Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp

290 Pages·2013·2.92 MB·English

by  Ann Kirschner

| Map

| Dedication
FOR JOEY, MY FIRST HERO
| Epigraph
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose
not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a
little trouble out there.
—Nora Ephron, Wellesley College commencement address I don’t have to
speak, she defends me.
—Robbie Robertson, “Up on Cripple Creek”
| Contents
Map
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue:
In Which I Land on Planet Earp
1
A Jewish Girl in Tombstone
2
The Fourth Mrs. Earp
Photo Insert
3
The Greatest Mining Camp the World Has Ever Known
4
Waiting for Wyatt
5
Josephine’s Last Trail
6
Planet Earp
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Praise
Other Books
Earpnotes
Sources
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue | IN WHICH I LAND ON PLANET EARP
D
ID YOU know that Wyatt Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery?”
Just hearing his name threw me back to my childhood in Jackson Heights,
New York City, sprawled on the floor in front of a black-and-white television,
watching Westerns with my big brother Joey, dressed up in his special shirt with
braided trim and snazzy snap buttons and black cowboy hat and shiny gun in a
faux leather holster slung around his hips. Joey and I tuned in and pretended to
walk the streets of Tombstone every week, together with millions of Americans,
young and old.
Joey was my hero, and Marshal Earp was his.
Brave, courageous, bold . . . and Jewish?
That’s how it all started, just an innocent question from a friend who thought
(correctly) that I would be intrigued by the incongruities between anything
Jewish and anything Tombstone-ish.
This first burst of curiosity about Wyatt Earp’s final resting place and
religion was easily satisfied. I soon learned that Wyatt, the only man to emerge
unscathed from the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, was not Jewish but had lived
with a Jewish woman for nearly fifty years. She buried him next to her parents
and brother in a family plot at the synagogue-affiliated Hills of Eternity
cemetery outside of San Francisco.
And that was my introduction to Mrs. Earp.
As children when Wyatt Earp ruled the airwaves, we didn’t know that he had
a wife, certainly not a Jewish wife from New York. I was a Jew from New York!
So each revelation about a woman named Josephine Sarah Marcus evoked new
images that made me smile, especially the thought of Wyatt Earp going home for
chicken soup after a tough day fighting for truth and justice in the dusty streets
of Tombstone, Arizona.
I quickly became far more interested in Mrs. Earp than in her famous
husband. Contradictions piled up like a freeway collision. How had a beautiful
girl from San Francisco via New York and Prussia ended up in Tombstone?
While the rest of her immigrant family climbed out of poverty and into
bourgeois respectability, why had Josephine run away? What inspired five
decades of adventure-seeking that took her from the Arizona Territory to
California, Nevada, and Alaska, and then, finally, to Hollywood?
The historical record on Josephine was thin. None of the early articles and
books about Tombstone—and there were many—even mentioned her existence.
On the other hand, the history of Wyatt Earp and the Arizona Territory sank
deep roots into the American psyche. Books about Wyatt’s exploits became best
sellers, movies played to full houses, and historical reenactments drew large
crowds. Wyatt Earp was big business, then and now. Try a random Internet
search today, and the O.K. Corral will pop up in a motley assortment of links to
political contests, basketball championships, and stock traders fixing interest
rates. On Wikipedia, the story of Wyatt Earp is told in twenty-six languages, but
Josephine was, until recently, nowhere to be found.
On October 26, 1881, Wyatt, his handsome brothers, and Doc Holliday
strode down Tombstone’s main street and confronted a quartet of murderous
cowboys and thieving cattle rustlers near the O.K. Corral. Less than a minute
and dozens of bullets later, three men were dead and three were injured. Wyatt
Earp walked away without a scratch.
The gunfight never loosened its iron grip on the public’s imagination. For
more than a century it has remained an important symbol of American culture,
evoked in the wake of every contemporary tragedy, from Columbine to Gabrielle
Giffords, an enduring reference point for our national obsession with guns and
violence and revenge. Along the way, “cow-boy” lost the hyphen and mutated
from lawless marauder to the Maverick Man. Tombstone and the O.K. Corral
became intertwined with other powerful themes of American history:
industrialization, urbanization, seismic shifts of attitude toward gambling and
alcohol and prostitution, and the end of the American frontier.
I thought I knew the story. But I knew only one version. The O.K. Corral is a
story with a thousand variations. There is, for instance, the Marxist script that
casts the Earps as the repressive embodiment of a capitalist regime, determined
to impose law and order on the frontier to keep profits flowing. In the
Manichean narrative, Wyatt Earp is a defining figure in the dynamic interplay of
good and evil.
As Josephine and I became better acquainted, I wanted to hear the human
version that restored to its center the real life of one woman caught up in the
frenzied atmosphere of the most famous frontier boomtown. The Gunfight at the
O.K. Corral was a love story, fought over Josephine Marcus, a woman of beauty
and spunk barely out of her teens, escaping the restrictions of birth and seeking
adventure, independence, and romance.
SHE HAD BEEN born on the wrong side of the tracks. For the rest of her life,
Josephine would characterize her father as a “wealthy German merchant,” but
that was one of her cover-up tales. Her mother and father were from Prussia and
subject to the deep-seated prejudices of German Jews against their Eastern
European cousins. They had neither the connections nor the education nor the
wealth to launch their daughter into the highly stratified German-Jewish
aristocracy of nineteenth-century San Francisco.
Although she never experienced anything as dramatic as a spiritual crisis or
loss of faith, Josephine was indifferent to being Jewish and believed that she
could leave her family history behind. As Nora Ephron would memorably say of
herself, Josephine was not in denial; she acknowledged that she was a Jew, but
being Jewish was not in the top five things she wanted you to know about her.
Her few nostalgic references to home were linked to her mother and some
affectionate Yiddish blessings and songs. An accomplished cook, she preferred
biscuits and other southern specialties to the schmaltz of her childhood. She
relinquished all personal ties to Judaism or any organized religion, preferring a
kind of loosely held pantheism that peeked out occasionally when she was
overwhelmed by the grandeur of the Californian desert or the wild Yukon River.
Wyatt Earp had more Jewish friends than she did. In the rough and paranoid
years of her later life, she stooped to label her enemies “kikes” or “sheenies.”
And yet when she confronted her greatest crisis, she turned back to her
family’s faith and buried her husband among the Jews of San Francisco.
Josephine was street-smart and intuitive, playful and fearless and headstrong.
A mixture of naive and sophisticated, she had no interest in politics, and no one
remembered her picking up a book or a newspaper. She yearned to be a lady,
while spending much of her life among gamblers and gunfighters. She was a
man’s woman, with a handful of female friends. None of her husband’s status as
popular culture hero would rub off on her: there would be no television shows or
theme songs about her, no lunch boxes with her image.
Josephine was beautiful. With her spectacular figure, piles of dark hair, and