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The Trip to Orienta: The Dreamer and the Scraper
Orienta on State Highway 412
It was Thanksgiving Vacation, I was a twelve-year-old schoolboy freed for a long weekend, and my Grandparents Earp were driving out west into the Oklahoma panhandle to visit their oldest son Ernie, who was Principal of a school called Orienta. (That is how this story must begin, though the narrator at points will become “Wayne” or just drop into anonymity.) Orienta was an unincorporated community located on State Highway 412 in Major County, Oklahoma, lying north of Fairview, east of the shimmering Glass Mountains, and south of the Cimarron River of Edna Ferber fame. Near Rattlesnake Lake, the post office, established in 1901, took its name from the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway whose rails connected it to the world, a fact of which the world took little notice. And why should it? This was car country--cars, trucks, and pickups.
Grandpa drove what was probably a 1966 Dodge pickup--after the passage of six decades, the year numbers and car models are no longer clear to me (like many details of this tale I’m about to tell). Colors, however, remain. It was a dark green, the bemused color of cedars, and inside and out he kept it clean. Grandpa and Grandma had a mongrel hound called Buddy, my hunting and fishing companion many a summer, but Buddy didn’t keep his feet clean and was not allowed to accompany us. Grandma was more lenient but Grandpa didn’t want any dog fights and thought a canine should know his place. Buddy had the habit of visiting bitches in heat around neighboring farms, but an anonymous owner took exception to his courtship, beat him with a club over his exposed spine and helplessly erected backside, and decommissioned him. Who said a dog’s life is easy?
As for Uncle Ernie, a few facts will orient us. He was born in Kendrick in 1917 and attended Chandler high school, where in 1931 the Chandler paper first mentions him:
Seventh Grade, 26 March 1931
We are very enthusiastic over the April Fool's Day track meet and hobo day. The boys who are going out for track are are, in class "A", Ernest Earp, who won second in the county track-meet in the one-half mile last year; in class "B", Carl McGlamery, James Koonce, Tom Ross and Bill Stevens; in class "C", Nelson Hargis, Bernard Davisk Noel James, Winfred Phelps, Cecil Shepherd, Carl Gough; and in "D" class, Doyle Trent, Vernon Clark, Jonnie Wagner, Lester Frost and Ozell Durham. These boys are full of energy and enthusiasm and we are sure they will win some medals.
In 1931, Ernie was fourteen. He graduated Agra High School 1936, spent a few years hoboing around the country before returning to his dad’s farm in Stroud, as his sister Opal recounts below. Enlisted in the US Army Feb. 1939 at Cheyenne Wyoming and was stationed first at Ft. Laramie in Laramie Wyoming. After Pearl Harbor, the newspapers carried this report:
Earnest Earp, son of Mr. and Mrs. Huey Earp, one and a half miles north of Chandler, left Tuesday for his post at Ft. Mears, Alaska, having been summoned by telegram. Young Earp is with the 37th Infantry and has been in Alaska since May 1st. It will take him eleven days on a boat to reach Dutch Harbor after he reaches Seattle. Several Oklahoma Indian boys are stationed there with him, he stated but there are no other Lincoln county boys at the post.
Earp was born near Kendrick and was graduated from the Agra high school in 1936. He was home on a 60 day furlough when word reached him. Asked what he thought about the war, he replied, "There is no question but that we will win it." His father with him stated that if he were young enough he would be happy to 'join up'.
Chandler News Publicist, 22 Dec. 1941
His grandson Wayne, now the only witness to these distant events, recognizes Huey’s gung-ho words as the happy-to-join malarky that was second-nature to the man, hardened horse-trader that he was. (His father had been a horse breeder.) As a boy Wayne heard Huey boast of how his flat feet kept him out of WWI, a fight for which he was otherwise prime meat. It stayed in his mind because he inherited his granddad’s feet, though in his own day (1968-70 of the Vietnam War) it was not considered an impediment. Pun intended.
Grandpa was not only a horse-trading malarky man, he could be mean and cruel. He had a windmill to pump water for the livestock, but my grandma Arly had to carry the water for the kitchen from the well a couple of hundred yards away. One fall day he took me out into the woods to hunt squirrels. He would spot a nest high up in a tree and shoot into it with a .22 Mauser rifle (originally belonging to Ernie) to see if a squirrel dropped out. All the better care if it was a small one--it’d make a more tender stew. In my twenties, after reading Walter Noble Burns’ The Saga of Billy the Kid --found in an abandoned farmhouse when I was fourteen--I learned that while Hollywood movies gave the killers black eyes, the most cold-blooded killers of the old west--Bill Hitchcock, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and their ilk--had blue eyes. I knew then who Hughey was.
