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

by Ann Kirschner

  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  I negotiated some tricky pathways that admitted me to important new sources, including the unpublished manuscript of Josephine’s memoir, I Married Wyatt Earp, written with her collaborators Mabel Earp Cason and Vinnolia Earp Ackerman.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.

  1 | A JEWISH GIRL IN TOMBSTONE

  LONG 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.

  Every mile she rode toward Tombstone took her farther from San Francisco and from her life as the daughter of Sophia Lewis and Hyman Marcus, Jewish immigrants who had arrived separately in New York around 1854, escaping the political upheaval and limited opportunities in their native towns in the province of Posen. A large Jewish community, Posen had been partitioned from Poland in the late eighteenth century and absorbed into Prussia, which would eventually become the core of modern Germany.

  Prussian policy rewarded assimilation. Jews were encouraged to convert to Christianity with the carrot of citizenship and the stick of discrimination; many Jewish schools were closed down, and Jews were severely restricted in where they could live, work, and marry. Other Jews were emancipated in 1820—but not the Jews from the annexed region, who were denied citizenship for another generation.

  Class distinctions evolved within the newly expanded population. Some stereotypes came from within the Jewish community itself. German Jews sought to project an image that was secular, sophisticated, and upwardly mobile, in stark contrast to poorer, less educated and worldly Prussian Jews who spoke mostly Yiddish and were more likely to stay stuck at the bottom of the social ladder. Craftsmen or small merchants, they were also most vulnerable to dislocation in a rapidly industrializing European economy.

  In the minds of those given to labels, these Jews were less likely to succeed, more likely to be disparaged as “Polacks.” It was a stubborn prejudice that would survive well enough to be transplanted into the soil of another continent.

  Hyman Marcus had every reason to leave Prussia. His own father, the baker Moses Marcus, had probably received citizenship in 1834, but Hyman faced an uncertain future. He could follow his father’s profession in their town or move to a larger city—perhaps Breslau or Berlin. Or he could start over in England or the New World. Like thousands of other Jews from Prussia, he chose America.

  Hyman booked passage to New York, the most popular and the easiest destination to arrange, even for families or women traveling on their own. Soon after he arrived, he met and married the widow Sophia Lewis, who had emigrated a few years before with her daughter, Rebecca. Sophia and Hyman were married around 1855, and three children followed: Nathan in 1857, Josephine in 1860, and Henrietta in 1864.

  Despite the strangeness of their new country, Hyman and Sophia were comforted by the presence of many other immigrants. They probably settled in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where they would have found the streets filled with Jews speaking German and Yiddish, including many from Posen. The Jewish population of New York City more than tripled in the 1850s, reaching about 60,000 by the end of the decade. Hyman would have been relieved to see an abundance of jobs in food production, especially for bakers and confectioners. One local directory shows that there were nine Jewish bakers preparing “rea
l kosher” matzos for Passover in 1859.

  However, conditions in pre–Civil War years were primitive and dangerous. In Five Points, families crowded together in slums with backyard wooden privies. Outbreaks of typhoid were common. The city’s highest mortality rates were of immigrant children under the age of five. There were public schools, but many immigrant children did not attend classes at all, and were taught at home, or worked side by side with their parents. New York City had a police department, but no professional firefighters.

  The most influential forces in the community, next to the synagogues, were the ten Jewish newspapers that recorded births, deaths, marriages, political meetings, cultural events, and advertisements, vying with Civil War coverage, and with exciting letters from transplanted New Yorkers who had made their way to San Francisco. The West loomed large in the imagination of all Americans and must have been particularly irresistible for immigrant Jews who had come searching for the promised land of economic opportunity, social mobility, and political power, and had not found it in New York. Now San Francisco beckoned to them as a remarkable Jewish success story.

  San Francisco sprang up as a child of the 1849 gold rush. When the output of California gold, so extraordinary in the early years, began to decline, San Francisco thrived because of its harbor and geography, evolving quickly from a village of shanties and wood-frame buildings to a metropolis with a diversified economy that could support a large workforce of skilled and unskilled laborers. San Francisco became the home of an affluent and influential Jewish community, which included retail businesses founded by Levi Strauss and Solomon Gump, as well as the founders of the Wells Fargo Bank and Lazard Frères. Although smaller in absolute numbers than the New York Jewish community, San Francisco boasted a similarly glittering cast of entrepreneurs in retailing and manufacturing, bankers and stockbrokers, and represented a wider range of Jewish economic interests, from fur trading in Alaska to wheat farming, sugar mills, and vineyards.

  With arrivals from England, Australia, Holland, and Russia, as well as the large representation from Germany and Prussia, Jews created a vibrant cultural and religious life within the city, and constructed a sturdy social safety net for those less fortunate, including orphan asylums and services for the elderly. There were five Jewish newspapers, and Jews were active in political life, electing merchant Abraham Labatt as alderman for the new city of San Francisco in 1851. Considerable chest-thumping proclaimed San Franciscan Jews to be the most prominent and prosperous group of Jews in the world, so integrated into San Francisco’s commercial life that steamer service—the city’s vital link to the rest of the world—was suspended on the Jewish high holidays. An enthusiastic editorial in the Daily Alta California lauded Jews for being true Californians, and congratulated the non-Jewish Californians, since “no other part of the world can instance a similar act of liberality.”

