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

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Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp Page 7

by Ann Kirschner


  As Clara predicted, Tombstone became a “warm place” for the Earps. After a contentious year of conflict and provocation, frontier justice moved swiftly through a thicket of hearings, writs of habeas corpus, arrest warrants, indictments, affidavits, remanded testimony, and jurisdictional disputes. A formal inquest was convened two days after the gunfight. Ten jurors considered the evidence and failed to find against the Earps and Holliday. In disgust, Ike Clanton filed a first-degree murder complaint. Morgan and Virgil, still bedridden, were suspended from duty. Wyatt and Doc were taken into custody. Bail was fixed at $10,000, and was raised by Wyatt’s friends. Doc would probably have languished in jail had Wyatt not urged his friends to help him. Big Nose Kate Elder, contrite over her false accusations, gave Doc most of the $100 she possessed and left town.

  Attorney Tom Fitch, an experienced courtroom lawyer, helped to raise bail for Wyatt and undertook his defense. Fitch’s strategy depended on winning the hearing, and thus avoiding a trial in which Wyatt might confront a jury full of cowboys. Frank and Tom McLaury’s brother, successful lawyer Will McLaury, rushed from Texas to aid in the prosecution of his brothers’ killers. “I think we can hang them,” he assured his sister. At his insistence, bail was revoked for Wyatt and Doc. But the prosecution never recovered from the disastrous testimony of Ike Clanton. He was an unsympathetic witness, rambling and inconsistent, and spoke in a high falsetto voice, “rather like a rusty hinge,” as one observer noted. Fitch outmaneuvered the prosecution by demonstrating that Ike had entered into a secret agreement with Wyatt to hand over the Benson stage robbers in exchange for the reward.

  Fitch pushed Johnny to repeat his grievances against Wyatt and caught him in several lies. Behan testified that he had originally intended to appoint Wyatt as deputy sheriff, but he evaded any explanation of his change of heart, saying only “something afterwards transpired that I did not take him into the office.” He also denied that he had any particular relationship with Ike Clanton; it would be decades before it was known that Behan had secretly underwritten Clanton’s court costs.

  Wyatt’s testimony was far more effective. He used his physical presence to his advantage and read in a sonorous voice from a well-prepared script. Without apology, he disclosed his ambitions to become sheriff: “I thought it would be a great help to me with the people and businessmen if I could capture the men who killed [the stagecoach driver]. . . . I told them I wanted the glory of capturing [the robbers] and if I could do it would help me make the race for Sheriff at the next election.” He also presented impressive character references from his former constituencies in Wichita and Dodge City.

  There were two sides at the hearing, and Josephine was significant to both of them, but her name was never spoken, her existence never revealed. If Fitch or Will McLaury knew about her role in fueling the hatred between Wyatt and Behan, they remained silent. Introducing her story would bring no obvious advantage to either side. It would certainly not have helped Behan to admit his infidelity and jealousy, which would have then been considered as additional motives in his war against the Earps.

  After a month of testimony, Spicer issued a strong verdict acquitting the Earps. It did not matter who shot first, he reasoned, only that the Earps had acted in “discharge of an official duty.” He invited the grand jury to consider new indictments if they disagreed with the decision, but in the meantime, “there being no sufficient cause to believe the within named Wyatt S. Earp and John H. Holliday guilty of the offense mentioned within, I order them to be released.”

  THE EARPS SHOULD have left Tombstone. While they had been vindicated, the outcry from the other side made it clear that Spicer’s decision would hardly stand as the last chapter in the Earp-cowboy war. Virgil and Morgan were now strong enough to travel. Their family in California urged them to come back. Their professional future as lawmen was cloudy: acting governor Gosper had visited Tombstone during the Spicer hearing and believed that Johnny Behan and the Earps should be permanently removed from office.

  But Wyatt resisted the pressure to leave. The brothers had substantial business interests, including a part ownership in the Oriental Saloon and mining claims such as the “Mattie Blaylock,” which Wyatt had filed soon after they arrived in Tombstone. He held on stubbornly to the hope that he might run again as sheriff and defeat Behan. Josephine was still in town.

