Lady at the O.K. Corral (2 page)

Even her name was contentious. From 1881 until 1929, Wyatt mostly called her Sadie, a nickname from her middle name, Sarah. After Wyatt's death, she could not bear to be Sadie and insisted on Josie only. But some denizens of Planet Earp mocked her preference of Josie as pretentious or a vain attempt to hide her past. I discovered that I could stumble over some fatal tripwire if I used the wrong name. Heads would shake with disapproval. Sources would dry up. Conversations would end.

And so I called her Josephine.

JOSEPHINE MARCUS EARP
wasn't the only woman erased from western history; with few exceptions, Planet Earp was inhabited only by men. The early chroniclers of frontier lore, writers like Walter Noble Burns, Frederick Bechdolt, and William Breakenridge, seemed to have no wives, mothers, daughters, lovers. At least, they didn't write about them. When Western writers did insert an occasional dance-hall girl back into the landscape, her portrayal was often crude and lifeless. And more recently, when modern historians did begin to pay attention to Wyatt's women, the stories were often inaccurate and filled with ugly caricatures. Whenever I heard Josephine described as “shrewish,” I suspected that the writer really meant “Jewish.”

Josephine had the right to her own story. Feminist scholar and writer Carolyn Heilbrun might have been writing about Josephine when she pointed out that denouncing women as shrill or strident—accusations often made about Mrs. Earp—was another way of denying them power. Josephine had the additional complication of belonging to an immigrant Jewish family. She aged into an America that would experience a wave of anti-Semitism, especially in the 1930s, when Josephine was at her least likable, a querulous old lady recovering from the death of her lifelong partner.

Would Josephine be furious to have been all but rubbed out of the pages of history, or relieved?

I wanted to answer that question, not to provoke a discussion of misogyny or anti-Semitism among Western writers and historians, though I could argue that one was long overdue, but because I had news: there was a woman at the O.K. Corral.

Only a handful of people even knew that she was there, and few recognized that she was at the apex of a love triangle as the former fiancée of the Cochise County sheriff, the champion of the cowboys' cause and Wyatt's political rival. She fell in love with Sheriff Johnny Behan, only to discover that she had chosen poorly. He wooed her with promises of marriage, but she would soon find herself alone in the hostile climate of a frontier boomtown, where a single woman in need of food and shelter could easily find herself working as a prostitute.

None of her contemporaries knew why Josephine Marcus came to Tombstone, or why she left. As eyewitnesses died off, it became harder and harder to follow the trail of broken promises and festering secrets. But fascination with Wyatt Earp and the West increased. He became famous as the iconic American lawman, a stoic, ambiguous figure at the heart of the ultimate American morality play, sometimes wearing a badge and defending the law, and sometimes in pursuit of vigilante justice. “Manhood extreme,” as his friend Bat Masterson described him, this improbably handsome man attracted a remarkable variety of loyal friends, from Doc Holliday to Senator George Hearst to Endicott Peabody to Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Successive generations used him as an archetype from which to fashion contemporary versions of a lawman who stalked the streets of gangland Chicago, the jungles of Vietnam, and more recently, zombie-postapocalyptic landscapes and alien battlefields of outer space.

Before the archetype, there was a man. The real Wyatt Earp lived with the same woman for most of his adult life. Little has been known about that woman or her critical role in shaping the life and legend of Wyatt Earp. Until now, hers was just one more untold tale of the women of the West. Yet our national narrative is flawed, our canvas incomplete, until Josephine Earp makes her entrance, which is the purpose of this book.

Josephine spent decades shaping the public face of Wyatt Earp. Her motivation was complex, even contradictory: to give immortality to the legend of Wyatt Earp and to erase the dark shadow that Tombstone cast over their life. She dreaded anything that came close to the unsavory, violent truths that were the foundation of their long life together. If her pleas and tears did not suffice, she threatened lawsuits against anyone who threatened to reveal the secrets of their past. She and Wyatt came to dread the very mention of Tombstone—yet Tombstone was undeniably the wellspring for her subsequent adventures, and Wyatt's everlasting fame. “Surely there is something more pleasant to talk about,” Wyatt would say to inquiring folks. Josephine hid her tracks so well that when her own niece visited Tombstone, she called it “Uncle Wyatt's old hang out,” with nary a word about her aunt.

