Josephine Earp: The Woman Who Shaped the Story of Her Beloved Husband—the Most Famous Lawman of the Old West

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. For nearly fifty years, Josephine Earp was married to the most famous lawman of the Old West, Wyatt Earp. Here to tell her story is Ann Kirshner, author of Lady at the OK Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: In the 1950s, Wyatt Earp was everywhere on television. Every single American network had a Wyatt Earp or Tombstone-themed show on Wyatt, Bat Masterson, Gunsmoke. And so, when we were watching television and watching Wyatt, we certainly never thought about Wyatt Earp having a Jewish wife, and we thought we knew something about the gunfight. What we didn’t know was that there was this gutsy, busty broad who had a lover on both sides of the gunfight at the OK Corral. And we thought we knew something about Wyatt Earp himself. He was the one with the white hat, right? But what we didn’t know was that the Wyatt Earp that we knew was in large part a story of…

00:01:23
Speaker 3: Josephine Earp’s making.

00:01:25
Speaker 2: She had the extraordinary sense of celebrity that in some ways shaped the legend of Wyatt Earp into what she would call a “nice, clean story.” So let me take you back to Josephine’s beginnings. And in later life, Josephine would always say that she was the daughter of a wealthy German merchant.

00:01:51
Speaker 3: Not true.

00:01:52
Speaker 2: In fact, most of what Josephine Marcus Earp told us about herself was not true. So, the Marcus family came from the Posen region around 1850, and they came first to New York. Josephine was born in 1860, and the family was struggling. He was a baker, her father, and they were reading in the many Jewish newspapers in New York at the time about the wonders of San Francisco – you could make your fortune in San Francisco. And they really were not making their fortune in New York. So they decided to emigrate again, and off they go to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama. But the San Francisco that they arrived in was a highly stratified Jewish community. The most successful San Francisco Jews were German Jews, and then there were the other Jews and the Polish Jews, and that would be Josephine’s family. They were definitely on the wrong side of the tracks. And this prejudice goes back to those early days of the German Empire, when it was the German Jews who were better educated, more affluent, more secular.

00:03:03
Speaker 3: The Polish Jews spoke Yiddish rather than German.

00:03:06
Speaker 2: They tended to be peddlers and much more religious than the German Jews. And that was the stratification that existed in San Francisco as well. And so Josephine found herself once again in a community that was highly stratified. And there was nothing “second class” about Josephine. She was an extremely pretty, active, outgoing young woman, and she felt she had the world to conquer. The spark for what would change Josephine’s life came from an unexpected source: that was the HMS Pinafore craze which swept America at this time. Every town had a Pinafore troupe, and the Arizona Territory, which was just out there to the east of California, had several touring companies. They were so desperate for performers that they would go into the amateur dancing academies and attract young singers and dancers to join the troupe. So Josephine gets recruited to go to the Arizona Territory, and this strikes her as a terrific idea. She’s going to run away from home. She’s going to become an actress. Josephine had a bit part. She was just part of a, you know, dancer in the chorus, so she would not have had a shout-out. And she was also using an assumed name because, you know, she was afraid that her parents would find her and drag her back by the hair, which is, in fact, actually what happened the first time. So Josephine goes off to what is not yet the state of Arizona, but the territory. When Josephine first came to Tombstone, she came as the common-law wife of Johnny Behan. She had chosen very badly. Johnny was a dirty dog; he was a womanizer, and she soon left him. In the intervening months, she met Wyatt Earp, who had a wife. He left his wife, and he and Josephine had an affair. The gunfight… one part was allied with Johnny Behan, and one part was allied with Wyatt Earp. But the feud that had been ignited just before the gunfight really never ended, and Wyatt had work to do. So Josephine left Tombstone.

00:05:24
Speaker 3: She left.

00:05:25
Speaker 2: She had already left Johnny Behan; now she left Wyatt as well. She went back home to wait for Wyatt, while Wyatt took his wife, put her on a train, and sent his common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock, back to his mother and father. I think that was probably the most cowardly act Wyatt Earp ever did: to send poor Mattie Blaylock back to his mother to wait for Wyatt. But he did, and it took quite a while before she figured out that he was not coming for her. Their adventures from there on: Wyatt Earp picks up Josephine in 1882, and for the next 47 years they are together. They had adventures in every boomtown that you’ve heard of, and probably quite a few boomtowns that you haven’t heard of. When Josephine and Wyatt got together in 1882, they didn’t have any money, and for the…

00:06:21
Speaker 3: next 47 years, that’s really what they did.