  The “divided state of society in Tombstone” that Clara Brown observed at the cowboys’ funeral intensified, stoked daily by the town’s two newspapers. The cowboys were rumored to be holding secret midnight vigils, swearing blood oaths against the Earps, who represented everything in government that they most hated. Death threats were made against Spicer and Mayor Clum. Far from having any gratitude toward Earp for saving his life during the gunfight, Ike sought another day in court with new legal representation; Will McLaury left town in disgust.

  Tombstone business interests cared less about justice than they did about resolving controversy and bad press that interfered with the flow of capital. The town’s natural riches could make the county so great, Clara wrote, but for “an element of lawlessness, an insecurity of life and property, an open disregard of the proper authorities, which has greatly retarded the advancement of the place.” In her view, Tombstone was as safe as San Diego or Boston, but the town was getting a terrible reputation. Around the country, leading national newspapers were writing about the gunfight. Even in Australia, there was talk of a “cowboy war” raging in Tombstone between a family of professional gamblers named Earp and a “tribe” known as the Clanton gang. “Goodness knows when it will end,” reported the Australian Town and Country Journal.

  The Earps should have left.

  “Ever since our trouble we have stayed at the Cosmopolitan Hotel and it is very disagreeable to be so unsettled,” Louisa wrote to her sister. Wyatt had heard rumblings of a cowboy hit list and moved the family out of their houses and into the Cosmopolitan, while the cowboys took up residence at the Grand Hotel across the street. The “trouble” had also disrupted the Earps’ businesses, especially now that Ike had begun a new lawsuit. To raise money to cover their legal fees, Wyatt sold his share of the Oriental Saloon and mortgaged his house in a legal document that bore his name as well as that of “Mattie Earp, wife.” But the clock was ticking down the days of their marriage.

  The “Cowboy and Earp feud,” as Endicott Peabody and Clara Brown called it, exasperated the entire town. Ike was defeated a second time in court, but he renewed his public demand for revenge. He’d lost his brother and two friends, his public reputation was shredded, and he had been twice thwarted by the justice system. George Parsons recorded the judge’s decision with a diary entry that “a bad time is expected again in town at any time. Earps on one side of the street with their friends and Ike Clanton [with his supporters] on the other side—watching each other. Blood will surely come.”

  On December 28, Tombstone exploded again. Under the headline “Shooting a US Marshal,” the New York Times reported that “Deputy United States Marshal [Virgil] Earp was fired upon while crossing Fifth Street last night by three men, armed with shotguns, who were concealed in an unfinished building and who escaped in the darkness.” The hail of bullets shattered Virgil’s elbow. According to George Parsons, Virgil was carried away on a stretcher while reassuring a terrified Allie: “Never mind, I’ve got one arm left to hug you with.” Virgil begged Wyatt to stop the doctor from amputating the shattered limb.

  Josephine was still living quietly somewhere in Tombstone. With Wyatt’s every move being watched carefully by the Clanton faction, the lovers would have had little opportunity for a liaison or to make plans for the future. Even exchanging greetings would have drawn Josephine into more danger. She could do nothing but wait.

  DESPITE THE EXPLICIT warnings of the Arizona governor to President Chester Arthur, outlining the persistent “problems of lawlessness” in southeastern Arizona and emphasizing that neither the Earps nor Johnny Behan deserved any law enforcement auth
ority, Wyatt received an appointment as a deputy U.S. marshal to hunt down Virgil’s assailants. He was wearing a badge again.

  Wyatt kept the family indoors and guarded. Virgil had not left his bed at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Morgan, however, was angling for a night out. Wyatt relented and agreed to accompany his brother to the opening night of a comedy at Schieffelin Hall. Surely a night of laughter would do them both some good, reasoned Wyatt. Surprisingly, this cautious man of few words loved the theater. Allie delighted in telling the story of how Wyatt once became so engaged in a performance that he stood up and threatened to draw his gun in defense of a young actor whose fictional character was falsely accused. “That was Wyatt for you,” Allie recalled. “He wasn’t the one to stand by and see wrong done to an innocent boy anytime.” But on March 8, 1882, he should have obeyed his instincts. Instead of staying safely at the hotel, Wyatt and Morgan went to see Stolen Kisses and then finished up the evening with a game of billiards at Hatch’s, a nearby saloon.

