Lady at the O.K. Corral (13 page)

Had she been so inclined, Josephine could have attended the nearby annual conference of the American Historical Association, held in conjunction with the Exposition. She might have paused to listen to the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner deliver one of the most provocative and influential lectures of its kind: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Based on the results of the 1890 census, Turner argued that the frontier was “closed” because there were no longer any great tracts of land to settle. “The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history,” Turner pronounced. He evoked the ideals of the vanishing frontier as the greatest qualities of America: democracy, self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, a practical outlook on life, and “master grasp of Material things.”

As if to underscore Turner's point with head-spinning irony, the highlight of the Exposition for Josephine and Wyatt Earp was to be among the six million visitors who saw Buffalo Bill's reenactment of the western adventures they had so recently experienced, a hint of what they would experience when Hollywood invaded Tombstone.

Soon after Turner's lecture,
Harper's Monthly Magazine
commissioned “short stories of Western life which is now rapidly disappearing with the progress of civilization.” Their writer, Owen Wister, went on to write one of the most popular novels of cowboy life,
The Virginian
, the best-selling book of 1902 and 1903.

“[The West] is a vanished world,” Wister wrote. “No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now.”

Underlying Turner's lecture and Wister's fiction was the question of how America would adapt to the passing of the frontier. The same challenge would resonate through the rest of Josephine's life: Could she and Wyatt survive in postfrontier America?

Is this young beauty Josephine Sarah Marcus?

Possible age progression for Josephine, based on forensic analysis. Only the last three photographs of older Josephine are fully authenticated.

Celia “Mattie” Blaylock, Wyatt's common-law wife before Josephine

Wyatt Earp, mid-1870s