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

by Ann Kirschner

  As she had fallen in love with the California desert, now Josephine reveled in the “wildly picturesque” landscape of the Yukon River, flanked on both sides by steep mountains with tall trees marching down to the water’s edge. The wind was still warm with the last summer breezes. But soon Josephine felt the autumn chill and could see the shallow parts of the river beginning to freeze. Snow was falling steadily as they drew close to Rampart, a small settlement halfway between St. Michael and Dawson. The steamer struggled forward as more ice solidified. One more bend of the river—and they were locked in a deep freeze.

  The passengers left the boat. Some of them made immediate plans to continue their trip by dogsled. Josephine canvassed the opinion of acquaintances, who predicted that business would be better in the American part of Alaska. “You are under the good old Stars and Stripes,” they urged. “Up at Dawson, the Union Jack flies above you and they don’t favor Yankees.”

  Rampart would be her home that winter.

  THE SMALL VILLAGE was raw and new. Originally established by settlers along the Yukon River, Rampart had become a hub for prospectors and trappers and home to about two thousand men and fifty women. It was part of the rapidly growing empire established by the Alaska Commercial Company, a Russian trading company that had been chartered by Catherine the Great, then sold to a firm of San Franciscan Jewish businessmen who built it into a major provider of general merchandise for trappers, explorers, and gold seekers, steamboat transportation, and financing of Alaskan mining ventures. The company’s village stores became the multipurpose center of community activities, serving as bank, post office, and the venue for marriages and funerals. Rampart had no church, though Josephine had heard about one minister in town “looking for business.”

  Rampart even had a connection to the Arizona Territory through Tombstone founder Ed Schieffelin, who had moved to Rampart after selling his silver mines. Schieffelin believed that Alaska was the best place to tap a mineral belt that encircled the earth, and he invested in a steamboat from the Alaska Commercial Company. But he was deterred by the inhospitable climate and sold his riverboat to the unofficial mayor of Rampart, Captain Al Mayo, and returned to the States.

  Rampart society was tightly knit but welcoming to newcomers. Although it had none of the sophistication of San Diego or San Francisco, it was the first place that Josephine had ever lived where a gambler and his common-law wife could socialize freely and enjoy the company of a diverse and remarkable cast of men and women. Instead of spending most of her time waiting for Wyatt, as she usually did, they were together day and night. Their closest friends were Captain Mayo, a former circus acrobat who had been among the first traders in the Yukon Valley, and his wife Maggie, the daughter of the chief of a nearby Indian trading village. Intelligent and resourceful, Maggie was her husband’s trusted business partner, and also served as translator and expert seamstress. Josephine observed with interest how Maggie skillfully navigated her two worlds, keeping house “in the manner of a typical American housewife,” giving her children “every advantage,” but also maintaining strong ties to her native family.

  It was Maggie who tutored Josephine in the art of keeping house in the harsh Alaskan winter. Josephine embraced this unfamiliar world, a new environment that she was determined to conquer. She was soon outfitted with a beautiful parka of white deerskin, made by Maggie, while Wyatt purchased his cold-weather gear from the local Indians. Finding a suitable residence was tricky, since Rampart had fewer than five hundred cabins. Some less fortunate residents were forced into unusual arrangements, like one woman who shared her place with a roommate who worked in a bar: it was her “rent” to keep the cabin warm during the night, and when her roommate returned to sleep during the day, she went to work. Josephine found a one-room cabin for a monthly rent of $100. Close to a brook, now ice-locked and silent, the cabin was made of “logs chinked with moss and a roof covered with a deep layer of earth,” furnished with crude homemade furniture. Josephine carpeted the floor with overlapping burlap sacks obtained from local storekeepers, layered with furs that had been traded from Indians or Wyatt’s own hunting. The bed was warmed with blankets and down comforters that she brought from California. Calico curtains hung on the windows and separated the bedroom from a small sitting area. They kept the fire going day and night, grateful for the plentiful supply of wood in Rampart.