When Josephine finally agreed to tell her story, she recruited two Earp relatives, Mabel Earp Cason and Vinnolia Earp Ackerman, but even to them, she could not bear to reveal the truth.

Never sure whether she should speak or be silent, Josephine destroyed one version of her memoir and put a curse on anyone who dared to publish it.

The result was that for more than a hundred years, most of what was written about Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp was a lie—and no one told more whoppers about Josephine than she did herself.

What was she hiding?

CURIOSITY BECAME OBSESSION
. I fell in love with Josephine, the flamboyant, curvaceous Jewish girl, the restless romantic with a persistent New Yawk accent. She began her nomadic life on horseback and in stagecoaches, and would later travel by railroad and eventually ride in her own car, always moving, always looking for the next destination, making and losing fortunes, driven by what Wallace Stegner called “the incurable Western disease.” She would be at home in the deserts of the American Southwest and the boomtowns of the Alaskan gold rush, in the opulent hotels of San Francisco in the Gay Nineties, in rough mining camps, gaudy gambling casinos, racetracks, and boxing arenas, and finally she would be received among the royalty of Hollywood. As Mabel Cason's son told me, she was the most aggravating, frustrating, interesting woman he had ever met, as far from “plain vanilla” as you could get.

I set out to find answers to the mysteries of the woman at the O.K. Corral. I wanted to understand how a woman could survive in the crazy boomtowns that were Tombstone, San Diego, and Nome. How did she fuel her bottomless capacity for self-invention? What sustained her lifelong partnership with a man of uncommon charisma and complex heroism? Her life enveloped me as the untold tale of a private woman every bit as interesting as her husband. I wanted to understand this woman of contradictions: the young runaway who stayed close to her family, the Jew who shunned other Jews, the rebel who could never make up her mind about whether she should be the lady or the tramp. Josephine sought to cover herself with a cloak of respectability, but she couldn't quite make it stretch over a life that was as unpredictable and dynamic as the American frontier itself.

Wyatt and Josephine lived together for forty-seven years. She drew her strength from him, but she was the one who managed his business, signed his letters, and entertained his friends. He was buried with tears and eulogies and coast-to-coast headlines, while she died practically destitute and friendless.

All of which brought me back to the gunfight of October 26, 1881.

I WENT TO TOMBSTONE
. I walked its streets, thinking about its peculiar place in history, how it was at one time destined to become the capital of Arizona, only to be practically abandoned after its precious metals were depleted, the bankers, brothels, and booze long gone. The mines that once operated twenty-four hours a day were open only as tourist attractions. At the annual Helldorado festival, created in 1929 to keep Tombstone alive as a business and tourist center, the streets filled up with thousands of Wyatt Earp wannabes, riding in stagecoaches, waiting for hourly reenactments of the gunfight, and ready to twirl a bushy mustache for photographs. Lost in the town's tacky present was the drama of the once sharply drawn factions of another century: Confederate loyalists versus abolitionists, rural cowboys and ranchers versus townsmen and capitalists. They voted for different parties, and they read different newspapers. Even their clothes were distinct, with the urbane Earps on one side in long black coats, and the cowboys on the other side in their farm clothes and bandannas. They collided at the O.K. Corral, a place named in honor of President Martin Van Buren, nicknamed “Old Kinderhook” after his hometown in upstate New York.

So what about the other shootout that day, the one where the central character was Josephine and the prize was love? How did this nice Jewish girl end up at the center of an iconic event with one of America's greatest folk heroes? What drew her into a love affair that was at odds with every value and experience of her immigrant family?

