Lady at the O.K. Corral (28 page)

Wyatt spent Thanksgiving Day in bed, with his big cat Fluffy nearby. Flood and a few other close friends came to visit; Josephine would recall later how pleased he was to have company on a day that they had always celebrated together, complete with his favorite ice cream dessert.

On January 12, 1929, John Clum visited with a friend from Alaska, and there were some hollow jokes about whether Wyatt might return to Nome. Dr. Shurtleff stayed all day, as did a nurse. During Wyatt's long and restless night, Josephine kept watch. It would always puzzle her what he meant when he sat up suddenly, and said, “Supposing—Supposing . . .”

“I wish I knew what was troubling him.” Josephine turned his last words over in her mind. “I should like to finish the sentence for him.”

On the morning of January 13, 1929, Dr. Shurtleff was reading aloud from Alfred Henry Lewis's 1905 book
The Sunset Trail
, about the frontier exploits of Bat Masterson and the Earps, and had just finished a passage about Doc Holliday when Wyatt died.

THE PASSING OF
Wyatt Earp was a national news story. “Out from the colorful past of the old West stepped these friends of Wyatt Earp,” began one article that named each of the remarkable pallbearers, including John Clum, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Wilson Mizner, Charles Welsh, and Judge Hunsaker. The sight of the distinguished group, many of them leaning on canes and weeping openly, struck a chord of nostalgia as “a reunion of the sturdy men and women who knew Wyatt as a wiry, six foot two gun officer of the law in mining town, cow camp and almost anywhere along the frontier where trouble was apt to pop loose.” Although Wyatt was most often eulogized as frontier gunman and courageous defender of law and order, he was also beloved by the Hollywood film community. Dr. Thomas Harper presided over the open casket service, which was held at the Pierce Brothers Mortuary, a chapel of the Wilshire Congregational Church, where Wyatt and Tom Mix had been frequent visitors. Edward Doheny sent an elaborate floral arrangement. Lake was there, still weak from the flu, summoned by a telegram from Josephine.

Josephine did not attend the funeral. In her place, her sister Hattie rode with John Flood in the cortege. Longtime friends Grace Welsh Spolidoro and her mother helped with the details of Wyatt's cremation and served as witnesses, together with Flood and Hattie.

Josephine's absence attracted little notice. This was a day for the public to say good-bye to Wyatt Earp. She may have been overcome by grief or unnerved by the long months of constant nursing. As she knew from previous crises, such as her friend's childbirth in Alaska, Josephine's bravery had its limits. Unlike Wyatt, she did not face the darkest moments of life and death with equanimity.

Josephine considered bringing Wyatt's ashes to Vidal, but her thoughts returned to her childhood and to San Francisco, Wyatt's favorite city. It had been decades since she had any overt Jewish affiliation, but in all the difficulties she was facing, here was one relatively simple, available choice.

She waited a long six months to decide, but finally, accompanied by her nieces, she took the train from Los Angeles with Wyatt's ashes in an urn, held tightly in a satchel on her lap, braced against the rattling and lurches of the train, and brought him to the Hills of Eternity cemetery outside of San Francisco. It was the place where her parents and brother were buried, and there was room for Wyatt and, someday, for Josephine.

Never suspecting that Wyatt Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery, his acolytes would search for another thirty years before finding his grave.

L
ESS THAN
a year later, some of Wyatt's pallbearers found themselves back at Tombstone.

In 1929 the current editor of the
Tombstone Epitaph
and a group of local boosters suggested creating an event called “Helldorado” as a rousing celebration to mark the old town's fiftieth birthday. Tombstone badly needed some good news; having survived fires, the death of the mining industry, and the shootout at the O.K. Corral, the town continued to lose jobs and prestige to nearby Bisbee, which was now vying to replace it as the seat of Cochise County.

As a move to demonstrate political viability, Helldorado failed. The county seat moved to Bisbee. As a publicity stunt to launch Tombstone's next life as a tourist destination with a whiff of the frontier West, it succeeded beyond its creators' wildest dreams.

No stagecoach or horses required: Tombstone was now an easy drive from Tucson in a newfangled automobile, just a nice day trip along U.S. Highway 80, the “Broadway of America.” The plans for the event came together very quickly. Helldorado would be a four-day extravaganza where the whole town spruced itself up to welcome its guests, many of them wearing their best western whiskers and boots, a street party where history took a back seat to braggadocio and pageantry, complete with parades, bands, contests, and brightly painted Indians in war bonnets. “They cleaned the Bird Cage Theatre out, the first time in forty years, and every male within 30 miles is trying to raise a beard,” joked Harrison Leussler, who attended the first Tombstone reunion as the western scout for Houghton Mifflin, the Boston publishing company that had carved out a strong market in frontier-themed books. Although Tombstone lost many of its earliest buildings in the fires, Schieffelin Hall and the Bird Cage Theatre were still standing. And of course, despite modifications over the years, there was still an O.K. Corral.

