Such, however, proved not to be the case, and he was arrested by Deputy Marshall Wyatt Earp. Holliday was picked up and placed in a chair, it being generally thought, from his bloody appearance, that he was severely, if not fatally, hurt. Officer Bennett appeared upon the scene and separated the combatants, taking Joyce out of the saloon. Closing with Holliday, he struck him on the head with his six-shooter and finally threw him on the floor. Joyce kept advancing all the time, and it is said, fired one shot. The first shot struck Joyce in the pistol hand, disabling it, the second missed him and passing through the bar, struck Parker on the foot. Holliday, shortly afterward, returned, and as Joyce was coming out from behind the bar, opened fire on him with a self cocker, firing two shots in quick succession. Holliday demurred, and Joyce and he got into an altercation, during which Joyce put Holliday out of the saloon. Tyler complied and Joyce then made the same request to Holliday. Joyce went to Tyler and told him to leave the saloon, as he didn’t want trouble. Shortly, before the shooting referred to occurred, Holliday and Joyce came into the Oriental. The particulars, as we gather them from an eye-witness, are about as follows: During the early evening Holliday had an altercation with Johnny Tyler which boded a shooting scrape. Parker, received a stray bullet in the big toe. Joyce, one of the proprietors, and a man, named Doc Holliday, during the course of which Joyce was shot in the right hand and his partner, Mr. “About 12:30 on Sunday night last a shooting affray took place at the Oriental Saloon, corner First (Fifth) and Alien, between M.E. On October 12, 1880, a strange article appeared in two of the local papers.

However, Doc made a very bitter enemy, as he would find out a few years later. Tyler was literally laughed out of Tombstone. Finally, he turned and ran through the front doors.ĭoc smiled and remarked “Still running.” From that time on, every time Johnny Tyler appeared anywhere in town, someone would call out, “Still running, Johnny?” And everyone present would burst out laughing. It was obvious to everyone present that Tyler was deathly afraid of Doc. Doc pushed right up to his face and challenged him to fight where they stood. Livid with anger at how he had been publicly humiliated, he barged right into the saloon and invited Doc out into the street. Tyler went down the street, found himself a pistol and came back to the Oriental. While Wyatt was busily occupied with this chore, Doc Holliday stood quietly, hand on his pistol, smiling at Tyler’s friends, who were most anxious to help him, but not anxious enough to go against Holliday.

Wyatt’s first act was to throw Tyler bodily out of the Oriental. In order to get rid of Tyler and his ruffians, Rickabaugh sold Wyatt Earp an interest in the Oriental gambling concession (not in the saloon itself).

Even though Tyler and his friends were quite successful in creating chaos and driving good customers away, Lou, the major owner in the gambling concession, refused to do business with Tyler, although it appeared that if he didn’t take some sort of action, he might lose everything. The least that could happen with such a program was that the gambling customers would go elsewhere: back to their old haunts (or so Tyler thought). Tyler reasoned that if he and his rowdy friends kept the Oriental in such a tumultuous state all the time that the owners were continually dealing with these problems, they would soon give in and perhaps, offer him a percentage of their gambling layout. Several of them led by a would-be thug and a gunman named Johnny Tyler, began to cause trouble in the Oriental every night. Other local gamblers took notice of this decline in their business. Between the lavish surroundings (built by Joyce) and the attractive gambling layout, provided by the trio (Rickabaugh - dark - Harris) much of the gambling business in Tombstone was diverted to the Oriental. His two partners were Bill Harris, who had held interests in the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City and Lou Rickabaugh, another gambler who was well-known all through the West. By the time that Milt Joyce had his Oriental Saloon ready to open in July, 1880, dark and his two partners had already made an arrangement to lease the gambling rooms in the saloon.#M(READMORE)# Dick dark, who was a high roller in the gambling circuit all over the West, heard the call of the new boomtown with the strange name, “Tombstone.” Little did he know that he would spend the rest of his life there, dark arrived early in the year 1880.

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