00:06:23
Speaker 2: Was make money, lose money, make money, lose money. They never seemed to care about money for the sake of it. But it was adventure that drove them. Josephine, her love of adventure, which I think is what first led to that running away to the Pinafore Troupe, really never left her.

00:06:41
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Ann Kirshner, author of Lady at the OK Corral. And we know so much about Wyatt through myth, through legend, and through American Westerns, but so little. I knew nothing about his wife and did not know she was Jewish. And the family emigrated from Europe to New York City, then to San Francisco. From 1882 on, after meeting Wyatt Earp, adventure all over the frontier is what her pursuit was with her husband. They never cared about money for the sake of it. It was adventure. This couple sought it. This adventure they found. When we come back, more of the story of Wyatt Earp’s wife, Josephine, here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love Our American Stories and America like we do, please go to ouramericanstories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s ouramericanstories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Josephine Earp, as told by Ann Kirshner. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:08:20
Speaker 2: And that title, “Lady at the OK Corral,” is in part ironic because Josephine did have those two sides to her. Part of her wanted to be gung-ho for adventure always, and the other part of her wanted to be a respectable lady like her sister — her younger sister — who became a very successful businesswoman and society lady in San Francisco.

00:08:42
Speaker 3: So they roamed around, and as they aged…

00:08:45
Speaker 2: They spent most of their time in a circle between Los Angeles; the desert between Arizona and California; and San Francisco and Oakland, where Josephine’s family lived. She was very close to that one sister in particular. In 1929, the era of Tombstone and the OK Corral, which had already been famous throughout their lifetime, got a new shot in the arm. First of all, by the town of Tombstone itself, which launched what it called ‘Helldorado Days,’ but much more importantly and lastingly, by the creation of Hollywood and the first films, so many of which had cowboys, Indians, and Western themes. Two of the most popular stars were William S. Hart and Tom Mix, who became very, very close to Wyatt and Josephine. So the story of Tombstone in the OK Corral was being told, but Josephine didn’t like how it was being told.

00:09:48
Speaker 3: You know.

00:09:48
Speaker 2: First of all, she was nervous that somebody would find out about her as ‘Mrs. Behan’ or the sad story of Mattie Blaylock. But more importantly, she wanted the image of Wyatt to be heroic and scrubbed clean, ‘like a Sunday school teacher,’ as somebody said later on. What made her so nervous about Mattie was not simply that Wyatt had had a common-law wife before, but after Mattie figured out that Wyatt was not coming back for her, she didn’t have too many options. You know, women at that time, particularly women who were not at all educated — it wasn’t as if she could go and get a job someplace. She became a drug addict; she was a prostitute; and she committed suicide. On the day before she died, she was cursing Wyatt Earp as the man who’d done her wrong. So this was the story that Josephine was most terrified about. When an enterprising writer named Stuart Lake approached the Earps to tell the story the way Wyatt and Josephine wanted it told, they thought that was a really dandy idea. Wyatt began to sit for interviews with Stuart Lake, Josephine there almost all the time, making sure that she caught every word. And so it was Stuart Lake who published the first biography of Wyatt Earp, and it was an immediate bestseller. America, particularly in the era of the Depression, was ready for a hero.

00:11:18
Speaker 3: To the end of his days.

00:11:20
Speaker 2: Wyatt was this good-looking, aristocratic guy, while Josephine — well, ladies — that’s not really fair.