  The game had just begun when two rifle shots rang out: one missed Wyatt, but the other tore into Morgan’s right side. He lived for one more hour. Allie Earp had ventured out of the hotel to buy taffy for Virgil, and from a few blocks away she saw the commotion at the pool hall. Tiny Allie crawled between the legs of the men clustered around Morgan to see who had been shot. Wyatt saw her and said, “Allie, you and Doc [Goodfellow] fix up Virge so he can get out. Then I can go get those fellows.”

  Now Wyatt had also lost a brother.

  Morgan’s inquest drew a most unexpected informant. Josephine’s friend Maria testified against her husband, Pete Spence. It had been just over a year since she and Josephine shared gumdrops on the Benson stagecoach. The once-hopeful brides had remained friends in Tombstone, linked by their stagecoach trip and by mutual friends such as the local milliner. Perhaps they had cried on each other’s shoulders for their bad choices of husbands, though Maria’s match was arguably even worse. Pete was beating Maria and her mother, who was living with them.

  Maria spoke out against her husband, telling the inquest jury that they had quarreled after she saw him identify Morgan to another member of his gang as the intended target of an assassination plot. Pete struck her and threatened to shoot her if she told anybody about what she had seen. After she testified, Maria privately warned the Earps that even now, with Morgan dead, the violence was not over. In her memoir, Josephine dramatized Maria’s bravery at the most critical moment of Wyatt’s life: “A dark-eyed young woman—the wife of the outlaw, Pete Spence—slips into Addie Bourland’s [sic] millinery store—and saves the Earp family from annihilation.”

  Morgan’s body was taken by train to his parents in California, accompanied by his brother James. A few days later Virgil and Allie followed, guarded by Wyatt and a small army of his friends. They were expecting trouble. Allie was wearing Virgil’s six-shooter under her loose coat, sitting at his right hand so he could draw the gun at the first sign of trouble. The train pulled into Tucson. While it idled at the station, Wyatt glimpsed the ambush he expected: Frank Stilwell and Ike Clanton, lurking on the tracks. When Wyatt followed the men, Ike ran away, as he had in Tombstone, but Wyatt caught up with Frank Stilwell. Without bothering to be discreet before or after, Wyatt unloaded so many bullets into Stilwell’s body that one observer called him “the most shot up man I ever saw.”

  For the rest of her life, Allie would remember those tense hours at the Tucson train station and Wyatt running alongside the train, holding up a finger and shouting, “It’s all right, Virge. We got one! One for Morg!”

  Knowing that Wyatt was hell-bent on revenge, Allie remembered that they “kept worryin’ about Wyatt” as the train left for San Bernardino without him. He was the only Earp left in Arizona. It would be years before they saw each other again.

  MATTIE AND JOSEPHINE were the last of Wyatt’s entanglements still in Tombstone. There was no room for romance in Wyatt’s life, not now. He put Mattie and James’s wife Bessie on a train to join his family in San Bernardino. With a compassionate farewell, the Tombstone Epitaph noted the departure of the two Mrs. Earps: “They have the sympathy of all who knows them.” Josephine’s departure went unnoticed.

  Wyatt Earp may have been devoid of physical fear, but he sent Mattie off to his parents without an honest word of good-bye.

  FRANK STILWELL’S KILLING marked the beginning of what became known as Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride.

  It was Wyatt’s actions after Tombstone, at least as much as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that sealed his reputation as an implacable avenger. Now he would ride for justice, not for law. He had seen enough of courtroom procedures to conclude that nothing made sense; after all, his attempt to represent the interests of businesses against the unruly and individualistic world of the cowboys had led to this grievous wound to his family. The courts had failed him. Henceforth, justice would be swift, personal, and final.