  With this encouraging track record of tolerance, plus a temperate climate and booming economy, San Francisco had much to offer an immigrant Jewish family. Hyman Marcus had achieved only modest success as a baker, and he and Sophia were ready to leave the filth and the grinding poverty of Five Points. They had already made the far more difficult decision to leave Europe; the second leg of their family voyage at least would not require another new language and a new continent. It was not uncommon for young and energetic immigrant families to make multiple moves. In fact, rate wars between rival railroads and steamship companies made it actually cheaper for some families to move than to pay the rent.

  The Marcus family made the bold choice to continue west across a continent that was still decades away from regular train service. Together with some 40,000 other people who would travel to California in the late 1860s, they arrived in San Francisco in time to be counted for the 1870 census. While Sophia Lewis’s obituary would later identify her as a California pioneer who sailed around the Horn, the family most likely crossed the Isthmus of Panama, which replaced the dangerous eight-week-long all-sea voyage to become the major artery connecting the East Coast to California and the primary route for transporting gold, mail, news, and packages. Adult passengers watched the scantily dressed Panamanian natives through the train windows, marveled at the rain forests, and exclaimed at the deep canyons and unfamiliar flora and fauna.

  Once the travelers reached the western coast of Central America, they boarded another overcrowded steamship. Josephine, then about eight years old, remembered almost nothing of the journey. Since she tried to eliminate any impression that her family was ever poor, she would have been silent anyway about an unpleasant three weeks in steerage.

  The San Francisco that greeted the Marcus family was still recovering from the 1868 earthquake, but its economy was robust. The chaotic boomtown atmosphere of the gold rush years was gone; schools, community centers, and restaurants replaced brothels and saloons. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 would soon connect San Francisco even more to the outside world. The city was growing up, but it retained a strong entrepreneurial spirit.

  Although Josephine’s new neighborhood was a step up from Five Points, middle-class stability and status still eluded the Marcus family. Josephine would later claim that her father had a “prosperous mercantile business” that gave her a “comfortable and prosperous” home, but all evidence points to a more precarious existence. Hyman was still a baker. Local directories show that the family moved frequently—at least six times in their first ten years in San Francisco, all within the lower-class sections of Ward 4.

  Not all Jews were so sure that the wealth and influence of San Francisco was a good thing. Among the most fascinating portraits of nineteenth-century San Francisco is that of Israel Joseph Benjamin. Born in 1818 in the province of Moldavia (now Moldava and part of Romania), Benjamin had some commercial failures before seizing on the idea that he might emulate the great medieval traveler Benjamin of Tudela and wander the world as an itinerant preacher and commentator on contemporary Jewish life. Supported by donations and hosted by curious local leaders, he traveled extensively throughout the Near East, North Africa, and Europe before sailing to the United States.

  Benjamin saw much to admire in the thriving cultural and intellectual life of American cities. But he was unsparing in his contempt for their emphasis on commercial success and indifference to high culture and scholarship. Repelled by the materialism he saw, he concluded that neglect of learning was the source of all American misfortunes, not only those of Jews. “Will America be able to become a nation of princes without the education of a prince?” he asked rhetorically. In his view, young people who were brought up to be merchants, bankers, farmers, and mechanics were not destined to become independent, compassionate, or intellectual.

  Benjamin devoted one of his longest stays to San Francisco. He observed that the pinnacle of society belonged to the Germans, and the lowest class rungs were the provinces of Polish Jews. He was amazed to discover that when a major fire destroyed two streets and eight large warehouses in San Francisco, the Eureka Benevolent Association, one of several Jewish social services organizations, turned its back on Polish Jews made homeless by the fire. Benjamin related the sad tale of a religious Polish Jew who applied for help to feed his many children. Refused by the board of directors—which included mostly Germans and Frenchmen—he went to an American Christian and told him the story; according to Benjamin, “that person went to the president of the society and shamed him into giving the Pole money.”

  SOON AFTER THE Marcus family arrived in San Francisco, Josephine’s half sister Rebecca married Aaron Wiener, a clothing salesman who was also from Prussia. Josephine never forgot the sight of her father’s stovepipe hat and long tails, her mother’s wine-colored moiré, the bride’s pale silk lavender dress trimmed with white satin, and her own yellow high-button shoes. She recalled her errand to purchase “diamond dust” to sprinkle over the bride’s elaborate, perfumed coiffure. Young Josephine could not resist opening and sampling the precious powder, which spilled out
of the package and blew away.

  Josephine found the strict discipline of school disagreeable, and was not much of a student; her sister Henrietta, known to all as Hattie, was the family’s star scholar. The sisters’ education was, however, a sign that the family had finally risen to the middle class. Neither Josephine nor Hattie was put to work to support the family, nor is there evidence that Mrs. Marcus worked outside the home.

  As a child, Josephine was infatuated with the stage; the abundance of San Francisco theaters and their low ticket prices made it a favorite pastime. Among her closest playmates were the Belasco daughters, whose brother David was already on his way to becoming one of the most famous playwrights of his era. It was a heady time for Jewish performers like Adah Isaac Menckens, who stunned even worldly San Franciscans with her onstage appearance in flesh-colored tights. Rebecca took Josephine and Henrietta to the opening of the Academy of Music, never dreaming that its owner, Elias Johnson (Lucky) Baldwin, would one day be Josephine’s close acquaintance. San Franciscans also loved artists and art; one painting by the Jewish artist Toby Rosenthal was so popular that thousands of people lined up to pay twenty-five cents to see it. When it was temporarily stolen, people filed past to pay their respects to an empty picture frame (it was eventually returned).