In a poem written decades ago I caught some of the difference between Hughey and may dad, whose brown eyes I inherit:
ARLY
It was north of Chandler 1939,
My granddad with the killer blue eyes
Hughie Earp reading by kerosene lamp light
A shoot'em-up dime-store western
Much to the surprise of the brown-
Eyed farm lad come courting
Later to be my father
And recall to me that scene
Glimpsed through an opening door.
And even then he not fooled by such
Display of weakness for the word
In this known hardshod
Horse trader who still had
The first nickel he'd ever made,
This pale-eyed reader
Rocklike in washed out overalls
Whose livestock had a new windmill
While Arly carried water
Up the hill and longed for town.
In the photo I have of them, made
From a trashed negative after Grandpa died,
Hughie looks straight into the lens.
Arly wears a black church-going hat,
Her gaze gone out grimly away from his.
Arly daily carried the water
For the kitchen and table and bath
Up a hundred-yard slope
Of red-clay rocky Lincoln County hill
Silently by hand.
I remember a Sunday once
With whoops and chants
She gathered up her skirts
And showed us how the Sac and Fox danced.
Though he had only two years of formal education. Hughey learned to read under Arly’s instruction. As her son Wendell remarked, she was a very intelligent woman.
The photo that accompanies this poem makes its own comment on the marriage:
Hughey and Arlie, c. 1940
In WWII, the major engagement in which Ernie fought was the Battle of the Bulge, where he was wounded. He must have received an early discharge because of his wound, for in April of 1944 in Chandler he married Christine Hurst of Wellston, with whom he would have two daughters, but first he started college in Gunnison Colorado, completing his degree in 1949. This meant he did not have the OU imprimatur and would never get a good teaching job in Oklahoma. The 1950 census shows him in Hotchkiss CO teaching high school and with his first daughter, Elaine.
Ernie seems always to have been interested in family history, probably because his surname connected him to the infamous Tombstone lawman and he wanted a few degrees of separation. Or at least he wanted the facts. Besides school-related news, the first appearance of his name in print seems to have been in The Genealogical Society Bulletin, vol. 10, no 3 Apr 1967:
The Rev. Ernest F. Earp, Rt. 1, Hennessey, Okla is working on a
history of the EARP-McPHERSON fams- Anyone on the Caleb EARP or
William McPHERSON lines please contact him.
I have not been able to determine the identify of William McPherson, but he may have been an automotive engineer. Ernie writes:
"I have searched quite a bit still have several unsolved puzzles. My
grandfather, William A. Earp, born 1856, Apr 3, Cherokee County Alabama, and died
Lincoln Co, Okla 1924, Apr 27. His mother was Mary Jane Deal b Ga 1835 died in
Okla Aug 1912, Her father was Robert Deal b S.C, about 1799, and his father
was Alexander Deal b S, C. about 1760.
“William A. Earp’s (my grandfather) father was, I believe, Caswel1 Earp who
died 1859 of measles, Then his mother (Mary J. Deal) married his brother, either
John W, Earp or William Earp both of whom were killed during the Civil War. She
then married George Ewing and moved to Iowa, to Nebr., to Okla.
“I am descended from either Richard Earp, Tenn, or Matthew Earp, S.C. who both lived in Cherokee Co., Ala, same time, perhaps they were brothers, Their father, I believe was Daniel Earp, S.C. about 1775.”
Under Earp Family, the LDS’s Family Search has: Josiah and Phillip Earp were born in Maryland about 1760. They fought in the Revolutionary War and later moved to Virginia and later North Carolina. Later generations moved farther west and today descendants are found throughout the United States. Information on their descendants and related lines are given in this volume including the infamous Earp brothers. Descendants now live in Texas, Missouri, and elsewhere in the United States.
Earp is not an Irish surname. A British surname expert lists only one reference for it spelled Erpe in 1561—and claims its origins are unknown. However, American sources note that references to Earp can be found under the spelling of Harp. Being aware of the British’s propensity to drop their “H’s,” genealogists must consider this possibility when researching a surname beginning with a vowel. Wyatt Earp’s great-great-grandfather appears on a 1776 Maryland enumeration as William Harp. William Earp, born 1729 in Maryland, along with three of his sons&151;Philip, Joshua, and Josiah—participated in the Revolutionary War. William’s wife was Priscilla Nichols. William was the son of Joshua Earp and Mary Budd. Joshua Earp, born ca 1705, died ca 1760 in Fairfax County, Virginia was the son of John Earp and Rebecca [—?—].
