Lady at the O.K. Corral (11 page)

The Earps traveled alone to explore the silver fields of Idaho, via Ouray, Colorado, and then across the Rockies. Anticipating the rigors of crossing the 11,000-foot Red Mountain Pass, still covered in snow despite the late spring, Wyatt suggested that Josephine exchange her skirts for overalls. She was horrified at first—what would the hotel guests and employees think!—but finally agreed. Over her trousers Josephine added layers of sweaters and a heavy dark coat, scarf, and gloves, all in different blue tones, and then climbed aboard a frisky mule for the long walk over the rocky ridges. A parting gift from Mrs. Masterson, Dickie the bright yellow canary made the crossing too, tenderly fed from Josephine's hand and kept warm in a carefully wrapped cage. At the summit they surprised three reporters, two from Chicago and one from Denver. Josephine's initial embarrassment turned to pleasure when they waxed poetic about the apparition:

“We couldn't believe our eyes,” said one. “Here we've been trudging through this stood-on-end wilderness of snow all day without seeing a soul, when suddenly out of the skies a brown-eyed goddess appears—”

“Riding on a donkey—” added the second.

“With a blond Apollo to push it along,” the man from Denver finished.

The reporters were still more tantalized to discover that the “blond Apollo” was actually Wyatt Earp, whom they believed to be a fictional character from a Western thriller. The reporters kept their promise to send their article, a “glowing account” that recorded the chance encounter as a highlight of her early life with Wyatt: overalls, canary, and all. It was not the last time that Wyatt Earp would surprise someone expecting a legend, not a man.

The couple went separate ways in the summer of 1883 to attend to matters of friendship and family. Wyatt returned to Dodge City, Kansas, at the request of his friend Luke Short, who was embroiled in a legal tussle over his right to operate saloons and whorehouses. As part-owner of the Long Branch saloon, Luke felt that he had been unfairly targeted by newly imposed “moral” ordinances, and he called upon his friends, the most famous gunfighters in the West, to show their support by returning to Dodge City. Not a shot was fired. Instead, what would become known as the Dodge City War Peace Commission resulted only in a famous photograph of Wyatt with Bat Masterson, Luke Short, and others. The reunion was a pleasant one for Wyatt, as was the new lesson that he could win battles by using his reputation and his famous stare, and just the glint of a gun.

Josephine went home to San Francisco for the wedding of her sister Hattie to Emil Lehnhardt, happy to exchange her Rocky Mountain overalls for beautiful dresses that showed off her fine figure and the healthy glow of these joyous first months with Wyatt. It was July 5, 1883, barely three months since she had left home, but the pace of her life—Salt Lake City, Denver, crossing the Rockies—must have been startling in comparison to the relatively staid life of her sisters in San Francisco. As the new wife of a pillar of the Oakland community and a director of the Unitarian Church, Hattie was on a solid path to respectability, stability, and prosperity. Her husband had come to California from New York around the same time as the Marcus family, and was building up a candy manufacturing business, which was already prosperous enough for him to present Hattie with her wedding present: a beautiful large house on Telegraph Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street in Oakland.

Back on the road with Wyatt, Josephine began using the name “Mrs. Earp” as early as December 1883, when she registered at the Washington Hotel in Galveston, Texas. She had discovered a newfound ability to move gracefully between the worlds of her Jewish parents, affluent sister, and frontier husband. However, no matter where she went, so did the shadow of Tombstone. In Fort Worth, Will McLaury glared at Wyatt when they met accidentally: a man of words rather than bullets, Will would not take his desire for revenge beyond legal limits, but his fury was still fresh. Still worse was a close encounter with the previous Mrs. Wyatt Earp. Mattie was reportedly visiting Big Nose Kate in Globe, Arizona, when the new Mrs. Earp passed through.

Mattie Earp had finally figured out that Wyatt was not coming back to her. After an unbearably awkward period of living with his parents, she left Colton. Not much is known about her whereabouts for the next few years. However, she apparently had the bad luck to visit Globe just when Josephine and Wyatt showed up. Josephine would have found it gratifying when one of the local papers said that “besides being very handsome, [Josephine] is certainly a lady anywhere.” For Mattie, the sight of Josephine, young and beautiful, sashaying around in her finery may have been the final blow that triggered her tragic last chapter.

