About six weeks after Sherman’s visit, another fire struck the beleaguered city, and this time the destruction was still more devastating. The long-suffering citizens of Tombstone had rebuilt before, and they were sure that they would rebuild again, but now the town’s foundation was shaken to the core. The recent history of lawlessness, constant fires, and threats of Indian attack were all factors in Tombstone’s demise, but what finally doomed the town was that the silver was running out, and the mines were filling with water. Labor unrest was growing, and wages were falling. The railroad came tantalizingly close . . . and then terminated, less than fifteen miles away.
Those who had come to Tombstone with vague notions of adventure and wealth began to leave, most of them no richer than before. Gamblers, prostitutes, and saloonkeepers moved on to ply their trades in the next boomtown. By the fall of 1882, even some of the town’s leading citizens were moving on, including the memorable trio of Peabody, Brown, and Parsons.
Endicott Peabody never had intended to stay very long, and he grew bolder in his dislike of the place. “O unfortunate! To contemplate a sojourn in such a country,” he warned a prospective settler. The inhabitants are “rotten,” he said, and life there is “crude,” dismissing the whole lot of Tombstoners in his sweeping indictment. Yet he never wavered in his good opinion of Wyatt Earp. “YOUNG MAN,” elderly Peabody raised his voice in rebuke of a whippersnapper who inquired if the distinguished educator and clergyman really approved of “such men” as Wyatt Earp. “I don’t think you realize the kind of person we needed as law officers 60 years ago,” Peabody lectured. “The Earps were very good law officers.”
Clara Brown was the next to depart. She and her husband had lost their nest egg after the destruction of their bank in the June 1881 fire. “All feel that this is a place to STAY in for a while; not a desirable spot for a permanent home,” Clara predicted early in her residence. Now that it was time for her to leave, she vowed to remain a booster, declaring that Tombstone still had a bright future as a good place to make money, despite being “so gloomily named a town.”
The last to leave was George Parsons, who stayed for a few more years before moving to California. For the rest of his life, he would defend the Earps as “a benefit and a protection to the community.” He would continue to cross paths with Wyatt in far-flung places, and would remain his loyal admirer, though he remained resolutely silent on the subject of Josephine Marcus.
Tombstone deflated as quickly as it had expanded. When the biggest mines closed down in 1886, half the population fled in just six weeks.
For Josephine and Wyatt, Tombstone would remain forever the wellspring of their romance, despite the violent contradictions of that complicated time when she belonged to Johnny Behan and fell in love with his rival, and when Wyatt’s family peace was shattered forever.
For now, she was Josephine Sarah Marcus again, back in her parents’ home in San Francisco.
Mattie Blaylock Earp was in San Bernardino, California, with the other Earp wives.
Both of them were waiting for Wyatt.
2 | THE FOURTH MRS. EARP
JOSEPHINE’S SECOND return home was as ignominious as her first. From her parents’ point of view, she accomplished nothing in Arizona other than embarrassing love affairs. She had been in contact with her parents during her brief career as Mrs. Behan, but it must have taken some serious talking to explain that she was now in love with Behan’s archenemy, the subject of so many lurid stories in their local newspaper.
The contrast between her home in San Francisco and the lethal but exciting world of Tombstone was even more jarring to Josephine than before. Yet her family hoped that she would settle down, and perhaps be more like her siblings, who had done a much better job of meeting their parents’ expectations. Josephine’s older half sister Rebecca had married Aaron Wiener and was raising a Jewish family. Nathan was still in school, though he was not much of a student and seemed to have little ambition. Younger sister Hattie was a charming young girl of seventeen, with large blue eyes and light hair. An up-and-coming businessman named Emil Lehnhardt, who was also from an immigrant family, was courting her, and so far he had expressed no strange plans to conquer the frontier West.
It was hard for Josephine to predict what her future might be with Wyatt, but it wasn’t likely to fall into a pattern that anyone in the family would consider normal.