In 1961, in the midst of these pleasant lucubrations appropriately marked [—?—], came the knock on the door, a summons from Earnie’s grandmother Mary Francis Wright Earp, who at last at the age of ninety-nine in Stroud Oklahoma had the good fortune to die. When death knocked, she was gumming a fried frog-leg which she’s Hughey and I had told her was chicken and finding it good. She was laid beside her husband William the horse breeder who had preceded her in death by thirty-seven years, but not before in 1926 he had brought in a gusher on the homeplace which covered the farm with shining filthy black lucre. It provided each of his eleven kids $20,000 (enough to buy a farm,) and a new A-Model Ford, and left Mary Francis the where-withal to buy a house in town and build a church, still standing the last time I drove through Stroud.
The gusher comes in, the money goes out. Phrased in different words: Man proposes but God disposes. Which leads us by a pleasant vicus of recirculation to the death of Mary Francis her long suffering self and eventually the disposal of her worldly pelf, including a black, board-covered Bible of encyclopedic size, big as Webster’s Unabridged. It was thought by covetous children and their spouses to be a valuable antique but was nothing of the kind since Grandma had bought it after the oil money came. That didn’t stop the plotting and maneuvering This is only my idea, but I was an observant teen, and my dad, a man of well known honesty and good judgment, agreed with me. Indeed the idea starts with him.
My father had known the Hurst family of Wellston, which was a large one, since boyhood. According to him, they were all crazy. The actions of Christine do not belie his estimate. In the course of the Great Bible Bust-Up, she effectively imprisoned Ernie and refused to allow him out of the house or to talk by telephone with his siblings. In retrospect, I think her actions caused us all trauma, including my teenage self, for at this point I also lost contact with Ernie.
In my mother’s Tale That is Told: The Autobiography of Opal Earp Pounds, she gives the details, writing:
Being superintendent kept Ernie too busy, I suppose--and all that was before the scandal of the Big Bible Bust-Up tore into us like a hurricane, and Earnie’s wife put him in lockdown and wouldn’t let him talk to his own siblings. To me, that was the most shameful thing that ever happened to our family . . .
Ernie was the dreamer. He was always dreaming about exotic places and faraway lands that he was going to visit someday. He was always good natured and helpful. I can never remember quarreling or having a fight with Ernie, though he liked to hide around the corner of the barn and let you have a surprise corncob on your head, and he liked it even better if the corncob was wet. But it was always in fun. Ernie hated the farm so when he graduated from Agra High at eighteen, Dad decided to send him to Hills Business School. Of course, he had to get a job to help out.
He got a job “busting suds”--washing dishes in a cafe. He wasn’t happy at that so he took a job as a traveling book salesman and headed toward California. He arrived broke and no job so he worked picking fruit and picking up almonds while pawning his clothes to live. He did that for a few months, and then one day we looked down the road and saw this dirty, ragged tramp-looking fellow with worn out shoes coming in at the gate. It was Ernie. Hungry and broke, but he had seen some of the world, even to getting himself locked in a freight train boxcar and stranded on a railroad spur. By good grace someone came along and heard him yelling and pounding inside the car and let him out. He had been asleep when he was stranded. After that he joined the Army.
Opal continues, now writing about the years post 1945:
The boys were home from the wars. Wendell was home again all intact except for scars on body and soul. He married Lavonne Graham and used his G.I. loan to go to Hills Business College. Ernie made it home safely except for battle scars. He also went back to school and became a teacher. He and Chris had two lovely daughters, Ernestine and Elaine. He was also called to preach, so he worked as well in the ministry in the Church of God, affiliated as pastor and evangelist.
An obituary adds some detail to this account: “Ernie was a decorated WWII veteran having served in both in Alaska and the European Theatre. He was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in Feb 1945. He was a Squad Leader and a Platoon Sergeant.” Of his early life, it is perhaps time to add that he was an athlete, winning prizes in track meets for his running. To this I can add a bit of detail. When he joined the army in 1941, he was 5’ 10” tall and weighed 155 pounds. Later photos show a heavier man, for it’s common for men to gain weight in the service with its regular meals and exercise. I myself in 1969 gained twenty pounds in basic training. Ernie also taught sports like football in the early part of his teaching career. In 1951, for example, newspapers reported that he coached at Carney.