THERE WAS ALWAYS
a new boomtown. Some secret signal seemed to emanate from them, drawing prospectors and those that fed off them.

The new mining sensation of the day was Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The Earp brothers—minus Morgan and Virgil—reassembled there in nearby Eagle City. As they had before, Wyatt and James dabbled in law enforcement, saloon keeping, real estate, and mining. Wyatt was elected the deputy sheriff of Kootenai County and handled legal threats from claim jumping to at least one murder case. He also took on a new role as innkeeper of the popular White Elephant. “Wyatt Earp escorted us to the rear rooms of his large establishment,” recalled one guest. “He hailed from Arizona, where several brothers [of the Earps] had been partners, and were cattle kings.” Tombstone was hundreds of miles away, but half-truths about Wyatt Earp were following him, hovering close to the surface.

The Idaho boom was short-lived, however, and the Earps were soon on the move again. Wyatt was working for Wells Fargo for the first time since Tombstone. His work took them all around Texas, including El Paso, Austin, and San Antonio. At Laredo, they crossed into Mexico, where Wyatt became so absorbed by a street card game that he failed to notice a pickpocket, who made off with the gold watch that had been a gift from Senator George Hearst. “They've touched me,” he exclaimed, chagrined by his own lack of street savvy.

Josephine's acting days were behind her, but she continued to try on various roles. As they traveled through the farmlands of Texas, she romanticized the simple life of the farmers whose fields and modest cabins she observed through the train windows. Could she be a farmer's wife? That required a leap of imagination for the lively consort of an itinerant lawman and gambler. But she also dreamed about being a respectable lady of means, like her sister Hattie.

In the spring of 1885, Josephine and Wyatt were staying in Denver's Windsor Hotel, visiting from Aspen, where Wyatt had invested in a saloon. Tombstone came walking toward them, in the form of Doc Holliday. Shockingly thin, unsteady on his legs, coughing continually, Doc found it difficult to talk, but he had learned that Wyatt was there, and was determined to see him again. Doc would soon be moving to a sanatorium in Glenwood, Colorado, where he would spend his final days, still drinking a bottle for breakfast and dispensing sardonic commentary from his bed.

Doc clung to Wyatt, as if to derive strength from hanging on his arm. Touched by Doc's condition and its immediate effect on Wyatt, Josephine put aside any lingering resentments. This was Doc, whose irrepressible bad-boy behavior had often riled people up against the Earps, but it was also Doc who once saved Wyatt's life in Dodge City.

Wyatt's loyalty to Doc would remain nearly inviolate. Asked decades later in a legal deposition “whether Doc was somewhat of a notorious character in those days?” Wyatt answered memorably: “Well, no. I couldn't say that he was notorious outside of this other faction trying to make him notorious.”

It was too late for any of them to pretend that Doc would recover; his tuberculosis had advanced to its final stage.

“Isn't it strange,” Wyatt reflected. “If it were not for you, I wouldn't be alive today, yet you must go first.”

Doc died on November 8, 1887. He was thirty-five years old.

UNLIKE TOMBSTONE OR
Coeur d'Alene, it would be land, not silver or gold, that defined the next boomtown: San Diego. The combination of great climate, excellent harbor, and train service created “the best spot for building a city I ever saw,” in the words of Alonzo E. Horton, the founder of “new” San Diego. Backing up his own predictions, Horton bought nearly a thousand acres, and watched property values explode as the population grew from 5,000 to about 35,000 from 1885 to 1887. Railroad rate wars brought prices down to irresistible lows; a round trip from Chicago plummeted from $150 to $1.

It was Virgil who convened the Earp clan in San Diego. He and Allie had visited the city, and as he had in Tombstone, he saw the possibilities immediately and sent for his brother.

For three years Josephine and Wyatt had been nomads, sometimes staying in luxurious hotels but more often in crude boardinghouses in backwater boomtowns that sputtered out after less than a year. San Diego offered the prospect of glamour and sophistication, perhaps a place worthy of a permanent residence. For once, their Tombstone connections elevated their status: San Diego native William J. Hunsaker had once chased the dream of silver in Tombstone but was now a prominent lawyer back in his hometown. Wyatt also connected again with his former lawyer, Tom Fitch. With their help, Wyatt became an active real estate investor and prominent citizen of San Diego.

