It was Virgil who convened the Earp clan in San Diego. He and Allie had visited the city, and as he had in Tombstone, he saw the possibilities immediately and sent for his brother.
For three years Josephine and Wyatt had been nomads, sometimes staying in luxurious hotels but more often in crude boardinghouses in backwater boomtowns that sputtered out after less than a year. San Diego offered the prospect of glamour and sophistication, perhaps a place worthy of a permanent residence. For once, their Tombstone connections elevated their status: San Diego native William J. Hunsaker had once chased the dream of silver in Tombstone but was now a prominent lawyer back in his hometown. Wyatt also connected again with his former lawyer, Tom Fitch. With their help, Wyatt became an active real estate investor and prominent citizen of San Diego.
The Earps’ greatest real estate investments and social success would come during these years. Wyatt was listed in the San Diego City Directory of 1887 as a “capitalist,” with real estate holdings that covered two city blocks. He owned several gambling places, but spent most of his time at the Oyster Bar in the Stingaree District. He judged horses and refereed fights at the Escondido Fair. He also traveled down to nearby Tijuana, where anything too wild for San Diego ended up: day-long festivals featured cockfights, bullfights, and epic prizefights that could go seventy-five rounds or more. The Tijuana weekends attracted thousands of attendees, packing the railroad trains so full that people sometimes had to delay their return until the following Tuesday or Wednesday.
The highlight of the San Diego real estate boom was the development of Coronado Island. A special beach railroad carried prospective investors and sightseers from the ferry to the site of the construction. Josephine was there when the first lots were auctioned from a big tent, and it did indeed seem like a circus to her. She also saw the foundation of the “great rambling structure” of the Hotel del Coronado, and attended the opening gala, at which Lily Langtry performed.
Bat Masterson turned up in San Diego. He was working as a detective and recruited Wyatt to join him on a quick trip to bring back a murder suspect. Josephine joined them, and they spent a pleasant day in Ensenada, notable for a great Mexican dinner and some jewelry shopping, and soon they were all back on board the small boat to San Diego with their prisoner. It turned out to be a memorable trip because of an altercation that occurred not with the fugitive but with the captain of the ship, who demanded that Josephine and Wyatt vacate their cabin to make way for the general of the Mexican army and his staff. Wyatt refused.
Considering the men that Wyatt had killed as sole judge, jury, and executioner during the Tombstone Vendetta Ride, Josephine could not help reflecting on this unexpected showdown. She was confused and sleepless in their cabin, while Wyatt slept like a baby. Her husband had always stood on the side of the law, but this time she believed he had been in the wrong; the captain was the master of the ship, and surely his jurisdiction put everyone under an obligation to follow his orders. Wyatt defended his actions:
“When laws are made, Josie,” he explained, “and certain powers are entrusted to a man, it is expected that the man will measure up to his trust; that he will play no favorites in the use of that power. That captain is too small for his job. He demanded that we give up our rights so that he could favor someone he wanted to impress. He was outside of his rights in that and I couldn’t keep my self-respect except by refusing. If it should come before a fair court, I would be upheld by the law and he knew it or he wouldn’t have let me get by with it.”
“Well, I could see his point clearly enough,” she reflected, “but I still would not have had courage to defy the captain of the ship in strange waters. I’d still be willing to let the brass buttons have the right of way.”
This was as close to doubt or disapproval about Wyatt as Josephine ever went. The captain with his brass buttons who was “too small for his job” sounded a lot like Johnny Behan. Wyatt’s definition of justice allowed him to select those legal requirements he would obey. Self-confidence and real-time decision-making were essential to Earp ethics: decide now, and hope for a smart judge later. Josephine did not criticize Wyatt, but neither was she wholeheartedly endorsing his philosophy.