Hughey Earp family, Carney OK, 1951
Ernie received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western State College in Gunnison, CO. He taught school in Carney, Agra, Cheyenne Valley and Canadian, Ok schools. During this time he completed a Master of Arts degree from Northwestern State College in Alva, OK. During the last years of his career he served as Superintendent of Schools.
Ernie was a Christian who joined with the Churches of God in Stroud, OK when he was 16 years old. He was licensed to preach in 1961 and ordained in 1962. He pastored the Stroud OK Church of God for seven years and other churches in Oklahoma and Iowa. He also put in a lot of time and work on family history. The most detailed account of Ernie comes from an autobiography I ghost-wrote for my great grandmother Sarah Frances, his Grandma Earp:
I think he was looking for some connection between our Earp name and Wyatt Earp, but if so he never found anything exciting. He did, however, drive all the way to Cherokee County, Alabama, to look for records of the Earp family. Cherokee County was where his granddad Earp had come from originally, back in the days right after the Civil War. He finally decided that his grandad and Wyatt had been something like fourth cousins. That was wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t any reason to send an article to The Tombstone Epitaph. We all have distant cousins, but we wouldn’t recognize a fourth cousin if he walked up and offered us a handshake. We couldn’t tell him from Adam. The Bible teaches us that all men are brethren. Maybe it should have said cousins.
Above, mention was made of the Church of God in Stroud, a story picked up in Arly’s narrative about her two sons. That was the church that Hughey’s mother built out of her oil money (for years it was called the Earp church). “When I could get Hughey to take me, that’s where I’d attend,” Arly wrote in my pseudo-anymous account, “and in the 1950s I heard Ernie preach there a few times. Bless the boy, but for all his talents he wasn’t a preacher.” The remarks makes sense because teaching had always been Ernie’s occupation. He preached like he was teaching a classroom of students, explaining the scriptures to them. He was serious, educated, and well spoken, but--as his mother said--he didn’t have the fire and the anointing of a real preacher. He didn’t reach people’s hearts.
Ernie didn’t touch people’s hearts because he had no flame. His passion had been stamped out by his father’s lash. One might expect Hughey to have influenced his two sons, but there’s no evidence of that except by negation. He worked them hard, not sparing the rod--or rather the lash, made of harness strap--and they both grew up to hate farming. Here, in what may cause the reader mild surprise, I find it instructive to compare Ernie with Joan Didion, the brilliant and celebrated California essayist, author of essay collections like Slouching to Bethlehem and The White Album, both from the 1960s.
It is in a later collection, however--Where I Was From (2004)--that we get to the heart of the matter, for here she writes of her pioneer origins. I will present a few examples.
page 5: The Potato Masher:
My mother was sent the photograph of this marker by her mother's cousin Oliver Huston, a family historian so ardent that as recently as 1957 he was alerting descendants to "an occasion which no heir should miss," the presentation to the Pacific University Museum of, among other artifacts, "the old potato masher which the Cornwall family brought across the plains in 1846." Oliver Huston's letter continued: "By this procedure, such items can then be seen by all Geiger and Cornwall heirs at any time in the future by simply visiting the Museum."
page 25: Irrigation, Railroads, Cotton:
Nor did the role of the government stop with the construction of the railroad: the citizens of the rest of the country would also, in time, subsidize the crops the rail-
road carried, make possible the irrigation of millions of acres of essentially arid land, underwrite the rhythms of planting and not planting, and create, finally, a vast
agricultural mechanism in a kind of market vacuum, quite remote from the normal necessity for measuring supply against demand and cost against return. As
recently as 1993, eighty-two thousand acres in California were still planted in alfalfa, a low-value crop requiring more water than was then used in the households of all
thirty million Californians. Almost a million and a half acres were planted in cotton, the state's second largest consumer of water, a crop subsidized directly by the federal government. Four hundred thousand acres were planted in rice, the cultivation of which involves submerging the fields under six inches of water from mid-April until the August harvest, months during which, in California, no rain falls.
page 70: The South vs. the West
In 1970 I spent a month in the South, in Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi, under the misapprehension that an understanding of the differences between the West and the South, which had given California a good deal of its original settlement, would improve my understanding of California. The philosopher Josiah Royce (born California 1885) had fretted over the same question: "Very early ... this relatively peaceful mingling of Americans from North and South had already deeply affected the tone of California life," he noted in California: A Study of American Character. "The type of the Northern man who has assumed Southern fashions, and not always the best Southern fashions at that, has often been observed in California life.
page71 Blood and Land
One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.
