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

by Ann Kirschner

  Flood finally did finish. He sent the manuscript to Hart with a plea for mercy to a first-time author. Hart sized up the manuscript as clumsy but thought it had enough promise to send it to several publishers and to the Saturday Evening Post in the fall of 1926, with a generous endorsement by William S. Hart and the promise of one “never before seen photograph of Mr. Earp.”

  WHILE FLOOD WAS struggling through his task, other writers continued to approach Josephine and Wyatt. Walter Noble Burns, a Chicago journalist who wrote The Saga of Billy the Kid, was eager to follow up that success with another dramatic Western. He already had a broad readership, and his book had been sold to Hollywood; Flood tried to get a copy of Billy the Kid at the library and was put on a waiting list. Wyatt granted Burns an interview, but made it clear that he had already selected his biographer.

  Josephine realized with consternation that Burns would have been a better choice than Flood. However, she had to agree with Wyatt that loyalty was everything, and they must stick with Flood. “LUCK BUT NOT FOR US,” she fumed. Burns reluctantly accepted Wyatt’s decision and suggested that instead he would write about Doc Holliday. Wyatt enthusiastically responded to an opportunity to set the record straight about his friend, and they began a correspondence.

  Wyatt, Josephine, and Flood failed to realize that Burns was only pretending to be writing a biography of Doc Holliday. He had never abandoned his first plan. It was not Doc at the center of the book that Burns would call Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest, but Wyatt Earp.

  JOSEPHINE’S WORST FEARS about Flood’s plodding manuscript were confirmed by quick, definitive rejections from three publishers and the Saturday Evening Post. The reviews were harsh, especially one that referred Flood to a lively new story about Wyatt Earp that was about to be published by Doubleday Page and Company—written by Walter Noble Burns. With words like stilted, florid, and pompous ringing in his ears, Flood was the first to suspect Burns’s double dealing.

  Although he had not yet read Burns’s book, Flood assumed the worst, and advised Josephine to consult with Hart about how to stop its publication; at the least, she had to make certain that the title would not bear Wyatt Earp’s name. “Strike quickly, and hard, and carry the thing to the bitter end,” thundered Flood. “They are using something which belongs to you, which is your property,” agreed Hart, who recommended a copyright lawyer. The result was a cease-and-desist letter that elicited polite assurance from the publisher that Burns’s book would be complimentary to Wyatt, and a follow-up visit by a Doubleday agent, who offered the Earps a 10 percent royalty. Josephine and Wyatt countered with a demand for 50 percent, plus a long list of corrections. The negotiations broke off with Josephine telling the Doubleday agent that Burns was foxy, sneaky, tricky, phony, and low-down, a thief, a wolf, and a liar. The controversy caused the Saturday Evening Post to withdraw its offer to Burns for serial rights.

  Between the ineptitude of Flood and the duplicity of Burns, Josephine and Wyatt were stymied. At seventy-nine, Wyatt declared, “They have told so many lies that it makes a man feel like putting on his fighting clothes.” Josephine’s letters about Burns have a frantic, repetitious tone, and an unpunctuated wildness. She feared that Burns’s book would be taken as “the real story of Wyatt Earp” and would destroy any possibility of subsequent books. “For once the public had read one story of Mr. Earp, they would not be interested to read the same thing again by another author,” agreed Flood. “Immediately then, Mr. Burns would have his story filmed, and there you are!”

  But it was Flood who calmed down first. Risking Josephine’s wrath, Flood remained silent for a few weeks. When he returned to his typewriter, it was to compose a dispassionate summary of their dealings with Burns. Flood was at his most admirable in this crisis; having devoted some three years to his own attempt to write Wyatt’s life, risked his business and his health, endured Josephine’s constant criticism, and suffered those insulting letters of rejection, he responded with dignity and self-awareness. Burns was “well provided for with time, pace, and materials, and was without financial worries. Writing a story, surely, is far more than a mere matter of pen and ink, even among experienced writers.” A sense of humor glints through Flood’s usually dour prose, as he considered how Burns would handle the story of Wyatt Earp without Josephine’s interference. “If [Burns] tells [Wyatt’s] story in the same manner in which he wrote The Saga of Billy the Kid, as he probably will, or has, he will call a saloon a saloon, a church a church, a spade a spade, and a blankety-blank a blankety-blank, and the public will like it.”

