Melbourne: Was Wild West Wyatt one of the Melbourne Earps

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It is exactly 125 years since Wyatt Earp and his brothers faced the Clantons and McLaurys at the OK Corral. Maxwell Craven investigates whether there is any truth in the long-held belief that the Wild West hero was related to the Earps of Melbourne, Derbyshire.

ONE hundred and twenty five years ago, 30 seconds of bloodletting in a small settlement in Wyoming led to the inexplicable – to me – creation of a legend.

The event was the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which was essentially the culmination of long-term rivalry between two families, the Earps and the Clantons. Both were represented by three brothers, with the two McLaury brothers also turning out to support the Clantons.

The essential difference between the two is that the Earps were on the side of law (and, occasionally, order), while the other two were what my 10-year-old daughter calls “baddies”. Virgil Earp was marshal of Tombstone and his brothers, Wyatt and Morgan, were at the time sworn in as his deputies.

On October 25, 1881, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury rode into town in classic style, threw their weight about in the Alhambra saloon and got into a row with tubercular gambler and gunslinger John H “Doc” Holliday, whose soubriquet was earned pulling teeth.

The next day, Virgil Earp arrested Ike and Tom for carrying firearms and confiscated their hardware before releasing them, a humane gesture that was, with the benefit of hindsight, ill advised, for they were joined by Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury at the OK Corral, leaving the marshal and his deputies faced with the difficult and dangerous task of disarming the new arrivals.

Consequently, the three Earps, along with Doc Holliday, advanced to the Corral in order to urge them to disarm in the name of the law.

Unfortunately, having been asked by Virgil – probably not particularly politely – Billy Clanton loosed off a shot at him, which began a 30-second exchange of fire in which everyone but Wyatt Earp was wounded.

Tom and Frank McLaury, along with Billy Clanton, were killed and Ike Clanton escaped. Wyatt and Doc Holliday were the real artists with a revolver and the event projected them into Western legend.

Indeed, Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp subsequently made a successful career as a U.S. marshal, mining prospector and saloon owner before retiring to Los Angeles, after marrying three wives. He died in his bed, aged almost 81.

Now, anyone with local knowledge of surnames will tell you that Earp is a relatively rare surname.

Meaning “swarthy”, it has been concentrated around Melbourne and district for nearly three centuries.

Prior to that, there were two families of Earp in Appleby Parva (then in Derbyshire) at the time of the 1662 hearth tax – the only ones in the county. Historian Dr David Hey attributes the Earps to South Staffordshire and Yoxall, albeit in a later era.

Either way, it should make ol’ Wyatt a Derbyshire man, especially as his Christian name is an equally rare surname, from the adjoining part of Staffordshire. The more credulous might think the juxtaposition would virtually confirm it.

In reality, Wyatt’s father, in Monmouth, Illinois, was the fifth generation of the family in the U.S. and a recent researcher has apparently established that the family actually migrated there from Scotland – a long way from Melbourne or Appleby!

Of Wyatt’s four brothers and one half-brother, four bore surnames as Christian names and, indeed, Wyatt’s own middle names also look like surnames.

The practice of the time, here as in the US, was to bestow such names when inherited through marriage alliances. Hence, one might expect, along with Wyatt, various Morgans, Warrens and Newtons among the brothers’ ancestry.

So many inherited names also suggest that Wyatt’s parents had a sound knowledge of their ancestry, despite living for more than a century in the New World.

My own research into the Derby Earps, who were stock and share brokers in the Victorian era, takes their ancestry back to a Samuel Earp, who lived in Melbourne in 1746.

A William Earp was a contemporary there and, in the next generation, there was a Samuel and a Thomas. Samuel lived as a tenant of the Earl of Rawdon at Beaulieu Hall, an ancient house, long gone, near Melbourne Church.

His son, John, married his cousin, Mary, in 1803, whose mother was also an Earp.

This marriage produced three sons. The two youngest, Edmund and Thomas, went to live in Derby. Thomas became a stockbroker and Edmund, originally a wool stapler, re-invented himself as a lace manufacturer.

His son, Edward, a master chandler, emigrated to Australia in 1884 where he left an extensive family.

Thomas worked with his son, Frank, the latter establishing himself as an estate agent and auctioneer at 5 London Road. Presumably his business was successful, as he was able to send son Russell to Repton in 1859.

I hope some researcher will complete the investigation into Wyatt’s ancestry. If, in the end, it does not go back to South Derbyshire or South Staffordshire, I shall be astonished.

After all, we have had a former Mayor of Derby related by marriage to the Sundance Kid, so I would like to think that the Wild West hero had his roots in middle England.

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This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.