Lady at the O.K. Corral (40 page)

198
courage, integrity, and patriotism
: Jeanne Cason Laing compared Lincoln Ellsworth naming his boat
Wyatt Earp
to naming the space shuttle after Wyatt Earp.

200
Josephine arrived the next day
: This account draws on the biography of Mabel Cason written by her son Walter (this chapter is called “the Josie Earp venture”), and on my interviews with Walter Cason. It also relies on interviews with Walter, Jeanne, and Rae, recorded by Glenn Boyer. Boyer Collection.

203  “
he didn't have the best of principles where women were concerned”
: Mabel Cason to Mrs. Merritt Beeson, April 9, 1956, Boyer Collection.

204  “
her big beautiful dark eyes were sparkling”
: Boyer, interview with Jeanne Cason Laing, 1974, Boyer Collection.

206
“We all loved Aunt Allie because she had such wonderful stories and an Irish wit”
: Casey Tefertiller, taped interview with Frank and Barbara Waters, Tefertiller Collection.

206
“a typical little Jewess”
: It is worth noting that Halliwell made these repellent comments not in the 1930s but in 1971. Halliwell continued, “Josephine's father was a Jewish silk merchant in the early days in San Francisco and she was just a typical little east side Jewess. . . . She got money for anything she did and she never let her right hand know what her left hand was doing. She was a clever little schemer.” Recorded interview, September 21, 1971, Special Collections, University of Arizona Library.

207
“The tombstones are rattling all over the place”
: Naomi Waters to Frank Waters, 1938, Jeff Wheat Collection.

208
“Wyatt Earp's widow was a problem in herself”
: Lake to Stanley Rinehart Jr., September 19, 1949, Lake Collection.

208
It was Josephine's first visit to Tombstone
: This account is drawn from Boyer's recorded interviews with the Cason family, my interview with Walter Cason, and the Cason manuscript.

209
“Whoring!”
: This may have been the source of Leonard Cason's belief that Josephine had been a prostitute.

210 “
It ought to be another
Gone with the Wind
”
: Josephine Marcus Earp to Harrison Leussler, April 24, 1937, Boyer Collection.
Gone with the Wind
was published in 1936.

212
“You are perfectly right in telling the story of your life”
: Harrison Leussler to Josephine, June 11, 1937, Gary Greene Collection. I have searched for but not located Mabel Cason's original drawings.

213
Leussler immediately sent their draft chapter to Stuart Lake
: Lake told Mabel that he had seen her manuscript, and that he believed he had exclusive rights to all future Earp biographies. Walter Cason unpublished biography of Mabel Cason.

213
The fire was prepared
: Jeanne Cason Laing describes this as a fireplace, Walter Cason as a backyard incinerator.

214
Edna relented and made a small settlement upon her aunt
: Josephine to Flood, September 28, 1940. “I had a letter from Edna three weeks ago last Thursday saying they would give me thirty dollars a month and that I should withdraw the suit and in the same letter Edna wrote me Emil enclosed a note to me telling me that they would settle the oil lease with Getty and they would give me $40 a month back pay.” Ragsdale Collection.

216
he finally had the real story of Tombstone
: Lake to Ticknor, February 24, 1945, Lake Collection.

216
the family of Mrs. Addie Schofield Sinclair
: The Sinclair family lived in Kern County; presumably, Josephine met Addie through the oil business.

221
making movies and publishing books
: For an extensive roundup of books and films related to the Earps, see Paul Andrew Hutton, “Showdown at the Hollywood Corral: Wyatt Earp and the Movies,”
Montana: the Magazine of Western History,
Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer , 1995), 2–31.

221
some 100,000 American soldiers received free paperbacks
: Lake never stopped being his own best press agent. After the war, he asked Houghton Mifflin to send a first edition to the White House at the personal request of President Eisenhower, who (Lake says) became interested in the book while playing golf with some of Lake's friends.

222
old steamer trunks in his mother's basement labeled “Property of Wyatt Earp”
: Kirschner interview with Felton Macartney.

222
John Gilchriese, a devoted historian and collector of all things western
: Kirschner interviews with Walter Cason and Murdock Gilchriese.

