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In looking at the evidence, one one has to ask the question: Why didn't Miguel Otero mention the Earp incident in the letter he wrote on August 17, 1940, four months earlier?
And perhaps even more perplexing: How could Miguel Otero, Jr., could
have written a 288-page autobiography (My Life on the Frontier) covering
just the first third of his life, through age 23, and yet fail to mention the
Earp incident.
Is there a good way to account for this? There seem to be three basic
explanations:
(1)
He didn't think it was important.
While perhaps not a defining moment in his life, it's hard to believe that
providing a safe haven for Wyatt Earp and his men wasn't important enough for
Otero to include in his memoir, especially considering some of the rather
mundane moments that Otero filled his pages with.
Consider, for instance, the entries for April 13, 1882, "We had a heavy snow
storm, the snow falling in Las Vegas to the depth of several inches," and for
April 14, 1882, "Mrs. A. G. Hood gave a very interesting concert at her
residence" (p. 241). These took place just before the Earp party arrived in
Albuquerque.
(2)
He was somehow embarrassed about the incident.
I suppose that harboring fugitives, even lawman-fugitives such as the Earps,
could have been considered too unsavory for Otero, who later served as
territorial governor, to recount in his memoir.
There are doubtless many persons who would have been chosen to exclude
the story.
But Otero?
Here's a man who reveled in his relationships with the iconic figures
of the Old West. The stories come fast and
furious, almost one in every chapter.
In his pages we learn that:
a.
Otero was a friend of Wild Bill Hickok and saw him kill a man in Hays
City around 1868, when Otero was about nine years old (p. 14-17).
During this same period he also came to know Calamity Jane (p. 21-22).
b.
In Sheridan, Wyo., Otero was introduced by Hickok to Buffalo Bill Cody,
who would allow Otero and his brother to accompany him on buffalo hunts (p.
32-33).
c.
While living in Kit Carson, Colo., Otero got to meet Generals George
Custer and Philip Sheridan as they accompanied the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia
on a buffalo hunt (p. 50-56).
d.
Otero first met Bat Masterson on a trip to Dodge City in 1874 (p. 89).
e.
Otero had a chance meeting with Jesse James at Las Vegas Hot Springs in
1879, during which time Otero promised to keep his identity secret (p. 176-79).
f.
Otero came to know Billy the Kid as he was being transported by train
from Las Vegas to Santa Fe in 1880, and that "nothing would have pleased me
better than to have witnessed his escape" (p. 214-15).
In 1936, Otero published a biography (The Real Billy the Kid) that
concluded with the statement that the Kid was "a man more sinned against than
sinning" (p. 134).
g.
Otero made the acquaintance of Doc Holliday during his short stay in Las
Vegas in 1880, "met him quite frequently and found him to be a very likeable
fellow" (p. 216-18).
And those are just a few of the
more famous folks who pop out.
The
bottom line is that it does not appear that Otero was the kind of person
who would be embarrassed to be associated with Wyatt Earp, and anyway, Earp's
reputation in the 1930s was not one to run away from.
(3)
He forgot.
Otero was about 75 years old when he was writing this autobiography, which was
published in 1935.
Could the
ravages of time simply have removed the memory of the incident from Otero's
brain?
Perhaps, but…
Otero mentioned the Earps twice on
p. 217 in My Life on the Frontier, in association with Doc Holliday.
Otero wrote that "as an experience horseman, [Holliday] qualified at
once for an appointment under the celebrated Earp brothers [our
emphasis]."
This would have been
a great segue into the Albuquerque story, but alas, Otero did not mention the
Earps further.
As if it needed confirmation, the
quote points out that when he wrote his autobigraphy, Otero was familiar
with Wyatt Earp and his reputation.
At
age 75 or so, he was pulling together all the threads of his past and weaving
them into a rich story.
Why leave
out the Earps?
And why, five years later, when
specifically asked about the Earps by Watson Reed, did Otero respond simply that
he "knew Wyatt Earp and his brothers and Doc Holliday when they were all in
Dodge City, Kansas, but I never followed up on his life…"
And why, then, perhaps just a few
months later, when asked the same question by an unknown correspondent, was his
answer so completely different?
If the events described in the Otero Letter really
happened, the evidence indicates that Otero had not forgotten them by the time
he wrote his memoir, would not have been embarrassed by retelling them, and
almost certainly would have found them important enough to include in his book.
The fact that he failed to mention the Earp incident in My Life on the
Frontier and in the Watson Reed letter casts a long shadow over the
authenticity of the Otero Letter.
There was one story that Otero was too embarrassed
to mention in his memoir: his father's fleecing
in Denver on April 12, 1882.
Otero
wrote not a word about it, even though he spent at least seven and
perhaps as many as twenty days in Denver trying to recover his father's money.
The incident had to be burned into
his memory, coming as it did just one month before his father's sudden death.