  Josephine would only learn the details much later, and not from Wyatt. His friends told her how Wyatt and Johnny Behan led different posses around the Arizona Territory for months, sometimes within sight of each other, Behan waving a warrant for Wyatt’s arrest and making a great show of following him, but only halfheartedly trying to capture his dangerous prey, while Wyatt ignored Behan and continued to hunt his brothers’ attackers, one by one, with ruthless precision. Again and again, Wyatt emerged unscathed from savage gunfights.

  The Vendetta Ride was followed closely, especially in Tombstone, where public opinion was divided as to the righteousness of Wyatt’s quest. “The sheriff was at the head of a gang of cowboys, hunting the Earps. A nice community,” was Clara Brown’s sarcastic summation. “The posses have marched and counter-marched until people have become accustomed to seeing armed horsemen upon the streets.” She considered it unfair that newspapers like her own San Diego Union carried lurid accounts of the Frank Stilwell murder, with no mention of the “even more villainous” assassination of Morgan Earp that preceded it. That Wyatt had turned his back on the law was inexcusable, but she urged her readers to consider that “it was not the Earps who first disturbed this quiet, and that their criminal actions since have been from the determination to avenge the murder of a dearly beloved brother.” George Parsons had no sympathy for Stilwell and his associates, and congratulated Wyatt on “a quick vengeance, and a bad character sent to Hell.”

  As Wyatt’s body count increased, his advocates back in Tombstone began to waver in their support. The town’s future was at stake: Would it be remembered for its success as a mining town, or as the seat of terror and anarchy? Even Earp partisans had grown weary of the tension created by the vendetta. “Fine reputation we’re getting abroad,” Parsons worried. He was ever the most bellicose of the Earp supporters, but he had investments to protect. “A regular epidemic of murder is upon us,” declared Endicott Peabody, fearing that the town’s violence would compromise his attempts to expand his congregation and build a new church.

  By April, the killing was over. The groups on horseback broke up, and the exhausted participants staggered back to Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.

  Wyatt’s next steps were uncertain; while the family still had business interests in Tombstone, including the Mattie Blaylock mine, not even he could doubt that the Earps were finished in Tombstone.

  Johnny Behan was done, too, though it would take more time before he left Tombstone. As with Wyatt Earp, opinion would remain sharply divided about Behan’s character and motivation. He gained a coveted place in history as the first sheriff of Cochise. His deputy Billy Breakenridge described him as a “brave and fearless lawman, who could see something good in even the worst of men.” But Earp advocates such as Sol Israel mocked Johnny as a man who was afraid of his own shadow. “The Tombstone pace was a bit too fast for him,” scoffed mayor John Clum.

  Behan never wore a badge again, but he did have a respectable, even colorful career after Tombstone. As a civil servant he was posted to Tampa, then Havana, and lived in China dur
ing the period of the Boxer Rebellion. He had senior political appointments as a customs inspector for the port of Buffalo and warden of Yuma Territorial Prison. He never won another election or married again; his advancing case of syphilis compromised his health, and eventually killed him.

  It was Wyatt, more than Johnny, who remained a controversial figure, forever defined by Tombstone and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. From that time on, the name Earp would set off a chain reaction that would make some cheer, some cringe, and all look around to make sure that there was no gun pointed in their general direction.

  Tombstone marked the end of the Earp brothers’ dream of shedding their law enforcement jobs and becoming a clan of capitalists. The brothers were not given to recrimination against one of their own, nor did they dwell on the past. There was enough blame to go around, but it was Wyatt who had kept the brothers in Tombstone too long, in the mistaken belief that he could win an election against Sheriff Behan. He wanted to leave town with Josephine, and not with Mattie; instead, he left with neither. The family had suffered much, and gained little, in Arizona.

  AFTER THE DRAMA of the Vendetta Ride, a much ballyhooed visit from the commanding general of the U.S. Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, provided a welcome distraction for the people of Tombstone, who must have wondered whether to be gratified or insulted by his surprise to find “such a number of fine looking intelligent citizens in this place so badly thought of outside.”

 

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