226
Gilchriese shared these stories with other people
: See the introduction and notes by William Shillingberg to the catalog of the John D. Gilchriese Collection of Tombstone and the West, auctioned through John's Western Gallery. It is possible that Gilchriese's long-awaited biography, or the notes to it, will someday be published, which will provide an opportunity to verify the stories that Gilchriese claimed to have received from Flood.

227
“That is what Josie was covering from us”
: Mabel to Mrs. William Irvine, February 5, 1959, Boyer Collection.

229
Allie's irresistibly folksy dialect
: See Waters,
Earp Brothers
.

229
Waters later admitted that he had combined Allie's words
: See the Frank Waters Papers, Center for Southwest Research, which include correspondence between Waters and the Arizona Historical Society.

233
This turned out to be . . . John Flood's typed manuscript
: There are many versions and copies of Flood's “original” manuscript. Boyer acquired one that may have been given by Josephine to her niece; he then published this version in a limited edition as 
Wyatt S. Earp: Wyatt Earp's Autobiography
 (Sierra Vista, Ariz.: Loma V. Bissette, 1981), and deposited the original typescript at the Ford County Historical Society. Flood gave other copies to John Gilchriese. Some of Flood's original notes and drawings became part of the Ragsdale Collection; others are in the Boyer Collection at Ford County Historical Society.

233
perhaps he had also bowdlerized the memoirs of Josephine Earp
: For an in-depth comparison of Boyer's
I Married Wyatt Earp
to the Cason manuscript, see ladyattheokcorral.com. Other discussions of the Boyer controversy include Jeffrey J. Morey, “The Curious Vendetta of Glenn G. Boyer,”
Quarterly of the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History
18, no. 4 (October–December 1994): 22–28; Gary L. Roberts,
Trailing an American Mythmaker: History and Glenn G. Boyer's Tombstone Vendetta
(Hamilton, Mont.: Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association, 1998); Gary L. Roberts, “The Real Tombstone Travesty: The Earp Controversy from Bechdolt to Boyer,”
Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association (WOLA) Journal
8, no. 3 (Fall 1999); Tony Ortega, “How the West Was Spun,”
Phoenix New Times
, December 24, 1998; and “I Varied Wyatt Earp,” 
Phoenix New Times
, March 4, 1999. For these and others, see “The Boyer Files,” http://www.tombstonehisto ryarchives.com/?page_id=80

234
“If it isn't Josie, it ought to be”
: Boyer wasn't the only person who thought that the photograph was authentic: Christenne Welsh and Grace Welsh Spolidoro were among those who had insisted that this photograph was Josephine. Jeanne Laing believed that she herself had given the photograph to Glenn Boyer.

235
“My mother and Aunt were aware of the earlier ‘Clum' manuscript”
: Jeanne Cason Laing expressed this idea on many other occasions in recorded interviews. In 1974, when asked by Glenn Boyer about Mabel and Vinnolia's initial reaction to the idea of writing a book about Josephine's life with Wyatt, Jeanne answered that they were very interested and “they knew this had been done before by Mr. Clum.” Boyer fueled the controversy with contradictory accounts of the Clum manuscript over the years, claiming sometimes that he could produce it at will, and at other times that it went missing during his move from Hawaii to Arizona. In more recent comments, he describes the “manuscript” as a “generic term” for source materials.

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader's search tools.

Ackerman, Harold, 201, 205, 208, 209, 211, 214, 222, 223, 226–27

Ackerman, Vinnolia Earp, 8, 10, 11, 137, 201–3, 205, 208–15, 217, 218, 222, 223, 225, 233

Adventure Magazine
, 164

Alaska, 92–134.
See also
Nome, Alaska; Rampart, Alaska; St. Michael, Alaska

      Bering Sea, 105, 108, 111, 115, 120

      boomtowns of, 93, 107, 122, 132–33 (
see also
Nome, Alaska)

      Chilkoot Pass, 94, 95, 128

      Earps in Nome, 107–15

      Earps in Rampart, 96–104

      Earps in St. Michael, Alaska, 104–7

      Earps' trip up the Yukon river, 95–96

      Jewish financing of Alaska mining supplies and ventures, 96 (
see also
Alaska Commercial Company)