No one would blame Josephine’s mother and father for wanting to lock her in her bedroom. Within a few weeks of having seen one brother assassinated in front of his eyes, and another crippled for life, Wyatt had killed at least three men. During his reign of terror, he lived for months in a shadowy jurisdiction where he was both outlaw and lawman, his posse circling around Behan’s like hungry wolves. By the end of the Vendetta Ride, Wyatt and his friends were confronting the more mundane work of figuring out their futures. They left their horses in Arizona and crossed into New Mexico. There was money to be divided—the remainder of the funding Wyatt had received from the U.S. marshal and Wells Fargo—and debts to be settled. Wyatt stayed with his friend Henry Jaffa, a prominent Jewish merchant from Colorado and New Mexico, who gave Wyatt a coat to replace the one he was wearing, now full of bullet holes and covered in the filth of the trail.
Wyatt and his men had been on horseback for a long time, and tempers were short. Doc Holliday caused the most commotion; he had an irrepressible tendency to rage, especially when he was drunk, which was most of the time. One night, he went too far. Wyatt was becoming “a damn Jew boy,” he complained. Doc also hinted that he had given money to “Behan’s woman,” which would later fuel speculation that Doc had been intimate with Josephine, though he might also have been referring to Behan’s expensive prostitute, Sadie Mansfield.
Doc’s ill-timed insult was a distraction that soon blew over. But it signaled bigger problems that would soon divide the friends forever, with Josephine again in the middle.
Behan was pushing for Wyatt’s extradition back to Arizona to stand trial for the murder of Frank Stilwell. Colorado governor Frederick Pitkin was pressured from all sides, but was ultimately swayed by George W. Crummy, an influential saloonkeeper who allegedly ran gambling houses in partnership with Pitkin and may have been an associate of Bat Masterson. Together, they managed to lift the Stilwell indictment permanently. If Bat could have helped Wyatt without assisting Doc, he probably would have, as Bat had little respect and no affection for Doc. But the cases were inextricably linked, and so both Wyatt and Doc benefited from Bat’s timely intervention.
With the legal situation settled, Wyatt’s Tombstone chapter was closed. Turning his back on Mattie, Wyatt headed for San Francisco. Virgil was there, consulting with doctors about his shattered elbow and meeting with Wells Fargo, who presented him with a large gold five-pointed star for his efforts to keep the peace in Tombstone.
Josephine was also there, waiting for Wyatt. Whatever commitments he offered were enough for her. Without any wedding ceremony, Josephine was ready to leave San Francisco with him.
Perhaps her parents had grown accustomed to Josephine’s bewildering changes of suitors. Wyatt had none of Johnny Behan’s unctuousness, and unlike Aaron Wiener or Emil Lehnhardt, he had little to offer in the way of a secure future. At least Johnny Behan had presented himself as a lawman with some business interests. The glibness that greased his path through politics would have come in handy when wooing prospective in-laws.
Between Wyatt’s compelling physical presence and Josephine’s obvious determination to attach herself to him, Hyman and Sophia Marcus probably made little attempt to stop Josephine from leaving home a third time. Of all their children, Josephine would always be the most unconventional.
JOSEPHINE BEGAN THE next phase of her life in Utah, excited about leaving San Francisco with Wyatt and staying in elegant hotels. In her memoir, she invested some of her first encounters with unusual significance. In Salt Lake City, she listened thoughtfully to an impromptu tale of woe from a Mormon hotel maid,
who poured out her heart about her childless marriage. Her husband cast her aside for a second, and then a third wife, until at last one of her rivals delivered a child. From Utah, Josephine traveled to Colorado, where she stayed at the luxurious Tabor Hotel, owned by a wealthy industrialist and his beautiful young wife, the improbably named Baby Doe. Although she could not have known it at the time, the glamorous Tabors would come to a sad end, and Baby Doe would die in despair and debt. Josephine would have much in common with both women: the barren maid and the impoverished widow.