  Josephine improvised a cozy home, the only one that she would ever recollect with nostalgia and pride. The resulting scene of domestic bliss stood out among the long list of hotels and campsites that they called home. “As soon as we were all settled and I was taking my first batch of bread from the oven, with beans boiling on the stove, Wyatt came in from battling a snow storm, dressed in his mukluks [boots] and parka. He sniffed, his eyes lighted with pleasure: ‘Snug as a bug in a rug!’ he exclaimed. On such small hinges does the door to contentment swing.”

  Rampart was the first kitchen where Josephine cooked regularly and presided over dinner parties. She apparently brought no recipes from her mother’s Jewish kitchen, preferring to prepare Wyatt’s favorites, mostly southern specialties such as hot biscuits with the occasional luxury of butter and sweet preserves. In the desert, she and Wyatt had shared the cooking and cleaning duties, but here she became an accomplished cook and popular hostess who was known for her ability to coax some degree of novelty into her menus within the extreme limitations of a Rampart larder. Milk and butter were scarce, and eggs even more rare, priced as high as three dollars per dozen. Moose and caribou were plentiful, and she paired them with beans and potatoes. Ptarmigan, a local bird, passed for chicken. She had the only supply of garlic and chili in town, packed among the provisions she had brought from San Francisco. Her fresh ice cream was a local favorite, a simple concoction of sweetened condensed milk (she recommended Eagle brand), powdered eggs, and a little vanilla, and she might have been stifling a laugh when she instructed that the bowl could be “set out of doors where it would freeze almost immediately.” Rampart cooks had to have a sense of humor; one of Josephine’s elegant meals ended with attractive slices of cake made out of a large white life-preserver, slathered with real icing.

  Prospecting for gold proved to be far less amusing. Wyatt managed to stake some claims, but the frozen ground was like solid cement. Although one million dollars in gold had come out of Rampart the previous summer, the Earp claims had yielded nothing so far. Instead, Wyatt worked in a saloon where the daily take went as high as $700, more than enough to secure whatever luxuries were available in a snowbound Alaskan mining camp.

  That winter, Josephine cheerfully counted her blessings. Given the isolation and deprivation that crippled many Rampart residents, she and Wyatt were comparatively well off. She had a new appreciation for the restorative power of a home-cooked meal, reserving special pity for prospectors who returned alone to their cabins after a day of frigid drudgery, chilled to the bone and too exhausted to cook. In snowbound Alaska, this was not a simple matter of enjoying companionship and nutritious food but a serious matter of survival. Depression and failure, compounded by hunger and loneliness, was a dangerous psychological brew. She decried the common practice of sending young men to Alaska to sow their wild oats, where they were “drawn into the maelstrom of drunkenness and gambling that existed in most of the camps,” she noted with intuitive concern. “The nostalgia, the excitement, the too sudden acquisition of wealth, or the disappointment of their not finding it, the lack of a comfortable place outside of the gambling halls, dance halls, and saloon; lack of good food—any or all of these, combined with the almost universal drinking of liquor, brought many a man to a level he would never have dreamed himself capable of descending to.”

  Even seasoned prospectors were not prepared for the severity of the Alaskan winter, its long dark days, and temperatures that hovered some fifty to sixty degrees below zero. Suicide rates were high, alcoholism rampant. The entire town of Rampart grieved as one family over the tragedy of a California widower who sold
his worldly possessions and left two small children with relatives to seek his fortune in Alaska. He was not pursuing the risky fantasy of a gold strike: his plan was to open a restaurant in Dawson. He invested his entire savings in provisions, and his greatest treasure was 1,500 dozen precious eggs, packed in lard and shipped in large barrels to Alaska. But he, like Josephine and Wyatt, was unexpectedly stuck in tiny Rampart for the winter. The eggs spoiled before he could sell them. He was found hanging from the rafters in his cabin. “I believe a wife would have helped him find a way out of his trouble,” Josephine declared. She joined her neighbors in raising a fund for his orphans.