WYATT’S LAW ENFORCEMENT assignment with Bat was a temporary distraction from what Josephine loved best about San Diego: horseracing. The sport provided a substantial source of income and delight for Wyatt, plus a dangerous new passion for Josephine. “He bought only one car in his life,” Josephine noted, but he never lost his childhood love of horses. She was talking about her own inclinations, as well as Wyatt’s, when she observed that “this love of horseflesh, coupled with his susceptibility to the wiles of Lady Luck, formed a combination that made it almost inevitable that at some time during his career the horse-racing game should claim him.” Their first racehorse, Atto Rex, was Wyatt’s prize in a high-stakes poker game. His prowess as a stable owner grew from there. When his horses were successful, Wyatt enjoyed buying gifts of jewelry for Josephine: once, it was a beautiful ruby bracelet; another time, a sparkling brooch in the form of a peacock encrusted with diamonds.
Josephine liked traveling around the California racing circuit and being a welcome guest in glamorous hotels, like Hollenbeck’s in Los Angeles, which attracted many of the Arizona old-timers, and Lucky Baldwin’s hotel in San Francisco. She knew the name and age of every horse, and crooned to them in their stables. Wyatt sometimes rode the horses to victory himself, but as their stable grew, they hired some of the best jockeys of the day and outfitted them in the Earp racing colors—navy blue polka dots on a white field.
As they became entrenched in this new life, Josephine felt protected from the terrors of Tombstone. Horseracing was her bridge to a wonderful new social life. Unlike the boomtown gambling halls, there was a place for women at the San Diego racetrack. Josephine eagerly stepped into a more public role in this exciting tableau, wearing elegant clothes and jewelry and drinking champagne. Still the common-law wife of a celebrated gunfighter, saloonkeeper, and stable owner, she relished her new freedom and social status. Her aspirations rose still higher through her friendship with Elias Jackson Baldwin, already famous as “Lucky” Baldwin. Although considerably older than both of them, Lucky became one of the few friends who would be as close to Josephine as to Wyatt.
Born in Ohio, Lucky Baldwin came to California by wagon train. Everything he touched seemed to succeed, especially his major bet on the Comstock silver mines. With an immense fortune to invest, and an outsize ego to match, he turned from mining to real estate in the 1870s, and became one of the biggest landowners in the country, with over 63,000 acres in California alone, as well as a major owner of thoroughbred racehorses, which competed under the banner of his Rancho Santa Anita.
Lucky never swore, never drank, and never bet on his own horses, though he was always ready to stake a friend or throw a major bundle at a promising investment. He admired Wyatt—they met as two celebrity gamblers and real estate investors—but he adored Josephine. Apparently they were not lovers, though Lucky was a notorious rake who chased women as compulsively as he acquired land and horses. He was eventually married four times, and would face more than one angry challenge at the end of a gun barrel for his extramarital exploits.
Wyatt expressed less jealousy about Lucky’s propensity to buy gifts for Josephine and lend her money to place bets on the horses, and more concern about Josephine’s gambling debts. “Are you game enough to take our losses too?” Wyatt asked, probing this new recklessness. She knew that fortunes were up and down, Josephine protested, and her gambling was only a way to spend more time with Wyatt.
But the reality was far more troubling. Wyatt appreciated the difference between betting as a compulsion and as a livelihood. His concern seemed justified by Josephine’s actions one night, when he returned to their hotel uncharacteristically drunk. Josephine waited until he fell asleep and stole his wallet, thick with the day’s receipts from the saloon (including money from Wyatt’s partners) and
designated for a real estate investment the next day. Josephine counted its contents over and over, marveling at the first $500 bill that she had ever seen. Pretending that she was committing a crime, she filched $10. Deciding that she might as well increase her stake, she took $20, then $50, then $100, giggling to herself all the while. However, Wyatt was not too hung over the next day to forget the exact contents of his wallet. Under his rather mild questioning, which included an offer to give her an equal sum for her own purposes, Josephine confessed all and gave him back the money.
This incident ended with Josephine’s promise to be more careful. Her resolution to “bet smarter” had a ring of sincerity—but it did not stick. She continued to rely on Lucky Baldwin as her banker and pawnbroker. To cover her mounting losses, she borrowed money from him, using her jewelry as security. Wyatt bailed her out and retrieved the gifts he had given her, but finally he lost patience, perhaps also concerned that Josephine was testing the limits of Lucky’s valuable friendship.