00:11:28
Speaker 3: But she didn’t quite…

00:11:29
Speaker 2: keep her looks the way Wyatt did. And when Wyatt died in 1929, it was a national news story, and the newspapers seized on it as “the passing of the Old West.” Josephine didn’t even attend the funeral. She was too distraught, and it took years before she was seen again in the public eye. But one of the things that really brought her out of hiding and into a new era of her life was a letter from Lincoln Ellsworth, the Arctic explorer, who had read Stuart Lake’s book, thought that Wyatt Earp was the epitome of American individualism and heroism, and decided that he would name his boat the Wyatt Earp when he went back to the South Pole. He wrote to Josephine, and Josephine, with that modern sense of celebrity that I think is very special to her, immediately realized this was a really great thing. In our parlance, this would be like naming the moon landing, you know, the shuttle or something after Wyatt Earp. So she sends Lincoln Ellsworth Wyatt’s last eyeglasses and one of his shotguns, and Lincoln Ellsworth creates a little shrine on the boat. And it’s hard to imagine today, but Lincoln Ellsworth’s name and the Wyatt Earp — the name of his ship — was in The New York Times every month for about six years. And when Lincoln Ellsworth was lost, it was a front-page story, and when he was recovered, it continued to be a front-page story. So this was as great a polishing up of Wyatt Earp’s reputation as you could possibly have. So perhaps the good feeling about Lincoln Ellsworth was what emboldened Josephine to think, ‘Nah, now it’s time to tell my story.’

00:13:23
Speaker 3: And she met some distant cousins of…

00:13:25
Speaker 2: Wyatt’s: two women, Vinolia Earp Ackerman and Mabel Earp Cason, and began to talk to them about writing her memoirs. They worked together on it for several years. And during these years, Josephine lived mostly with their family, and they even went back to Tombstone. So imagine: it’s her first trip back since 1882. You know, we think America has changed in the last, you know, ten or twenty years. But the era that Josephine lived through with Wyatt was a time of unbelievable change for America, you know, going from stagecoaches and horses to planes, trains, and automobiles. Going from an era when a man like Wyatt could make his money as a saloon keeper and a gambler…

00:14:16
Speaker 3: gambling is illegal.

00:14:18
Speaker 2: So the changes in America were unbelievably powerful. But the closer that Vinolia and Mabel came to the real story of Tombstone — and they were fine writers and researchers — the more nervous Josephine became. That even now — and now it’s in the late 1930s — even now, she hears those hook beats from Tombstone coming closer. And what if they ‘out’ her as ‘Mrs. Behan,’ or what if they tell the terrible tale of the demise of Mattie Blaylock? So she loses her nerve and she forces them to stop writing the memoir. She has them burn the manuscript; she watches them burn the manuscript. She puts a hex on anybody who will tell her story. And as far as she’s concerned, that’s the end: her story will never be told. They didn’t burn all the copies, so one of the copies is in the Ford County Historical Society in Dodge City, and it was my great pleasure to spend three days in Dodge City reading that manuscript. She takes to stalking John Flood, who had been her very close friend and Wyatt’s, and he writes all of this down. So this is his writing on the back of an old calendar. She comes to his house; she tries to put her hand through the screen door. ‘I’ll get back at you good and hard.’ That’s what Mrs. Earp wrote to him. But when she eventually dies, which is in 1944, it is not a national news story. It’s a tiny little piece in The Los Angeles Times that the widow of Wyatt Earp has passed on, and nobody attended her funeral. She died penniless. Sid Grauman of Grauman’s Theater and William S. Hart paid for her funeral, and, interestingly, it was officiated over by a rabbi. Josephine’s relationship to Judaism was very tenuous. She wasn’t ashamed of it, but she also wasn’t very engaged with Judaism in any way. And yet, at that darkest moment of her life, when Wyatt dies, she decides that she will bury him in the family plot in a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California. And then, when she dies, she is buried right next to him, and there they are. It’s the most visited grave in Colma. So when it comes to American stories, you don’t get much more American than the story of the Frontier West and Tombstone in the OK Corral. So I think the great joy for me was putting this woman back in the picture. And a…

00:16:59
Speaker 1: terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. A special thanks to the Library of Congress, where so many researchers, historians, and ordinary Americans go to learn more about their own country. And also a special thanks to Ann Kirshner, author of Lady at the OK Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp. And my goodness, what she and her husband did together was, in a sense, create the American West, at least the mythology of it. And what we love doing on the show is separating mythology from reality. We do it every day. There’s a great line: “All fiction is autobiography, and all autobiography is fiction.” And we try and do the best we can to make the people we all know and love become real-life human beings, because they were with flaws and imperfections, just like this great country. The story of Josephine Earp here on Our American Stories.