      Klondike gold fields, 89, 92, 93, 94, 103, 107

      miners and hardships of, 94

      prices of goods in, 105

      psychological hardships in, 99

      suicide in, 99–100, 254n 100

      travel to, 93

      weather of, 102–3

      winters in, 99, 114–15, 117–18

Alaska Commercial Company, 96, 125–26

      in Nome, Alaska, 112, 123–24

      in St. Michael, Alaska, 105

      Wyatt Earp and, 104, 105–6

Alliance
(ship), 119–20, 255n 119

American West.
See also specific cities and states

      boomtowns of, 9, 29, 42, 75, 93, 135, 138, 256n 136

      common-law marriages in, 37–38, 166–67, 249n 38

      ending of the frontier, 3, 87

      in films, 151–52, 153, 221, 234

      gamblers and, 42, 149

      
Harper's
short story series and, 87–88

      Jewish entrepreneurs in, 42, 70

      lawmen of, 42

      “manifest destiny,” 34

      prostitution in, 7, 36, 42, 47–49, 82, 84–85, 127, 137, 201, 211, 250n 49, 258n 186, 260n 209

      Red Mountain Pass, 72–73

      Stegner on, 8

      television shows about, 222

      travel in, 13

      travel to California, 1860 to 1870, 17

      wagontrains to, 34–35, 249n 34

      women's lives in, 7, 41

      women unacknowledged in histories, 6, 50, 164

      women with occupations, 47

      writings about, 87–88, 175, 183, 199–200, 221 (
see also
Boyer, Glenn;
Frontier Marshal
;
Helldorado
;
Sunset Trail, The
)

      Wyatt Earp as legend, 7, 11, 73, 75, 229

Apaches, 52, 130

Arctic Weekly Sun
, 128

Arizona

      boomtowns of, 29

      Civil War and divisiveness in, 50

      Cochise County, 7, 43, 50

      at Columbian Exhibition, 87

      Indian hostilities in, 52

      lawlessness in, 61

      Prohibition in, 144

      Tombstone as largest city, 28

Arizona Historical Society, 229

Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, 168

Arthur, Chester, 61

Bakersfield, California, 146

Baldwin, Elias Johnson (Lucky), 20, 80–81, 85, 86, 87, 90, 130–31, 132, 144, 256n 136

      death of, 142

      Josephine Earp's wedding ceremony story on yacht of, 85, 253n 85

Barra, Allen, 234

Bat Masterson
(TV series), 222

Beach, Rex, 102, 107, 108, 113, 118, 125, 134, 170, 254n 97

Bechdolt, Frederick, 6, 164, 167, 168

Behan, Albert, 31, 48, 49, 94–95, 165, 169, 208, 209, 257n 165

Behan, Johnny

      Benson stagecoach attackers and, 51

      Bisbee stagecoach attackers and, 52

      Burns' description of, 164

      business ventures in Tombstone, 31, 32

      career after Tombstone, 65–66

      character and personality, 44, 65, 79

      child and marriage of, 25, 26, 28, 30

      Clantons and McLaurys and, 45, 58

      as corrupt, 52, 53, 57

      cowboys, rustlers, and, 44–45, 52, 53, 57

      death of, 66, 148

      as Democrat, 32, 44, 51

      as Deputy Sheriff, 25

      Earp brothers as enemies of, 44

      Earp-cowboy war and, 59

      end of law career, 65

      Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and, 7, 56, 148, 154, 179

      Ike Clanton and, 58

      indictment of Earp for Stilwell murder and, 70–71

      Josephine Marcus and, 210, 212, 250n 46

      lead-up to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 54

      meets Josephine Marcus, 25

      relationship with Josephine Marcus ends, 46–47, 48

      relationship with Josephine Marcus in Tombstone, 7, 30, 31–32, 41–42, 45, 185

      rivalry with Earp, 7, 43–44, 49, 51, 64, 159, 252n 74

      as Sheriff, Cochise County, 7, 43–44, 59, 65

      Spence as associate of, 52

      Stilwell as associate of, 52

      syphilis and, 46–47, 250n 46