When I went searching for Josephine, I found myself caught up in an adventure in which the detective work of a biography brought me in contact with an extraordinary cast of characters. There are scores of professional and amateur historians who have made lifelong studies of the life and legend of Wyatt Earp and his family. Most of them are honest brokers of western history. I met heroes, who cheered me on and helped me gain access to important new sources and archives. I encountered some villains, who were not so fond of women or Jews, so they wished nothing but obscurity—or trouble—for Josephine and me. And sometimes it was hard to tell the heroes from the villains. You'll meet some of both in the last chapter.

I negotiated some tricky pathways that admitted me to important new sources, including the unpublished manuscript of Josephine's memoir,
I Married Wyatt Earp
, written with her collaborators Mabel Earp Cason and Vinnolia Earp Ackerman. My understanding of Josephine's life was profoundly enhanced by the privilege of reading this memoir, now in the archives of the Ford County Historical Society in Dodge City, Kansas. However, Cason and Ackerman had large gaps and inconsistencies in their story, usually because of Josephine's deliberate misdirection, which also made it impossible for them to finish their book. Their problems were compounded by the publication of
I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp
(1976), collected and edited by Glenn Boyer, a controversial book that kicked up a city-size cloud of intrigue over Josephine's life, as thick as the gun smoke that hung over Tombstone on that fall afternoon in 1881.

I wanted to clear the dust away and see Josephine with fresh eyes. For that, I had to peel back the layers of misinformation that hid the truth, going back to authenticated primary sources whenever possible. Historians must forever be grateful to Mabel Cason and Vinnolia Ackerman for saving their manuscript; to John Flood, for disobeying Josephine's orders to destroy her correspondence; and to Stuart Lake, whose archive at the Huntington Library is, as Jeff Morey has noted, his true legacy, every bit as important as his highly sensationalized biography of Wyatt Earp. I was the first to have access to the greatest number of Josephine's original letters, many of which are still in the hands of private collectors. Remarkable tape-recorded interviews with eyewitnesses were shared with me, many done in the 1960s, when recollections of Josephine were reasonably fresh. Walter Cason brought a bracing dose of realism and integrity to his memories of “Aunt Josie.”

As I struggled to portray Josephine with all her paradoxes, I was inspired by the high standards set by the writer Mabel Cason. Weighing incomplete or contradictory evidence, I asked myself: What would Mabel do?

Josephine's biography would demand an understanding of the forces that inspired her life decisions—the social history that influenced her as she shaped Wyatt's role in the myth of the West. This would be her most lasting achievement. But I also sought to uncover the story of an American marriage, forged in the frontier. In these pages, as he was in real life, Wyatt Earp will never be far away from Josephine.

There was a woman at the O.K. Corral. That one minute of mayhem changed her life as inexorably as it did Wyatt Earp's.

It all started in Tombstone.

L
ONG BEFORE
you saw the city of Tombstone, you could smell it and hear it and feel it in your bones.

Josephine left San Francisco and set out for the Arizona Territory just before Christmas, 1880. She traveled most of the way by train, and then boarded a stagecoach in Benson for the last leg to Tombstone. From the windows of the stagecoach, Josephine admired the raw beauty in the shadows that shifted over the mountains and giant rocks. As they drew closer to Tombstone, her holiday mood shattered as she and other passengers bounced painfully across twenty-five miles of rough road that left them nearly suffocated, covered with dirty, nasty-tasting dust, and aching in every muscle and bone.

A year ago, she had been a teenage runaway, headed for the Arizona Territory with dreams of becoming an actress but already suffering pangs of guilt for leaving her mother. She was a pretty and vivacious young girl, small in stature but already showing signs of the voluptuous woman she would become.

Now she was entering Tombstone for the second time, engaged and about to join her fiancé. She had changed greatly between the two journeys. She had given up on acting, but not on romance. The most striking hallmark of her character, her love of adventure, had just begun to emerge. Josephine was well aware of her exotic appeal, especially the effect of her expressive brown eyes and womanly curves. She was a confident and charming young woman with full breasts and a narrow waist, a ripe beauty who drew men's eyes wherever she went. Her strong features and creamy complexion were set off by tumbled curls of dark hair, only now growing back after being chopped off the year before, during her brief stint as an actress.