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Jaffa's Whereabouts &
The Board of Trade. |
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Assuming Miguel Otero could have found his way to Albuquerque during the time Wyatt Earp and his men rested there, the authenticity of the Otero letter hinges next on whether "Jaffa" was in town at the time the incidents took place.
The Otero letter never gives Jaffa a first name, and so the first question that must be asked is which Jaffa is the letter refers to. Hornung and Roberts naturally assume that the letter refers to Henry Jaffa, who ran the local branch of the family dry goods store, Jaffa Bros., and later served as the town's first mayor. Mark Dworkin, who wrote an article examining the possibilities of whether Wyatt Earp's Jewish girlfriend may have provided him with a connection to the Jaffa family, says that none of the other Jaffa brothers spent any significant time in Albuquerque.
Still, it is a question that should at least be considered. Was Henry the only Jaffa in town during April, 1882, or could one of his brothers — Benjamin, Samuel, or Solomon — have been the person who gave Wyatt Earp the new overcoat and took him to see the new bridge?
It is maddeningly difficult to tell. The Jaffa Bros. store advertised extensively in the Albuquerque newspapers in 1882, but the Jaffa or Jaffas who spent that year in Albuquerque seem to have gone out of their way to keep a low profile. The newspaper record is completely silent on the local Jaffa personalities. Although the local sheets were filled with local doings large and small, no Jaffa reported a burglary or a vagrant in 1882, or entertained guests at a private party, or heard from a long-lost brother in Kansas, or left town on the train or returned thereto, or simply stopped by the newspaper office to say hello. They were invisible, except for the family business.
The only personal reference to the Jaffa family published that year occurred on September 6, 1882, in the Albuquerque Evening Review:
Jaffa Bros. store will be closed on account of the death of their father, that occurred in Germany.
Without reading too much into the statement, it raises the possibility: Could there have been more than one Jaffa running the store in Albuquerque in 1882? At the moment, this is an open question, which presents a significant stumbling block in our research.
Assume for the moment that Henry Jaffa was the only Jaffa brother to live and work in Albuquerque. The next question is: Can it be proven that he was actually in town during April, 1882. Or more to the point, can it be proven that he was out of town? If a newspaper clipping should happen to surface that placed Henry Jaffa in Denver, for example, during the middle part of April, it would be a critical blow to the authenticity of the Otero letter. The Jaffa Bros. store had a least one manager, William S. Prager, later Jaffa's partner, who could have run the store in his absence. Interestingly, it is Prager who is shown to be on the road at the critical time, as written up in the Albuquerque Morning Journal of April 8, 1882:
William S. Prager, one of the managers of Jaffa Bros.' store in this city, went to Trinidad yesterday morning to be absent about ten days.
Did Jaffa Bros. have more than one manager? Could Jaffa and Prager both have been out of town at the same time? Again the record is silent.
It could still be proven that Henry Jaffa was out of town between April 15 and 25, 1882. But could it ever be proven that all four Jaffa Brothers weren't in Albuquerque during the same period? That's a tall order, and one that will require considerable research.
One thing that can be proven is that contrary to what Hornung and Roberts asserted in their article, Henry Jaffa was not the president of the Albuquerque Board of Trade in 1882. The newspapers are quite clear about this.
- As early as February 8, 1882, the Journal listed Colonel Molyneux Bell as president.
- Colonel Bell was then reelected president, as reflected in articles in the Journal and Review on May 10, 1882.
In fact, Henry Jaffa, who was elected the first of mayor of Albuquerque on June 30, 1885, was never mentioned in any of the long articles covering the proceedings of the Board of Trade. In 1882, for reasons unclear, he was an invisible man in Albuquerque.
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