Josephine submitted to a lecture—the sternest Wyatt would ever give her in their life together. “You’re not a smart gambler,” Wyatt told her. “You have no business risking money that way.” He warned her that he would no longer redeem her jewelry.
“That woke me up,” she reported in her memoir, seemingly chastised. Her banker backed out: Lucky confirmed that he was under orders from Wyatt not to loan her any more money for betting.
JOSEPHINE RETURNED LESS often to San Francisco, and for a while, her ties to the Marcus family seemed to loosen. But her happiness was far from complete.
Josephine was furious to discover Wyatt’s ties to San Diego brothels like “the Golden Poppy,” where prostitutes dressed in colors that matched the paint of their respective rooms, just a few steps upstairs from his successful Oyster Bar and Gambling Hall. Wyatt’s absences from San Diego grew more frequent when he opened a saloon in Harqua Hala, Arizona, an emerging boomtown, where he drew openly admiring glances from women wherever he went. He also returned to Colton, California, at least once to see his parents, a nine-hour train ride on the recently completed Southern Pacific line that had connected San Diego to the rest of California.
While he was away, Josephine would open his mail, ostensibly to answer his fans, but also to “nip any unwelcome contact in the bud.” She knew just the type of good-looking, intelligent women that he liked. The fact that he was not her legal spouse did not inhibit her from acting like a jealous wife. “While I was proud when women noticed my husband,” she declared, “I realized that he was human and not all of the attentions with which they showered him were sprung from unmixed motives.” They were nearing the ten-year mark of their relationship, and had designed a “little custom” that she considered key to domestic peace. When she lost her temper, which was often, Wyatt just grinned until her good humor was restored. But if her fury crossed some threshold of intensity, he would take his pipe and hat and walk out. She then wrote down the rest of her angry speech and left it for Wyatt to find. He called the notes her “love letters,” which gave her the privilege of the “last word.”
It must have worked, because when it was time to leave San Diego, they were a united couple again. Their departure was not because of marital problems but the result of a major collapse of the real estate market. San Diego had its boom, which was followed by the inevitable bust. Wyatt’s substantial holdings in the Stingaree district were affected first. As the general business climate began to sour, moral outrage over the libertine atmosphere grew and the clamor for reform became a convenient political issue that temporarily obscured the dangers inherent in San Diego’s overvalued assets. “The growth of the evil has gone on through the sufferance of the authorities and it is high time the law was enforced,” thundered the San Diego Union. The police chief was indicted, and Tombstone friend William Hunsaker was accused of representing criminals and gamblers. Fees for saloon licenses tripled. Gambling rooms and dance halls were shut down. Real estate plummeted in value, and the banks pulled back loans. Businesses shuttered, construction ceased, and the city began to lose population. Alonzo Horton, who had been responsible for so much of the early excitement, was wiped out.
By 1890 the boom was over. Although the city would eventually recover and thrive again, it was time for Josephine and Wyatt to move on, leaving behind loose ends in the form of lingering lawsuits for recovery of promissory notes and real estate taxes.
They had come so close to making their fortune. The scene of her greatest triumph, San Diego could have provided the permanent home and the social prominence Josephine craved. However, as the once bright future slipped away, she had no regrets. They were leaving together, and memories of their glamorous horseracing days would outlast the disappointment of their now worthless real estate holdings, her gambling losses, the seedier side of the saloons with the whores upstairs, and their domestic quarrels. She would always remember these years as a beautiful and colorful “kaleidoscopic picture”:
I have but to shut my eyes and call them to mind to see again the gay sights and hear the merry sounds of those full years—Santa Rosa, Chicago, Tanforan, Laton, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, Santa Anita . . . crowds screaming, yelling, roaring; bright banners; bold trumpets, gay parties, lovely women, handsome men, special trains, horses, smells, music, brave laughter—and Wyatt coming home to me; if he had won, the light of triumph in his eyes; if he had lost, the gleam of hope for a better showing next time.
