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

by Ann Kirschner

  The Earps came to Tombstone to make money. Everyone dreamed of striking it rich, but Wyatt and his brothers knew better than to rely solely on the vagaries of mining. Wyatt’s initial plan was to start a stagecoach line, but he discovered belatedly that the town was already well served. He was not discouraged. “There’s other business here, plenty of it,” he anticipated, and with the help of his solid recommendations from Wichita and Dodge City, he signed on as a shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo, while investing with his brothers in mines, water rights, and gambling concessions. But he still aspired to a position on the law force, like Virgil, who had been named chief of police. In a town like Tombstone, peacekeeping went along with lucrative tax collecting.

  And Tombstone certainly needed lawmen.

  When the Earps joined the community of Tombstone, they encountered the unique social structure of a well-developed boomtown. What looked superficially like a wide-open frontier town was nearly as stratified as Josephine’s San Francisco, albeit along different fault lines. The Earp men mixed among political and business leaders, but they did not socialize with them. They might have a drink with the mayor or the biggest mine owner in town, but they were not invited over for supper. Their common-law wives were shunned, not only because they were poorly educated and living in unions unblessed by judges or clergy but because their husbands were gamblers and saloonkeepers. All legal pursuits, to be sure, and considered essential in a frontier town, but not embraced by polite society.

  Neither Josephine nor the Earps participated in the conventional world of church socials, literary nights, amateur dramatic benefits, and lending libraries, though these were happening all around them. That Tombstone can best be seen through the eyes of a trio of firsthand observers, whose contemporary diaries and letters offer a compelling picture of Tombstone’s aristocracy: Clara Spalding Brown, George Parsons, and Endicott Peabody.

  Clara Spalding Brown came to Tombstone with her husband a few months before Josephine, enduring a stagecoach trip so bad that “nothing short of a life and death matter” would tempt her to travel again during the summer. A talented writer and loyal San Diegan, she began her distinguished journalism career with a series of colorful, keenly observed letters to the San Diego Union. She drew social distinctions with a fine and knowing hand: “There are frequent dances, which I have heard called ‘respectable,’ ” she relayed to her readers; “but as long as so many members of the demi-monde, who are very numerous and very showy here, patronize them, many honest women will hesitate to attend.” Those honest women preferred more exclusive balls with good musicians and refreshments served by “darkies, in imitation of metropolitan style.”

  George Parsons came to Tombstone early in 1880. The eldest son of an affluent and well-educated eastern family of lawyers and bankers, Parsons had been a bank teller in San Francisco and came to Tombstone to chase his dream of striking it rich. He was warmly welcomed into the homes of the mining magnates who were the gentry of the Arizona Territory and the first families of Tombstone. Unlike Brown, Parsons wrote in private about his daily life, mostly short, telegraphic journal entries that registered the weather and political climate and catalogued his business dealings, as well as his social engagements and random observations that interested him, such as the atmosphere of murder and mayhem in Tombstone, or the sight of a lesbian couple embracing in public.

  The third member of this unusual Greek chorus was Endicott Peabody, the future founder and headmaster of Groton, where he would one day teach the school’s most famous graduate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a handsome young newly ordained minister, Endicott enjoyed his cigar and his drink, and riding enthusiastically around Tombstone and its environs, recruiting congregants. A frequent letter writer, he chronicled life in Tombstone for the enjoyment of his friends and family back east, expressing his surprise at the sophistication of Tombstone. Time would tell if he would stand by his early observation: “The gamblers said to be a very decent lot, Cowboys alone bad.”

