The first time I met him in 1881, I was so excited. And so scared. As a twenty-year-old schoolteacher recently arrived from New York, I was more naïve than I owned.  I assessed this man of whom I knew so little. He was tall and lean, made of grit and sinew, without an ounce of fat. The angles of his face were sharply unyielding, and I felt a little afraid of his imposing appearance.

Within days, I was sitting across from him at our dining table. I was here because Papa needed my help. I wavered at first, but my father’s eyes convinced me. For the first time in my life, Papa needed me, and I could not say no. 

Papa’s presence eased my trepidation when I first met him. But now we were alone. Unconsciously, my teeth clenched. Despite his intense appearance, his soft-spoken greeting dispelled most of my anxiety. “Pleased to see you again, Miss Herring.” His warm smile contradicted the wild tales shared by my brother.  As we talked, his spare words and lack of emotion made me wonder what he hid inside. Then he told me how he struck a man with his pistol, knocking him down in the street. He said the humiliated scoundrel still wanted to kill him.

I shuddered but leaned across the table and asked, “Has anyone ever knocked you down that way?”

He lowered his head, his eyes narrowing under his strong brow. With a voice of flint, he said, “There’s not a man alive to tell about it.”

I was stunned. He spoke as one who lived by a set of rules utterly foreign to me.

Despite or maybe because of it, he inspired me.

How could this memory, so clear now in my mind, have happened so long ago? I wasn’t much more than a girl then and incapable of guile. I wasn’t sure who I was or what I wanted, only that I could not accept my parents’ conventional expectations. This man looked into my soul, spoke the truth, and pushed away the haze of my uncertainty. Throughout his lifetime, he was known by many labels—sheriff, marshal, prospector, saloon owner, and horse racer.  But to me, he was simply my friend. My friend, Wyatt Earp.