Instead, the mundane moments that Otero chose to include in
his autobiography, two of which are mentioned above, are frankly fraudulent.
Otero was in Denver, not Las Vegas, when the snow fell to a depth of
several inches. He was in Denver, not Las Vegas, when Mrs. A. G. Hood gave
her piano concert, and was in Denver a couple of days later, too, when his
father spoke at grand opening of the Montezuma Hotel the Las Vegas Hot Springs.
Although he needn't have gone to the trouble, Otero added these details
to his autobiography, and a casual reader — perhaps every reader until now --
would have to assume that Otero was in Las Vegas and witnessed the events he
described. If he wasn't consciously trying to cover up the Denver
incident, his subconscious surely did a good job of it.
The lengths he went to add these silly details are
extraordinary.
In an inexcusable
bit of academic borrowing, he inserted the text of certain articles from the Las
Vegas Optic directly into his manuscript without attribution.
For instance, the last two sentences regarding the Hood concert on p. 241
were dropped into his text verbatim:
The music was furnished by a piano and a connection of
telephone wires conveyed the lady's playing to Los Alamos and THE OPTIC office
simultaneously. Mr. A. G. Hood was director of the wire musicale and initiated
the hearers into new telephonic marvels.
Why did Otero feel it necessary to add an incredibly
trivial detail that he did not witness?
Likewise the two sentences preceding the introduction to
his father's speech on p. 276 are lifted directly from the Optic.
From an academic standpoint, it matters little whether
Otero borrowed a few sentences or a whole boatload. More important is that
this evidence indicates that Otero wrote a portion of his memoir with a bound
copy of 50-year-old Optics at his side.
As it happens, an inspection of the modern microfilm reveals that several
articles were clipped from the bound copy of the Optic, starting on April
17, 1882, and continuing for days afterwards.
These were articles that might have mentioned Otero, his father, and the
events in Denver, on which topic the Optic is found to be surprisingly
silent.
The bound copies were
microfilmed in 1952, well after Otero wrote his manuscript.
Could Otero have been responsible for removing these items? How can
we even make that conjecture without knowing what the missing articles were
about?
It turns out that at least one of the articles was not
lost. Buried in the stacks of the Arizona State Archives is a microfilm
that contains a single issue of the Las Vegas Optic, from April 17, 1882.
This was the special issue commemorating the grand opening of the
Montezuma Hotel, and in the first column on page 2, an item reads:
We had thought that Don Miguel Otero, of this city, was too old a bird to
be caught with chaff, but it appears that he was successfully roped in for
$2,400 by "Doc" Baggs, [...] confidence man of Denver, on last Wednesday.
The affair did not get into the papers until Saturday.
This item (and the few items in the column directly above
it) have been removed from the normally available microfilmed copy. The
content on the other side of the page is inconsquential; the cut was clearly
made to remove the Otero article, although it's impossible to know why it
was removed. But the possibility exists, and there is at least a hint of
evidence, that Otero might have tried to alter the "first draft of history"
by excising articles from the Optic while writing My Life on the
Frontier.
Other Unusual Memories
It's not just the things that Otero didn't remember that
stand out in the Otero Letter. Also of concern are some things that he
did.
Otero wrote:
Jaffa gave Earp an overcoat from his store, Earp's had been ruined in a
fight.with the Cow-boys. I remember that that cold wind even today.
It's impossible to impeach the statement, but really now — what triggered
the memory of the cold wind? Jaffa giving Earp a coat (while standing
outside in the wind)? It just seems an unlikely memory after 53 years.
A little later the letter states:
I remember that Armijo and Blonger kept watch over the boys. I was able
later, when governor, to reward Armijo for that favor to my father.
It's hard for the folks at BlongerBros.com to admit this, as much as we want
to prove the connection between the Blongers and the Earps, but why might Otero
have remembered this unusual name some 58 years later? Yes, it's true that
Sam and Lou were "famous" throughout the West, whatever that
means. It's possible that Otero remembered his chance encounter with the
marshal of Albuquerque, and it is even possible that he knew the Blongers later
in life. But as we have learned, Sam was
out of town almost then entire period that the Earp party was in
Albuquerque. Instead, his brother Lou served as the acting marshal, so
which Blonger was it that kept watch over the boys?
If Otero's lasting memory of a Blonger is somewhat problematic, so is his
rather vague impression of Perfecto Armijo, who in 1882 was the sheriff of Bernalillo County.
Otero had every reason to remember him: Armijo was Otero's first cousin, the son
of his father's youngest sister (My Life on the Frontier, p. 275), and so his impersonal mention in the letter seems a little odd. Otero's memoirs do not mention a specific favor paid to Armijo, but in light of their
familial relationship, Armijo's reappointment as sheriff of Bernalillo County during
Otero's tenure as territorial governor doesn't seem the least bit surprising.
Conclusion
There are concerns with what Otero remembered and what he did
not.
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