  The Earp wives lived only a short distance from Brown, Parsons, and Peabody, but they might as well have been a million miles away. They cleaned their houses, socialized among themselves, and made money with Allie’s prize possession, the sewing machine that they used to mend canvas tents for the miners for a penny a yard. Other than Bessie, none of them had children, perhaps in deliberate recognition that babies and boomtowns were not well matched. The Earp women knew nothing of cowboys or politics. They hardly ever visited “downtown,” though it was five minutes away. On one occasion Allie and Mattie ventured out and returned home tipsy, almost too terrified to face their husbands. As Allie recalled:

  Me and Mattie, Wyatt’s wife, wanted to go down and peek in the nice hotels and restaurants. So on a terrible hot morning when the men was away we went and had a good time lookin’. Then we met a friend who gave us a sip of all different kind of wines, some real fine. We got home and in bed all right, and everything would have been jim-dandy but Wyatt and Virgil came home for dinner for the first time during that hot spell. All I remember is waking up and seeing Virgil sittin’ by the bed stiff as a poker and Mattie spillin’ the coffee Wyatt was makin’ her drink.

  “That was our life: workin’ and sitting home. Good women didn’t go any place,” Allie remembered. “Everything was nice if you had money, and we didn’t so it wasn’t.”

  For drifters like Allie and Mattie, attachment to their husbands and extended family was everything. Loyalty was unconditional, and the Earp brothers were beyond anyone’s criticism, though in private, Allie struggled to find anything to praise in Wyatt. She found him serious, self-centered, and intimidating, like Nicholas Earp. Where Virgil was always ready with a joke and a loving word for his wife, Wyatt mocked Mattie’s passivity and may have also complained about her fondness for laudanum, an opium-based painkiller that was a common remedy for toothache or cough or insomnia.

  JOSEPHINE MARCUS BEHAN’S social status was even murkier than that of the Earp wives. She was caught in a netherworld between wife and mistress, stepmother and governess. Johnny continued to escort her to social affairs, where she mixed with couples who were legally married, such as the Dunbars and the Joneses. After all, she argued to Johnny, couples did marry, even in Tombstone. For example, Maria Duarte, her stagecoach companion, had become the lawfully wedded Mrs. Pete Spence. Even James Earp’s stepdaughter had married a local businessman in a legal ceremony, despite the fact that her mother, former madam Bessie Earp, was in a common-law relationship, as were the rest of the Earp women.

  Josephine had the additional complication of being Jewish, which she never hid but never used to bridge her social isolation. Tombstone had an active Hebrew Association, and counted a considerable number of Jews among its mining executives and merchants. German or Polish heritage mattered far less in the frontier, so she was no longer subject to that prejudice. She had no interest in socializing within the Jewish families or meeting any of Tombstone’s eligible Jewish entrepreneurs, but gravitated toward those who played a distinctive role in the frontier—the lawmen and the gamblers. She was friendly with Sol Israel, the Jewish proprietor of the Union News Depot, but in a town where newspapers were extremely popular, everybody knew Sol.

  Josephine’s once clear vision of her future as Johnny’s wife was fading. As she walked through the streets of Tombstone, conducting the ordinary business of picking up her mail, buying groceries, or ordering a new dress, she was known to all as Mrs. Behan. She received her mail under that name, and may have told her parents that they were already married. Her family was far away; although there were several Marcuses listed in the hotel registers of the time, they were most likely traveling merchants, not Josephine’s relatives.

  IN 1881 TOMBSTONE was three years old—and for those keeping score, it was approaching the upper limits of an average boomtown lifespan. True to the timetable, and despite the frantic activity everywhere, the easy days were over. Tombstone’s biggest silver deposits had been mined. Copper was the new
thing; the boom in nearby Bisbee was already siphoning off people and capital investment. California senator George Hearst hired Wyatt Earp to accompany him on a tour of the Tombstone mines; they became friends, but Hearst declined any Tombstone investment.

  Beneath the glittering surface was a city growing carelessly, built on top of a shaky foundation. Disputes over mining and real estate claims kept the city’s lawyers busy. The mines were experiencing water seepage. Sanitation was rudimentary, and fire was a constant concern. Because of the scarcity of water, local editorials warned that the town was a “tinder box, and liable any day to be swept from existence.” Gas lamps were a recent innovation, but they merely illuminated the filthy streets and the rats. Cowboys were running wild, and not the relatively harmless variety known to Wyatt in Dodge City, young cowhands who rode into town after months on the trail, looking to have a good time, make a lot of noise, and return to the range. A more dangerous lot, Tombstone cowboys had friends in high places. Clara Brown defined cowboys as “a convenient term for villains,” and George Parsons considered them a synonym for “rustler” and “desperado—bandit, outlaw, and horse thief.”

