Small Wonders--Virgil Earp of Pella (ii)

Virgil Earp and daughter, Nellie Jane

Even though Virge and Allie, his wife, never had any of their own, Virge had a thing about children, his sister-in-law says. He loved kids and dogs. "This sounds like some kind of testimonial," Josephine Earp wrote in her memoir of life with Wyatt, "but it's not."

Even though Virge was an Earp, and did more than his share of shooting, he was capable of a mission of mercy now and then, like the time he hauled a drunk out of a saloon when he saw the guy's fist full of bills, then locked him up and, in the morning, gave back every last dollar--a thousand of 'em, Josephine says.

There were these "cowboys" at the OK Corral, tough hombres local ranchers hated to love, bullies who rustled cattle out of Mexico and sold them to locals dirt cheap. On Wednesday, October 26, 1881, one of those rustlers named Ike Clanton was strutting around, looking to kill Virge and Wyatt, the law, he said. Instead, Virge clocked him cold with his six gun, arrested him, then set a $25 fine Ike paid. 

Later that afternoon, Ike came back with buddies, so Virge deputized two of his brothers, Wyatt and Morgan, and Doc Halliday. "Boys, throw up your hands," Virge told the cowboys when they met on the street. Ike and his boys didn't and thus began the legendary shootout at OK Corral. Three cowboys were dead when the smoke cleared. Virge and Morgan both took a bullet, and the streets were a mess.

That didn't end hostilities. On December 28, Virge got hit again, left arm, when someone hidden away on Allen Street used a shotgun on him. Pretty much lost that arm, but he told his wife not to worry. "I still got one arm left to hug you with," he said.

Bad wing and all, Virgil Earp never stopped chasing dreams. If you'd stick something in a map at every boom town where the Earps left a mark, the wild west would look like a pin cushion. 

Oregon's not one of those, but get this--Virgil Earp is buried in Portland, a place he visited only once. It's a story that begs to be told. 

A woman contacted him to let him know that she was his daughter, the daughter of that Dutch girl from Pella he probably shouldn't have married, the one who thought him dead in the war, the Civil War. That daughter sent them a note to say who she was. Just like that, Virge and Allie lit out for Portland.

"It was a meeting of great feelings," Allie remembers, "and after these had been dispensed with, they went to her home." Then this: "All these years and me and Virge never had a baby, and here was Virge finding out for the first time in his life he had a grown-up young lady daughter, Jane."

She was the daughter of the Pella girl, the Iowan with wooden shoes. 

Then Virge and Allie went back to Esmeralda County, Nevada, where, when he was a one-armed sheriff. He was 62 years when he smoked his last cigar and breathed his last.

Virgil Earp lived all over the west, from the end of the Civil War until the day he died. Only once had he been in Portland, Oregon, and that was to meet a daughter he'd never known. But Oregon was where he wanted to be laid to rest, he told Allie, so he could be near that daughter of his when one day her turn came. 

There's not much of Siouxland in Virgil's story, not a bit. Maybe now and then he and the brothers passed through.

But something in that miracle circle Virge made makes me want to think his life has an Iowa feel. Maybe it's just me, but I really do.