But for now, Josephine cared only for her immediate happiness. After her furtive days in Tombstone, she was exhilarated to be openly acknowledged as Wyatt’s woman by his closest associates, especially Bat Masterson and his wife Emma. They made a congenial foursome. Emma had also taken a turn on the stage, and she and Josephine became good friends. Josephine was immediately taken with Bat Masterson’s “Irish blue eyes and long curling eyelashes” and listened eagerly to his explanation of why Wyatt felt compelled to “clean up” the frontier by comparing him to a “fastidious housewife” who “hates dirt and untidiness in her home.” For his part, Bat openly admired Josephine and compared her to the celebrated actress Jefferys Lewis, who happened to be performing nearby, and joined them one night for dinner. Josephine professed not to see the resemblance, other than the basics of another “dark-eyed young woman with smooth skin and rosy cheeks,” but she glowed under his flattery.
The Earps traveled alone to explore the silver fields of Idaho, via Ouray, Colorado, and then across the Rockies. Anticipating the rigors of crossing the 11,000-foot Red Mountain Pass, still covered in snow despite the late spring, Wyatt suggested that Josephine exchange her skirts for overalls. She was horrified at first—what would the hotel guests and employees think!—but finally agreed. Over her trousers Josephine added layers of sweaters and a heavy dark coat, scarf, and gloves, all in different blue tones, and then climbed aboard a frisky mule for the long walk over the rocky ridges. A parting gift from Mrs. Masterson, Dickie the bright yellow canary made the crossing too, tenderly fed from Josephine’s hand and kept warm in a carefully wrapped cage. At the summit they surprised three reporters, two from Chicago and one from Denver. Josephine’s initial embarrassment turned to pleasure when they waxed poetic about the apparition:
“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” said one. “Here we’ve been trudging through this stood-on-end wilderness of snow all day without seeing a soul, when suddenly out of the skies a brown-eyed goddess appears—”
“Riding on a donkey—” added the second.
“With a blond Apollo to push it along,” the man from Denver finished.
The reporters were still more tantalized to discover that the “blond Apollo” was actually Wyatt Earp, whom they believed to be a fictional character from a Western thriller. The reporters kept their promise to send their article, a “glowing account” that recorded the chance encounter as a highlight of her early life with Wyatt: overalls, canary, and all. It was not the last time that Wyatt Earp would surprise someone expecting a legend, not a man.
The couple went separate ways in the summer of 1883 to attend to matters of friendship and family. Wyatt returned to Dodge City, Kansas, at the request of his friend Luke Short, who was embroiled in a legal tussle over his right to operate saloons and whorehouses. As part-owner of the Long Branch saloon, Luke felt that he had been unfairly targeted by newly imposed “moral” ordinances, and he called upon his friends, the most famous gunfighters in the West, to show their support by returning to Dodge City. Not a shot was fired. Instead, what would become known as the Dodge City War Peace Commission resulted only in a famous photograph of Wyatt with Bat Masterson, Luke Short, and others. The reunion was a pleasant one for Wyatt, as was the new lesson that he could win battles by using his reputation and his famous stare, and just the glint of a gun.
Josephine went home to San Francisco for the wedding of her sister Hattie to Emil Lehnhardt, happy to exchange her Rocky Mountain overalls for beautiful dresses that showed off her fine figure and the healthy glow of these joyous first months with Wyatt. It was July 5, 1883, barely three months since she had left home, but the pace of her life—Salt Lake City, Denver, crossing the Rockies—must have been startling in comparison to the relatively staid life of her sisters in San Francisco. As the new wife of a pillar of the Oakland community and a director of the Unitarian Church, Hattie was on a solid path to respectability, stability, and prosperity. Her husband had come to California from New York around the same time as the Marcus family, and was building up a candy manufacturing business, which was already prosperous enough for him to present Hattie with her wedding present: a beautiful large house on Telegraph Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street in Oakland.
Back on the road with Wyatt, Josephine began using the name “Mrs. Earp” as early as December 1883, when she registered at the Washington Hotel in Galveston, Texas. She had discovered a newfound ability to move gracefully between the worlds of her Jewish parents, affluent sister, and frontier husband. However, no matter where she went, so did the shadow of Tombstone. In Fort Worth, Will McLaury glared at Wyatt when they met accidentally: a man of words rather than bullets, Will would not take his desire for revenge beyond legal limits, but his fury was still fresh. Still worse was a close encounter with the previous Mrs. Wyatt Earp. Mattie was reportedly visiting Big Nose Kate in Globe, Arizona, when the new Mrs. Earp passed through.