  Crime was on the rise. A transaction at a Tombstone bank was a “special event” that called for “special precautions,” noted Endicott Peabody wryly. When entering the bank, “one came to the receiving teller with a pistol near to his hand. The paying teller was still more fortified, while, at the back, on the manager’s desk, lay a pistol; at his side was a gun, and in a box at the other side of the barrier at which a customer of his would be standing was another pistol which, unbeknownst to him, would be pointed directly at his diaphragm.”

  As concern about crime rose, the question of who would be the first sheriff of Cochise County became more pressing. Josephine assumed that the decision was important to her future, since the county sheriff kept the peace but also collected the taxes and the fines. The city fathers passed ordinances against gambling, prostitution, and carrying of firearms, but they were less concerned with the thankless task of regulating public morality in a frontier town than with keeping the peace and raising money for the town’s essential services—including paying the sheriff.

  If it was money that would finally drag Johnny to the altar, then Josephine wanted him to become sheriff of Cochise County.

  Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp openly campaigned for the position. The two men could hardly have been more different. Johnny was a natural politician: he was “Glad Hand” to Wyatt’s “Trigger Finger,” as writer Walter Noble Burns would later characterize their rivalry. “Johnny Behan was friendly, Wyatt Earp was grim; Johnny Behan smiled, Wyatt Earp shot from the hip.” Dark-eyed, short, and round-faced, Johnny was a lifelong Democrat. Wyatt towered over him, tall and athletic, fair and blue-eyed, and staunchly Republican. Johnny represented the interests of ranchers and was a good friend to the cowboys, while Wyatt stood with the miners and town officials and was a close friend of many of Tombstone’s business leaders. As two men-about-town, they competed in horse races and in shotgun competitions. They enjoyed the company of women, though Wyatt tended to be serially monogamous, while Johnny Behan had a soft word and a welcoming smile for all desirable women.

  Eager to avoid a public battle, Johnny Behan offered Wyatt a deal: if he would withdraw from the race, Behan would appoint him as deputy. Wyatt obligingly followed the script, but when Governor John C. Fremont appointed Johnny to the position, the new Sheriff Behan reneged on his offer to deputize Wyatt. Johnny’s double-dealing made permanent enemies of all the Earp brothers.

  Johnny had friends everywhere, and to his detractors, he was far too cozy with the cowboys and rustlers, who resented any restriction on how they lived, how they made a living, and how they entertained themselves. With the population exploding, demand for beef had grown to the point where it was second only to silver as local currency. Cattle thievery was rampant, and among those suspected of being involved in the practice were families like the Clantons and McLaurys, substantial property owners and close associates of Sheriff Behan. As long as Johnny Behan could keep a lid on things, however, and there was an ample supply of beef, the town officials would tolerate some level of cattle thievery.

  In the summer of 1881, things spiraled out of control for Johnny. He was struggling to control violence in the streets in Tombstone, while another explosive situation was building at home. He could no longer pretend to Josephine that he was delaying their marriage until his financial situation became stronger: he was now the sheriff, and making plenty of money. Yet the higher his status rose, the less interest he showed in her.

  Josephine was still calling herself Mrs. Johnny Behan, but the title had long turned sour. Eighteen eighty-one was not destined to be an auspicious year for Mrs. Behan, or for the city of Tombstone.

  THAT SUMMER WAS unbearably hot. With stifling days that Clara Brown called “wringoutable,” the city was buffeted by dust storms that swirled through it like a gritty fog, and endured ferocious nighttime thunderstorms that delivered no rain. On June 22 the town was struck by a major fire that began in a barrel of whiskey and then roared through the main part of town, consuming four square blocks, destroying dozens of stores and restaurants, and causing major damage to the Cosmopolitan and Grand Hotels. Firefighting resources were woefully inadequate, and ironically, Mayor Clum was away pricing new equipment. Among the injured volunteer firefighters was George Parsons, who was caught under a collapsing roof and had a nasty encounter with a stick of wood that pierced the left side of his face. Clara Brown’s bank was destroyed, a financial loss from which many depositors (including Clara and her husband) never fully recovered.