Here, with fine historical instinct, Didion has put her thumb on the heart of the matter. South, middle, or west, the Incorporation of America (see Trachtenberg in the bibliography below) required blood, a small percent from the white settlers, the lion’s share from the native peoples, red or brown, who occupied the land before the whites arrived.
The Earp Church, Stroud Oklahoma
The paragraph above reporting on Ernie’s education and ministry came from an obit posted at Find-a-Grave, but I’m not ready to bury the man yet. Here’s my Grandmother Earp (Ernie’s mother) remembering the good times at the Earp house when “the kids would come to visit us where we lived north of Stroud in the 1950s, bringing their families”:
After the children were in bed, suddenly a mild infection would seem to move in the air, and the men would begin to cough and wheeze. Two of them would say they believed they had a touch of flu, and Hughey would go into the bedroom and get the pint of whiskey he always kept in the upper drawer of our dresser. From that point on, the stories were pretty much confined to the men, and they became more interesting as the liquor warmed their bellies. Ernie and Wendell didn’t talk about the war. The three of them talked about old times on the farm, and Hughey became inspired as the topic inevitably moved to horse trading, at which craft he had at one time been very shrewd. He’d done plenty of that before the kids were born, and with the liquor prompting him he became an apt narrator of his skill in setting less wily men afoot.
I believe my grandkids enjoyed having me for a grandma. I loved to have fun with them. I‘d play games with them like Chinese checkers, dominoes and softball. Hughey, he didn’t know how to play games. He’d sit in his easy chair and watch. One time when we were all outside I hiked my skirt up a couple of inches and showed them how the Sac and Fox danced. I’d learned that going to the big pow-wows held at the reservation just north of Stroud.
My grandmother Arly had in all eleven grandkids, of which number Ernie and Chris contributed two girls, Elaine and Ernestine. Here they are at the Earp Church in June 1958, the year my grandparents and I traveled to Orienta. Wearing sister dresses, they form part of a group of five girls, Elaine on the front left, Ernestine beside her.
Now it’s about time for Wayne to tell the story of what he likes to call the Great Family Bible Bust-Up, which came in 1961. Great Grandma Earp had a big Bible, and that was the thorn of in our side and the object of contention. I used the adjective “big” advisedly because, in laymen’s terms, it was “a great big Bible” and the tribulation it brought us was also “family size,” as they say in the supermarket. As she approached the end of life’s journey, Great Grandma had to dispose of her worldly goods, and among her ten children everybody expected to get something. The good news was that apart from her house, she didn’t own much. The bad news was the Bible.
Most of the family thought of that book as an heirloom, especially because several pages of it were given over to a family genealogy of begats, but I’m here to tell you for a fact that whatever it was it was not an heirloom. It was not an old Bible handed down from generation to generation. Grandma had bought that Bible herself with her first oil money, so she bought it after her husband’s death in 1924. The family-history pages had been filled in by her oldest daughter, a good-hearted widow named Coy who lived with Grandma and took care of her. Oh it looked great--a big black thing with board covers too heavy to hold in your lap. You couldn’t read it. You could only refer to it. It was all show, the perfect example of what the Apostle Paul calls “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.”
Grandma’s children, who knew the Bible’s history, didn’t really want it because they knew it would be sitting on a lectern in their parlor gathering dust. The ones that wanted it were the grandkids who could forever thereafter call it “Great Grandma’s Old Family Bible,” blow the dust off the cover, and bequeath it to their own children. Of Grandma’s ten children, Hughey was elected to get the Bible almost by default. Coy had lived with Grandma for a decade and more and so stood first inline, but Coy wasn’t interested in it because she knew how much dust it collected. Next in line was Hughey, because he’d lived in Stroud with her since he was a boy and he also took care of her by visiting her every week and doing the masculine chores. He wasn’t worried about dust because that was his grandson to take care of, not him.
How the family squabble began is easy to figure. Bear in mind that as her train approaches the terminus, Grandma is in her latter 90s and can’t keep the cheese on her cracker. Every Sunday brings an array of visitors--kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. Once inside the front door, they enter the parlor, and there they see that great black leviathan sitting freshly dusted and gleaming on its lectern. So they’d ask her about it. “Grandma, what are you planning to do with that family bible?” And she’d reply, “Nothing special. I guess I ain’t thought about it.” The adult in the group would say, “Grandma, we might like to have that when you’re gone,” and she’d promise it to them.