Mattie Earp had finally figured out that Wyatt was not coming back to her. After an unbearably awkward period of living with his parents, she left Colton. Not much is known about her whereabouts for the next few years. However, she apparently had the bad luck to visit Globe just when Josephine and Wyatt showed up. Josephine would have found it gratifying when one of the local papers said that “besides being very handsome, [Josephine] is certainly a lady anywhere.” For Mattie, the sight of Josephine, young and beautiful, sashaying around in her finery may have been the final blow that triggered her tragic last chapter.
THERE WAS ALWAYS a new boomtown. Some secret signal seemed to emanate from them, drawing prospectors and those that fed off them.
The new mining sensation of the day was Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The Earp brothers—minus Morgan and Virgil—reassembled there in nearby Eagle City. As they had before, Wyatt and James dabbled in law enforcement, saloon keeping, real estate, and mining. Wyatt was elected the deputy sheriff of Kootenai County and handled legal threats from claim jumping to at least one murder case. He also took on a new role as innkeeper of the popular White Elephant. “Wyatt Earp escorted us to the rear rooms of his large establishment,” recalled one guest. “He hailed from Arizona, where several brothers [of the Earps] had been partners, and were cattle kings.” Tombstone was hundreds of miles away, but half-truths about Wyatt Earp were following him, hovering close to the surface.
The Idaho boom was short-lived, however, and the Earps were soon on the move again. Wyatt was working for Wells Fargo for the first time since Tombstone. His work took them all around Texas, including El Paso, Austin, and San Antonio. At Laredo, they crossed into Mexico, where Wyatt became so absorbed by a street card game that he failed to notice a pickpocket, who made off with the gold watch that had been a gift from Senator George Hearst. “They’ve touched me,” he exclaimed, chagrined by his own lack of street savvy.
Josephine’s acting days were behind her, but she continued to try on various roles. As they traveled through the farmlands of Texas, she romanticized the simple life of the farmers whose fields and modest cabins she observed through the train windows. Could she be a farmer’s wife? That required a leap of imagination for the lively consort of an itinerant lawman and gambler. But she also dreamed about being a respectable lady of means, like her sister Hattie.
In the spring of 1885, Josephine and Wyatt were staying in Denver’s Windsor Hotel, visiting from Aspen, where Wyatt had invested in a saloon. Tombstone came walking toward them, in the form of Doc Holliday. Shockingly thin, unste
ady on his legs, coughing continually, Doc found it difficult to talk, but he had learned that Wyatt was there, and was determined to see him again. Doc would soon be moving to a sanatorium in Glenwood, Colorado, where he would spend his final days, still drinking a bottle for breakfast and dispensing sardonic commentary from his bed.
Doc clung to Wyatt, as if to derive strength from hanging on his arm. Touched by Doc’s condition and its immediate effect on Wyatt, Josephine put aside any lingering resentments. This was Doc, whose irrepressible bad-boy behavior had often riled people up against the Earps, but it was also Doc who once saved Wyatt’s life in Dodge City.
Wyatt’s loyalty to Doc would remain nearly inviolate. Asked decades later in a legal deposition “whether Doc was somewhat of a notorious character in those days?” Wyatt answered memorably: “Well, no. I couldn’t say that he was notorious outside of this other faction trying to make him notorious.”
It was too late for any of them to pretend that Doc would recover; his tuberculosis had advanced to its final stage.
“Isn’t it strange,” Wyatt reflected. “If it were not for you, I wouldn’t be alive today, yet you must go first.”
Doc died on November 8, 1887. He was thirty-five years old.
UNLIKE TOMBSTONE OR Coeur d’Alene, it would be land, not silver or gold, that defined the next boomtown: San Diego. The combination of great climate, excellent harbor, and train service created “the best spot for building a city I ever saw,” in the words of Alonzo E. Horton, the founder of “new” San Diego. Backing up his own predictions, Horton bought nearly a thousand acres, and watched property values explode as the population grew from 5,000 to about 35,000 from 1885 to 1887. Railroad rate wars brought prices down to irresistible lows; a round trip from Chicago plummeted from $150 to $1.
Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp Page 8