  The town immediately began to rebuild, using adobe rather than wood whenever possible and raising money for fire equipment and an emergency supply of water. The newly organized “Rescue Hook and Ladder Company” was inaugurated with a grand ball to raise money, but attendance was disappointing; most women had already left town to avoid the summer heat. “Now is the time when the fashionable dame packeth her Saratoga and departheth for some haven in the East or West outside the precincts of Arizona,” Clara Brown explained. The only women left in Tombstone were what she called the SAH or the “stay at homes,” who would have loved to escape Tombstone’s baking temperatures with a vacation in the mountains, but were deterred by illness or fears of an Indian attack.

  When the rains finally came, floods overran the badly designed Tombstone streets. “We’re in a bad way in town,” George Parsons wrote in his diary on August 25. “Eggs and potatoes gone and flour getting scarce owing to the wash-outs. No mail at all and things generally are in a deplorable condition.”

  Josephine was not affected directly by the fire, and any distraction from her personal woes was fleeting. She had no money and no wedding ring. She could no longer tell herself that Johnny Behan intended to marry her. She left their home briefly, possibly to accompany Albert to consult with a doctor, but this good deed met with no reward. She returned home to discover Johnny Behan with another woman.

  She had been slow to acknowledge the reality behind Johnny’s reputation as a womanizer, so indiscriminate that one of his drinking buddies joked that he’d seen a horse that reminded him of Johnny, always trying to get at the mares. There may have been several lovers and prostitutes competing with Josephine that summer, but one likely candidate was Emma Dunbar, wife of Johnny’s business partner and friend, John Dunbar, who either did not know about their dalliance or simply didn’t care, since the couple remained together. Emma stayed in touch with Johnny Behan for years afterward, writing to him with a playful intimacy long after they’d both left Tombstone.

  Josephine was not inclined to be so forgiving. Whether she confronted Johnny about another woman or discovered the disturbing signs that Johnny had contracted syphilis, her situation had become dire. It was time for her to leave Johnny. Her next steps were less obvious: her parents would be appalled if she returned home for a second time without a husband. But if she wanted to s
tay in Tombstone, she would have to find some means of support. Although she was reasonably well educated for a woman of her time, she had no profession or independent source of income.

  Models for financially independent women were rare in Josephine’s experience. She hadn’t known any self-supporting Jewish women in San Francisco. On the frontier, things were different. She had seen for herself the example of Pauline Markham, who made a comfortable living as an actress and theatrical producer. Tombstone had a number of successful women. Josephine undoubtedly knew about Nellie Cashman, who built a string of frontier businesses, including a restaurant and grocery store in Tombstone. Josephine’s friend Addie Borland ran a millinery shop. Clara Spalding Brown was a freelance writer. But Josephine was only too aware of her limitations. She was no actress or writer, and had more interest in wearing fine clothes and dining in restaurants than in running a retail establishment.

  The most common occupation for a woman in Tombstone was prostitute or performer. Or both: many of the more attractive prostitutes also performed at the theaters and dance halls in town. Tombstone’s sex trade was regulated by the city, with license fees and fines that went into the town treasury. Prices were set according to age, ethnicity, and privacy. At the bottom of the ladder were the women who worked alone in the “cribs,” crude little shacks with room for a bed and chair. Rates ranged from twenty-five cents for Chinese, black, and Indian women to fifty cents for Mexican women, with higher rates for French and American women. In madam-operated parlor houses, the women charged $15, with a premium for overnight stays or special requests. The most popular prostitutes could make up to $150 per week in private rooms lavishly appointed with fancy furniture and drapery. However, even for the high-priced women carrying engraved calling cards with French names, there were high rates of alcoholism, disease, violence, and suicide. Many of the women were addicted to laudanum. Prostitutes were subject to weekly medical inspections by Dr. George Goodfellow, an Ohio-trained surgeon who treated the women with compassion and skill. His real specialty was gunshot wounds, but he was also the local abortionist.