  “Don’t be cross with me,” he begged Josephine, and signed off, “Your friend.”

  BURNS RESPONDED TO the Earp tempest with calm confidence. “Mr. Earp,” he predicted, “I think you will like my book.” By the time Josephine finally read Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest, she had to admire his portrait of Wyatt Earp as the “Lion of Tombstone,” the complete embodiment of the code of the West. Burns had captured Wyatt’s handsome natural grace as well as the roots of his character: “He had been roughly moulded by the frontier and he had the frontier’s simplicity and strength, its sophistication and resourcefulness, its unillusioned self-sufficiency. He followed his own silent trails with roughshod directness. He was unaffectedly genuine . . . he was incapable of pretense of studied pose . . . he was cold, balanced, and imperturbably calm.”

  Burns had used his brief interviews with Wyatt to good effect as he drew the most complex portrait yet of Doc Holliday as the “cynical philosopher.” As opposed to Flood’s painfully contrived dialogue, one could imagine Wyatt Earp actually having said, “Doc was one of the finest, cleanest men in the world, though, of course, he was a little handy with his gun and had to kill a few fellows.” Josephine must have been pleased to hear Johnny Behan described as “a bustling, self-important man, never too busy to stop and shake hands or clap somebody on the shoulder with a great show of friendliness.”

  Josephine’s greatest relief came from discovering that Burns had not disturbed the buried secrets of Mattie Blaylock and Josephine Behan. She could find no fault with Burns’s closing image of Wyatt’s unnamed wife, with whom he was “enjoying his declining years in peace, comfort, and prosperity.”

  Burns had no reason to be kind. He hardly knew Josephine and had already demonstrated his willingness to trample on her preferences. Although he conducted many interviews in stitching together the story of Tombstone, he completely skipped over the Earp wives and Josephine’s role in Tombstone. Either he missed the clues or he found them irrelevant. After all, he was writing a book about the code of the West as dramatized by male frontier heroes. Maria Spence was mentioned once as “Spence’s wife,” a cameo appearance that was essential because of her role in identifying the men behind Morgan’s assassination.

  With her anger at Burns subsiding, Josephine hardly knew how to proceed. She indulged in some recriminations at Flood’s expense, reminding him that “there many things I DID not like but you were both very stubborn and would not hear of it.” There clearly was “a mistake somewhere” in Flood’s writing, as Hart said, but the only solution seemed to be a new start with a different writer. Wyatt contacted Frederick Bechdolt, a prolific writer who had interviewed some of the Tombstone old-timers, including Behan’s deputy sheriff, Billy Breakenridge, and published novels as well as a popular series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure Magazine. Bechdolt turned Wyatt down.

  Josephine had no immediate solution, but her natural optimism reasserted itself: “Don’t worry, something will turn up for us.”

  She did not have long to wait. Despite Flood’s concern that Burns’s unauthorized biography would corner the market on Wyatt Earp, another book was about to turn up, this one far more dangerous.

  ALBERT BEHAN OCCASIONALLY visited Josephine and Wyatt in Los Angeles. Long after his father’s death, he remained friendly with both of them, and particularly loving toward Josephine for the brief time that she took care of him as a ch
ild. On one of these visits, they reminisced briefly, and then Albert came to the point.

  “I think I ought to tell you something,” he said. Albert had recently seen his father’s former deputy sheriff, Billy Breakenridge, who mentioned that he was now writing a book in which “he’s going to burn you and your brothers up—says he is giving you hell.” Wyatt looked incredulous, but Albert insisted that he was reporting the conversation accurately. “It made me sick when I heard what he was up to. . . . I thought I should tell you. . . . I think I’d better see Clum about it too.”