  DECADES LATER, RECALLING that winter from the warmth of her California home, even the relentless cold could not mar Josephine’s memories, which were forever colored by the beauty of the landscape lit by the northern lights, and the comfort of the closest female friendships she had yet known outside of her sisters. “If Rampart had not been such a sociable little community we might have found the dark and the isolation unendurable,” she recalled. Doors were left unlocked. Neighbors helped neighbors. Wyatt read his way through the extensive library of their neighbor Erasmus Brainerd, a prominent resident of Seattle who was there with two colleagues to assess the possibility of promoting their city as the gateway to the Yukon.

  Josephine spent long contented days and evenings with friends, embroidering, reading aloud, and swapping recipes. “I do not remember that we played cards often,” she notes, with perhaps some defensiveness. “It was later at Nome that I learned to play cards and found them really fascinating.” Even among the domestic pleasures of Rampart, gambling was never far away from their life, whether it was a friendly game between Wyatt and the neighbors or a high-stakes table at one of the local saloons.

  The fast crowd they ran with in San Diego and San Francisco had been replaced by a different social order, cruder in its clothes and range of entertainment, yet richer in ideas and energy, free of the snobbery and ostracism that Josephine dreaded. Even the newspapers seemed to cooperate, with one San Francisco article complimenting Wyatt Earp as “a model citizen of Rampart.” Josephine participated in community gatherings that ranged from lectures on the Spanish-American War in Cuba, literary discussions on books from Mr. Brainerd’s collection, and sleigh rides along the frozen river behind “Napoleon,” the only horse in Rampart. Tombstone, the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons debacle, even the sadness of her miscarriage—all felt wonderfully distant.

  The frequent town dances were Josephine’s special delight. Everyone was invited, and dance they did, to music provided by the violin of the postmaster Mr. Fleishman and the banjo accompaniment of the future novelist Rex Beach, whom Josephine described as “a tall good looking young man . . . fresh from college, with a flow of good humor that enlivened many a long winter evening.” The Rampart events were known as “cookie dances,” but the refreshments also included wine. The inhospitable climate and smallness of the town loosened everyone up. Their bulky cold-weather clothes were a source of amusement, as well as a great equalizer. Josephine mockingly compared their exuberant and casual parties to a formal cotillion: “Have you now a picture in your mind of several couples with powdered wigs, the men in velvet coats and satin breeches, the women in full-hooped and panniered gowns, moving through the stately measures of a minuet with courtly grace to the accompaniment of violins and harpsichord? Then banish it! Put in its place one of the strong men in mackinaws, corduroys and mukluks, and fair ladies in corduroy jackets, short skirts and—yes mukluks —but moving through the stately measure of the dance with courtly grace to the accompaniment of a violin and a banjo!”

  To Josephine’s surprise, Wyatt sometimes enjoyed a little more wine with his cookies than she considered good for him. While he didn’t totally disgrace himself, Josephine observed a “remarkable lack of skill” in his dancing, though her criticism was perhaps sharper because he was dancing with another woman. Her favorite partner was her new friend Tex Rickard, a former town marshal from Texas and a veteran of several Alaskan winters.

  Rampart lacked only fresh news and the familiar faces of her family. When Rex Beach and the local postmaster “mushed” down 850 miles from Dawson to Rampart with mail, Josephine was grateful to pay a dollar for every letter, ridiculing two young men from the East who asserted their rights as American citizens to free mail service. Writing some thirty years later, Josephine—never one to save papers or material possessions—disclosed that she still treasured a letter from her mother that came “with that [Rampart] mail and for which I would gladly have paid much more than the fee of one dollar. It is dated at San Francisco, September 8, 1898.”

  For her first Rampart Thanksgiving, Josephine stretched her chef’s ingenuity to the maximum and produced an astonishing variety of roasted and canned meats, vegetables, and fruits, and a dessert course of fresh doughnuts, pies, and cakes. That night one of their guests was too ill to attend the dinner, and Josephine and a friend set out to deliver his meal. They were better cooks than navigators. When a sudden blizzard overtook them, they were soon lost and huddled in a thicket, cold and terrified of wild animals. Josephine was struck with a crippling moment of fear, which she associated with Wyatt’s absence. “Never a brave woman, I had always depended completely upon Wyatt and now I was in a panic.” Wyatt soon showed up with a small rescue party, but the memory was a powerful one.

