s now scattered to the winds. All the history is gone. What a sad tale.
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The O.K.Corral in Tombstone

I am shocked! I just reviewed their web site and I am horrified. First let me say that I speak from the position of not just a lover of history, west devotee of southwestern history and all things wrapped around the Earp Family and the OK Corral - BUT, I was in the one hundredth anniversary GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL in the OK Corral on October 26, 1981, dressed as one of the cow boys.
     I am a published author and have written and published extensively about that period of time, and about that gunfighter family, and that gunfight. I speak with some experience.
     I personally knew and befriended Earp Historian Glenn G Boyer who was not only an author and historian on the subject, but personally knew the family. He knew where Wyatt's guns are. He passed away last year.
     I digress. I haven't looked at Tombstone in over three years, and after reviewing the web site today, am shocked.
     The OK Corral looks nothing like the original OK Corral. It looks like the OK Garage. Millionaires with no particular mission in life, retired with nothing to do except screw up sacred historical relics.
     The web site? Turn your kid lose with a 35 mm SLR auto lens and he's bound to get about the same product, minus any sense of depth, composition or feeling of what the hell he's shooting. For Tombstone, the town to dumb to die, the kid who shot these pictures trying to depict the toughest gunfight of good over evil forever depicted in a huge grocery cart full of movies, books, paintings and such, he might as well been photographing fruit.
    Oh, and he mis-spelled Coral. Oh Well. so much for the old worst.
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