She must have promised it to several of them, but it was Hughey who got it first. He maneuvered around and picked it up before Grandma was cold in her coffin. That was where it stood (in their small house) until 1975, when Hughey died. He had an old .38 hogleg pistol that Ernie and Wendell wanted, but Ernie wasn’t going to be allowed to get the gun and the Bible both. It was finally decided that the gun would go to Hughey’s grandson little Kenny, because the boy’s dad Kenneth (by then deceased) was Hughey’s oldest son, having been born to his first wife who died on the childbed because the doctor, coming in from the cow lot, didn’t wash his hands. The Bible would go to Ernie because he was a preacher. That was the ostensible reason, but the real reason was Chris. She was more mulishly stubborn and bad tempered than anybody else and nobody wanted to fight her. She locked that Bible down behind bars in her house and Ernie with it. She wouldn’t even let him talk on the telephone with his brother and sisters when they’d call.
She kept him locked away so tight and incommunicado that none of his papers have ever appeared, though a constant letter writer like Ernie must have had a large stack of them. Chris died in 2005, three years after Ernie. The worse fate that can befall a scholar: his papers were not kept.
That’s what I mean by Chris’s mulish ill-temper. She was mad, and she stayed mad. Not only that, it looks like she handed down her anger to her two girls as an heirloom. Even Elaine and Ernestine, poor things, were as sweet and as dear to the adults as their cousins, but after the Bible Bust-Up the other grandkids stopped hearing from them. Wayne as well, sigh. Arly writes, “I’ve been dead near half a century now, so I may not get the latest news nor know what’s happening among all my grandkids.” This suggested to my mother that she’d better stick to my own four kids and be happy with the devils that she knew.
Oh yes, the ice scraper that I wielded on the homeward journey. I recently Googled it but had to search hard to find a look-alike. I remember it was yellow. The penny visible beside it came from a wealthy donor. Unlike the other stories I have written about my childhood, this is the story of a good boy. The boy who was a scraper. The story of the bad boy can be found in the bibliography below.
.
OBITUARY FOR ERNIE:
Ernest Fay Earp is the son of Hugh and Arlie Flatt Earp. He was born near Kendrick, Lincoln Co. OK and passed away Nov. 25, 1992 in OK State Veterans Home in Sulphur, Murray Co., OK. Ernie was a decorated WWII veteran having served in both in Alaska and the European Theatre. He was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in Feb 1945. He was a Squad Leader and a Platoon Sergeant.
Ernie received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western State College in Gunnison, CO. He taught school in Carney, Agra, Cheyenne Valley and Canadian, OK schools. During this time he completed a Master of Arts degree from Northwestern State College in Alva, OK. During the last years of his career he served as Superintendent of Schools.
Ernie was a "born again" Christian who united with the Churches of God in Stroud, OK when he was 16 years old. He was licensed to preach in 1961 and ordained in 1962. He pastored the Stroud OK Church of God for 7 seven years and other churches in Oklahoma and Iowa.
Ernest married Christine Hurst, the daughter of Milton and Marilla Hurst on April 9, 1944 in Walla Walla, Washington. He and Christine had two daughters Elaine Christine Earp Dunkle and Ernestine Faye Earp. He will be remembered as a kind and gentle man who loved to serve people.
The saddest part of his life came about 1970 when his wife sent him into confinement in an old soldiers’ home in Sulfur, Oklahoma. His women folks could have cared for him at home but did not. I would love to find his papers, but of course Chris didn’t keep them. No one did.
The blinkering effect of the local dreamtime.
Grave of Ernest Earp
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burns, Walter Noble. The Saga of Billy the Kid. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952.
Didion, Joan. Where I Was From. New York: Harper Collins. A Harper Perennial. 2004.
Pounds, Opal Earp. A Tale That is Told: The Autobiography of Opal Earp Pounds. Edited by Geraldine Pounds Robideaux and Wayne Pounds. Smashwords: Columbia SC, 2017.
Pounds, Wayne. The Autobiography of Mary Frances Earp: Memories, Reflections, Dreams. Create Space: Columbia SC, 2018, revised 2020.
_____. “Grandma Arlie’s Soldier Sons.” In Tales My Grandmother Never Told Me. Independently published. Printed in Japan, 2024.
_____. “The Story of a Bad Boy.” Blogspot.com. 2025. https://uenowayne.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-story-of-bad-boy.html
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. NY: Hill and Wang, 2007. The essential work on the origins of America's corporate culture and the formation of the American social fabric after the Civil War.