  Alive to the irony of this, Josephine commented: “It seems a bit strange as I think of it that the son of Sheriff Behan should show this interest in the reputation of his father’s political enemy. But the character of the two men—Wyatt Earp and the sheriff’s son—answers that, and the friendly gesture on the part of the younger man is a compliment to both.”

  Breakenridge had been at Johnny Behan’s side when they were chasing Wyatt. He was a long-standing enemy, but nearly forty years after the Vendetta Ride, he turned up unannounced at the Earps’ winter camp near Vidal with a cheery “Hello there, old timer” to Wyatt. Josephine felt dizzy at hearing Billy’s “high pitched laugh” and recalled the “bitter heartaches and misery” that Breakenridge and his group had caused them. Despite her mistrust, she served him a big home-cooked breakfast with all of her specialties—fresh biscuits and strawberry jam, eggs, bacon, and coffee—while he and Wyatt reminisced, each of them avoiding any direct reference to the O.K. Corral and its aftermath. Afterward, she and Wyatt agreed that it was high time to set aside old grudges, though Wyatt agreed that Breakenridge would “still bear watching even yet.”

  Breakenridge was broke but anticipated a big fee from his connection to one of the biggest inheritance lawsuits of the time: the Lotta Crabtree estate. The case hinged on the status of common-law marriages in Tombstone, 1881, a subject that must have given Josephine and Wyatt some pause. Lotta Crabtree had been one of the highest-paid performers of her day, and a savvy investor. Her only sibling, Jack Crabtree, had died before her, and she had left her considerable fortune to charity. Jack Crabtree, however, had lived in Tombstone with a common-law wife and a daughter who survived him. An estimated one hundred claimants had already sued for a piece of Lotta Crabtree’s large estate, but only one had been a baby in Tombstone.

  Breakenridge had been recommended by Endicott Peabody to help the estate identify possible witnesses. As he hoped, Wyatt immediately remembered the Crabtrees and their baby, and agreed to give a deposition and to help locate other possible witnesses from Tombstone.

  Wyatt testified in his understated style. He and his brothers knew Jack Crabtree, and he recalled meeting Annie Leopold Crabtree as “wife of Crabtree” at the Tombstone ice cream parlor on Fourth Street between Allen and Fremont: “I liked ice cream,” he said, shrugging. Asked to confirm the breakdown of law and order in Tombstone, he countered that it was “not half as bad as Los Angeles.”

  Breakenridge had apparently not briefed the lawyers about Wyatt’s own complicated marital history. Wyatt was there as a distinguished Los Angeles businessman giving his opinion on the status of marriage in Tombstone. He was not there as a man who had abandoned two common-law wives and was still living with a third.

  Wyatt stoutly defended common-law marriage as indistinguishable from marriage sanctioned by state or church:

  Were there or not people in Tombstone going as husband and wife that you didn’t know whether they were married or not. You had never seen their marriage license, but you took them as man and wife?

  YES.

  Were Jack and Anna Crabtree taken the same way?

  YES.

  Were they any different than any others?

  NO sir, none at all. There were lots of good married people there.

  In the pre-DNA era, nobody could prove Carlotta Crabtree’s parentage. The lawyer for the defense argued that common-law marriages were meaningless in Tombstone. Jack Crabtree’s daughter received no inheritance.

  “I COMMEND TO your consideration Colonel Wm. Breckenridge [sic] a famous peace officer of the old fighting southwest,” wrote author William MacLeod Raine to his longtime editor at Houghton Mifflin, a Boston-based publishing company. After a chance encounter with Billy Breakenridge, Raine agreed to read his memoir. It was not quite ready for publication, he warned his editor, but “full of good stuff,” and since Breakenridge was one of the only living representatives of the “old time sheriffs who brought law and order to the frontier,” Raine thought the public would embrace the book. A successful Western writer himself, Raine was too busy to edit the book, but he offered to write an introduction and recommended Walter Noble Burns or Frederick Bechdolt as coauthors. Raine encouraged Breakenridge to give his book the title Helldorado, using a memorable nickname for Tombstone that reportedly originated with a disgruntled miner who complained that he came to Arizona’s “El Dorado” to try his fortune but ended up washing dishes in a hellish place. Raine had used the title for a long article in Liberty magazine and graciously suggested that it would do well for Breakenridge.