Some four hundred miles east of San Diego, Mattie Blaylock Earp was confronting the bleak reality of life with no glamour, hope, or love. She left Tombstone bearing the name of Mrs. Earp and endured a few excruciating months at the home of Nicholas and Virginia Earp until she could no longer ignore the knowing glances that passed between his parents and brothers. Wyatt had moved on. In the early days of their separation, he had sent her money, but by 1888 she was broke and alone. Her family had lost contact with “Ceely,” as they called her. In despair, she spiraled down into a grueling cycle of poverty and prostitution. She was living among strangers, eager to tell anyone who would listen that Wyatt Earp had “wrecked her life by deserting her and she didn’t want to live.”
On the morning of July 3, 1888, in the small town of Pinal, Arizona, Mattie asked the man in her bedroom to buy her another bottle and another vial of laudanum. She took a swig of whiskey with the man, and then he left her with the opiate drops. By the time her next customer arrived, she was dead.
It would be decades before anyone connected Mattie Blaylock with Wyatt Earp. This was the secret that Josephine most dreaded, that the world would know the sordid details of Mattie’s death and would add her to Wyatt’s list of victims, leaving Josephine reviled as the cruel, adulterous accessory to suicide.
Josephine’s terrified looks over her shoulder would be the driving force behind many of her future actions. Nothing less than Wyatt’s legacy, as well as her own reputation, was at stake.
The echoes from Tombstone had been muted in San Diego. They were back again now, louder than ever.
As if she and Wyatt had been waiting for Mattie to release Wyatt of any perceived obligation, Josephine later claimed that they were married soon after Mattie’s death, legally wed in a ceremony on Lucky Baldwin’s yacht. The year was 1888.
There is no evidence that Baldwin ever owned a yacht, though his daughter did. Nor have any records of an actual marriage ceremony ever turned up.
Nobody believed the story of a legal wedding aboard Baldwin’s yacht as anything other but Josephine’s wishful thinking. Josephine’s biographers tried to corroborate her story, and when they could not, they sought to reassure her that it did not matter. But the question of her legal status mattered very much to Josephine, as did Mattie’s suicide.
For the rest of her life, she struggled to keep these two secrets: her supposed wedding on Lucky Baldwin’s yacht and Mattie’s last days as Mrs. Earp.
AFTER THEIR BUSINESS reversals in San Diego, Josephine and Wyatt regrouped in San Fra
ncisco; it was the city they loved most, and an important time for Josephine to be closer to her family. Her father had fallen ill and died on January 5, 1895, the first of the Marcus family to be buried in the Jewish Hills of Eternity cemetery. Mrs. Marcus moved to the Lehnhardts’ big house in Oakland. The Earps lived first with Josephine’s older sister Rebecca and her husband Aaron at McAllister Street. Wyatt renewed old acquaintances and began to build up a new stable and betting connections. When his horses won, Wyatt would come home and spill out a bag of twenty-dollar gold pieces on his sister-in-law’s kitchen table. Luck was running in their favor more often than not, and soon they moved to a place of their own in the old Bay District near Fulton and Golden Gate Park, with a stable big enough for six horses. No longer a “capitalist,” as he had been in the San Diego directory, Wyatt was now officially listed as a “horseman” in the 1896 San Francisco directory.
Josephine’s favorite horse was Lottie Mills, a smart, beautiful thoroughbred that Wyatt bought in San Francisco and owned with Lou Rickabaugh, his former partner back in Tombstone. Lottie Mills attracted much attention whenever she competed, and even Lucky Baldwin wanted to buy her. Wyatt had other plans.
Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was a watershed event in America history. It drew people from all around the world, including Josephine and Wyatt. Josephine was excited to plan their trip, which would include racing Lottie Mills. On the way east they stopped in Colorado, where the Denver Republican ignored Josephine but gushed over Wyatt’s suave appearance with the headline “He Is a Dude Now,” noting approvingly his “neat gray tailor-made suit, immaculate linen and fashionable neckwear. With a derby hat and a pair of tan shoes he was a figure to catch a lady’s eye and to make the companions of his old, wild days at Tombstone and Dodge, who died with their boots on and their jeans pants tucked down in them, turn in their graves.”
Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp Page 9