The Earps' greatest real estate investments and social success would come during these years. Wyatt was listed in the San Diego City Directory of 1887 as a “capitalist,” with real estate holdings that covered two city blocks. He owned several gambling places, but spent most of his time at the Oyster Bar in the Stingaree District. He judged horses and refereed fights at the Escondido Fair. He also traveled down to nearby Tijuana, where anything too wild for San Diego ended up: day-long festivals featured cockfights, bullfights, and epic prizefights that could go seventy-five rounds or more. The Tijuana weekends attracted thousands of attendees, packing the railroad trains so full that people sometimes had to delay their return until the following Tuesday or Wednesday.

The highlight of the San Diego real estate boom was the development of Coronado Island. A special beach railroad carried prospective investors and sightseers from the ferry to the site of the construction. Josephine was there when the first lots were auctioned from a big tent, and it did indeed seem like a circus to her. She also saw the foundation of the “great rambling structure” of the Hotel del Coronado, and attended the opening gala, at which Lily Langtry performed.

Bat Masterson turned up in San Diego. He was working as a detective and recruited Wyatt to join him on a quick trip to bring back a murder suspect. Josephine joined them, and they spent a pleasant day in Ensenada, notable for a great Mexican dinner and some jewelry shopping, and soon they were all back on board the small boat to San Diego with their prisoner. It turned out to be a memorable trip because of an altercation that occurred not with the fugitive but with the captain of the ship, who demanded that Josephine and Wyatt vacate their cabin to make way for the general of the Mexican army and his staff. Wyatt refused.

Considering the men that Wyatt had killed as sole judge, jury, and executioner during the Tombstone Vendetta Ride, Josephine could not help reflecting on this unexpected showdown. She was confused and sleepless in their cabin, while Wyatt slept like a baby. Her husband had always stood on the side of the law, but this time she believed he had been in the wrong; the captain was the master of the ship, and surely his jurisdiction put everyone under an obligation to follow his orders. Wyatt defended his actions:

“When laws are made, Josie,” he explained, “and certain powers are entrusted to a man, it is expected that the man will measure up to his trust; that he will play no favorites in the use of that power. That captain is too small for his job. He demanded that we give up our rights so that he could favor someone he wanted to impress. He was outside of his rights in that and I couldn't keep my self-respect except by refusing. If it should come before a fair court, I would be upheld by the law and he knew it or he wouldn't have let me get by with it.”

“Well, I could see his point clearly enough,” she reflected, “but I still would not have had courage to defy the captain of the ship in strange waters. I'd still be willing to let the brass buttons have the right of way.”

This was as close to doubt or disapproval about Wyatt as Josephine ever went. The captain with his brass buttons who was “too small for his job” sounded a lot like Johnny Behan. Wyatt's definition of justice allowed him to select those legal requirements he would obey. Self-confidence and real-time decision-making were essential to Earp ethics: decide now, and hope for a smart judge later. Josephine did not criticize Wyatt, but neither was she wholeheartedly endorsing his philosophy.

WYATT'S LAW ENFORCEMENT
assignment with Bat was a temporary distraction from what Josephine loved best about San Diego: horseracing. The sport provided a substantial source of income and delight for Wyatt, plus a dangerous new passion for Josephine. “He bought only one car in his life,” Josephine noted, but he never lost his childhood love of horses. She was talking about her own inclinations, as well as Wyatt's, when she observed that “this love of horseflesh, coupled with his susceptibility to the wiles of Lady Luck, formed a combination that made it almost inevitable that at some time during his career the horse-racing game should claim him.” Their first racehorse, Atto Rex, was Wyatt's prize in a high-stakes poker game. His prowess as a stable owner grew from there. When his horses were successful, Wyatt enjoyed buying gifts of jewelry for Josephine: once, it was a beautiful ruby bracelet; another time, a sparkling brooch in the form of a peacock encrusted with diamonds.

Josephine liked traveling around the California racing circuit and being a welcome guest in glamorous hotels, like Hollenbeck's in Los Angeles, which attracted many of the Arizona old-timers, and Lucky Baldwin's hotel in San Francisco. She knew the name and age of every horse, and crooned to them in their stables. Wyatt sometimes rode the horses to victory himself, but as their stable grew, they hired some of the best jockeys of the day and outfitted them in the Earp racing colors—navy blue polka dots on a white field.