  Josephine’s self-styled “scaredy-cat” image went together with a morbid fear of sickness, even when it wasn’t her own life in danger. One such moment struck her when Captain Mayo asked for help in delivering Maggie’s third child. Despite her close friendship with Maggie, Josephine refused. Perhaps her own recent miscarriage exacerbated her fears, but Josephine’s misgivings went beyond her lack of training as a midwife. “The issues of life and death have always appalled me,” she confessed. She gave in only when Wyatt sternly ordered her to go. Even after Maggie’s baby was born, healthy and strong, Josephine predicted that she would be just as paralyzed with fear the next time she was needed.

  Weather was everything in Alaska. Josephine learned to recognize the groaning of the ice as the signal of the spring thaw, and as the brook behind their cabin came to life with a rush of running water, she prepared for sunny days and nights with the construction of an “Arctic roof garden” on the earthen roof, a common feature that took advantage of the brief but intense growing season. With the excess sentimentality to which she was susceptible, Josephine inserted into the scene the incongruous figure of Wyatt Earp, Alaskan farmer: “The lengthening visits of the sun warmed our little rooftop garden and it was not long until the young lettuce, radish and onion plants were crowning our domicile with a jaunty bonnet of green.” She compared Wyatt to a mother in his care for his young plants, “gazing rapturously at his garden.”

  The awakening of the Yukon River interrupted their idyll. The Yukon was once again a great lane of traffic. As each new boat came around the last bend in the river, the dogs began to bark and the townspeople gathered along the riverbank. Steamers arrived at all hours of the day and night, each one delivering old friends, mail, or new possibilities. On board one of the first steamers to reach Rampart was future playwright Wilson Mizner, a friend of Wyatt’s who was apparently exercising his creativity by running various confidence schemes that victimized miners. Josephine did not fail to notice that Mizner was standing next to an attractive female passenger, true to his reputation as a ladies’ man. He and Wyatt began shouting back and forth to each other even before the boat docked. Wilson joined the Earps in their cabin, dining heartily on steak and potatoes that he swiped from the ship’s kitchen (“to keep you alive until another boat comes in”) and briefing them on his plans for his next stop: Nome.

  Josephine had already noted the beginning of a mad migration to this northernmost outpost. People were scrambling for transportation to St. Michael, the best jumping-off point for the remote northern gold fields. Tex Rickard had already left. In fact, the Nome gold rush was kicked off in his
saloon, a large circus tent in St. Michael. As Tex later told the story, a young prospector walked in and threw a heavy pouch (a “poke”) of gold on the table. The usual clamor of betting and arguing hushed. Asked who he was and where he came from, he gave his name as Jafet Lindeberg and said, “I come from Nome, and there you will find more of the same stuff.”

  Rampart would soon become another ghost town, Josephine realized, as the previous year’s exodus from Yuma played itself out again. Suddenly, an opportunity presented itself: Wyatt received an offer to run one of the Alaska Commercial Company’s businesses at St. Michael, where they had stopped briefly the previous summer. It wasn’t Nome, but they would be one step closer to the real action.

  Josephine considered the prospect of leaving Rampart. She had enjoyed being part of an inclusive, intimate community that was fused together by the perilous winter conditions. That winter was among the happiest times of her life with Wyatt, and Rampart was the only place where they left behind close friends. So it was with mixed emotions that Josephine waved good-bye to Captain and Mrs. Mayo and their children as the riverboat steamed away, carrying the Earps and other passengers to St. Michael: “We left our little cabin by the brook, left our garden and our summer’s ice. It was a sad time for both of us for we knew that there was no scenery besides ocean and tundra and barren mountains where we were going. We had learned to love the wilderness of the Yukon.” But the Earps had come to Alaska to make money, not friends.

  JOSEPHINE COULD BE softhearted and occasionally nostalgic. But if she had any regrets about leaving Rampart, or any other choices she made in her long life with Wyatt, she buried them deeply. The road ahead was all that mattered. The horizon was endless, always beckoning her forward. She turned her back on Rampart and focused on the next chapter.