  Just one word of caution, Raine warned: “Old Wyatt Earp is still on deck” and might threaten Breakenridge with a libel suit, as he had already attacked Raine for his “Helldorado” article. “He has told his story so long he thinks it is true.”

  BILLY BREAKENRIDGE WAS living alone at the Old Pueblo Club in Tucson, where he served as the president of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society. Walter Noble Burns’s book had fired him up; it was well written and entertaining, “but as a history it is all buncomb. It is the story told to him by Wyatt Earp while Burns visited him last fall.” As for the “Earp Gang,” as he called them, Breakenridge scoffed at the idea that they were honest officers; Burns and Frederick Bechdolt had it all wrong. They had fallen under Wyatt Earp’s spell. Breakenridge was particularly incensed with Wyatt’s claim to have killed the infamous Johnny Ringo during the Vendetta Ride. “A mass of lies,” Behan’s former deputy declared.

  “I am not an educated man,” he conceded, and “chasing train robbers was sport alongside of trying to write a book.” Still, Breakenridge devoted himself to the task: he researched the original testimony from the Spicer hearing, conducted interviews with old-timers, and ferreted around the Tombstone newspaper archives.

  One of Houghton’s most experienced editors, Ira Rich Kent, agreed to edit the manuscript, and at eighty-one, Breakenridge was extremely gratified to find himself the published author of Helldorado: Bringing the Law to the Mesquite. He was particularly thrilled with compliments from John Clum, who had helped with some fact-checking, and now addressed him as “my dear ‘Helldorado’ Breakenridge,” congratulating him on a “rip-roarin’-snortin’ title” and a surefire best seller.

  Breakenridge and Helldorado replaced Burns and Tombstone as the target of Josephine’s wrath. Where Burns had idealized Wyatt, Breakenridge cast him as the villain of a lurid tale, portrayed with a sneer and innuendo as the leader of the “so-called law and order party.” Never identifying the Nugget as the house organ of the cowboys, Breakenridge relied on its highly politicized reporting. Wyatt escaped gunshot only because he wore a bulletproof “steel vest,” Breakenridge contended. Behan was treated sympathetically, and of course Breakenridge gave himself a starring role.

  Wyatt was genuinely shocked. He wrote to Breakenridge with uncharacteristic pathos: “I have always felt friendly towards you, and I naturally thought you had the same friendly feeling toward me.” Despite Albert Behan’s advance warning, it was too late for an injunction, so Josephine orchestrated a flurry of letters of protest to publisher Houghton Mifflin, and to their first-respondent group of well-placed friends. A complaint to William MacLeod Raine yielded the cool disclaimer that he had not independently verified statements made in the book, but deferred to Breakenridge.

  Burns’s book was annoying, but it did not rip open old wounds as Helldorado did. Because Breakenridge was a Tombstone ey
ewitness, his account would carry considerable credibility. “Very interesting,” Wyatt noted sarcastically to Breakenridge’s assertion that the Clantons and McLaurys were unarmed. “This probably explains how Virgil Earp, Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday were wounded during the fight.” With more nerve than logic, Breakenridge even copyrighted one of Wyatt’s most recent photographs.

  Josephine’s frustrations multiplied. Flood had failed as a writer. Burns had published a flattering version, but the Earps had no share in his success. Breakenridge accused the Earps of heinous acts of violence and corruption. Other accounts were reported to be in the works: even George Parsons was talking about publishing his diaries. Sympathetic to Josephine and Wyatt’s distress, Hart suggested other writers such as Rex Beach and Walter Coburn, but neither one was available.

  Wyatt’s legendary strength was waning. He was in constant pain from a chronic bladder infection. He refused to consult a physician until Josephine delivered an ultimatum. As both of them feared, a physician in Los Angeles recommended immediate surgery. When Josephine returned from making all the hospital arrangements, she found Wyatt packing his suitcases for the desert. “You can have an operation if you want it,” he told her with a grin.

  They left that afternoon. It would be his last winter in the desert.