Of the 400 pioneers who were invited, 343 attended. Fox sent a crew to film the entire event for later release in movie theaters. As a highlight, visitors were invited to attend dramatic reenactments of the Earp-Clanton gunfight, with cowboys and lawmen shooting blanks at each other three times a day. No murder, no mayhem, and no booze.

Former mayor John Clum led the parade. He had accepted the organizers' invitation to join an honorary advisory committee, along with Breakenridge, Burns, and others. But Clum came home disgusted by “this style of rip-roaring, Helldorado publicity for poor old Tombstone.” Nothing had replaced mining as the engine of economic development, and Clum saw no future for the town other than the exploitation of its violent past.

Hearing Clum's account, Wyatt's friend Fred Dodge was glad he had stayed home. “The battles fought for law and order in Tombstone were no moving picture affairs,” he wrote to Clum. “Good men, who were our friends, met wounds and death there. It is an offense to us and to them to reproduce these things as an entertaining spectacle, an incident, for it is not possible to show what necessity lay back of them and made them inevitable.”

For the rest of the world, opening day of Helldorado would forever have a different significance. October 24, 1929 would thenceforth be known as “Black Thursday,” the day when the American stock market crashed.

Josephine was not invited to Tombstone. She would not have gone anyway, but when she heard about the O.K. Corral reenactments, she started writing letters to friends and government officials. Her lawyer, William Hunsaker, patiently instructed her in the laws of libel, which held that she was not entitled to sue for defamation of a dead person, no matter how beloved or deserving. Arizona governor George Hunt answered her objections with a promise to take up the concerns of Wyatt Earp's widow with the mayor of Tombstone. The mayor of Tombstone followed up with more letters to Josephine from the town's leadership and the organizers of Helldorado, all reassuring her that they were “pro-Earp” and that the staged shootout was “history and reenacted just as it happened.” The current U.S. marshal took the opportunity to blame Johnny Behan for everything—and then inquired when he could expect his copy of Stuart Lake's book.

The cowboy faction was no more pleased with Helldorado than Josephine: they had already complained that the reenactment was a one-sided glorification of Wyatt Earp and his murderous brothers.

HELLDORADO AND THE
stock market crash were among many sources of distress for Josephine in 1929. Wyatt had been her anchor for nearly fifty years. They had no permanent address, but it had always been the two of them in whatever temporary place they called home, rarely apart for more than a few days. His friends and his enemies had testified to the power of his presence and his strong will; all that had been taken away, and Josephine hardly knew what to think or do. “I miss my dear husband,” she lamented in almost every letter she wrote, regardless of the subject or recipient.

She went back and forth between rented rooms in Los Angeles, her sister's home in Oakland, and the desert camp, but no place felt comfortable. Her sister had been her closest friend in the years leading up to Wyatt's death, but now she too was suffering from a combination of business problems, ill health, and anxiety. Hattie's biggest concern was her daughter Edna, who had recently lost her second husband, which left the young mother of two alone again.

Close friends drifted away. The younger members of the Welsh family, with whom Josephine and Wyatt had stayed for long periods of time in the desert and Los Angeles, had a strong preference for Wyatt over Josephine—as if it were necessary to choose between them. They made no secret of their contempt. “She was worthless, I didn't like her, folks just put up with her on account of Mr. Earp,” Christenne Welsh said. At a time when money was tight and families were struggling to feed their children, Christenne and her sister Grace believed that Josephine was stealing food from their mother's kitchen. They accused Josephine of leaving a frail Wyatt alone in an empty house with nothing to eat, while she spent her days playing cards, commuting on the “big red” train from Los Angeles to San Bernardino. In their view, Wyatt was a “normal gambler” who enjoyed a friendly poker game in the Vidal country store, while Josephine was a “compulsive gambler” who would return from a day at the tables and head over to the Welsh home to scrounge for food. If she was seen coming up to their door, their mother told them to hide under the bed, hoping that she would go away.

While the Welsh family found it easy to turn away from the widow Earp, John Flood remained steadfast. Drawing on a surprisingly deep well of patience and compassion, he endured Josephine's querulous complaints that he was ignoring her or mismanaging her mining properties. The two of them shared the sharp pain of grief and loss. Flood remained committed to Wyatt's legacy and successfully petitioned the postmaster general in Washington to rename the tiny town near their mining claims as “Earp,” recommending the proposed namesake as “an estimable citizen and much beloved by all who know him in this country.” He continued to handle Josephine's considerable business correspondence and urged her to sell the mines and, above all, to clear her mind of business conflict: “Yes I know the weather is hot, the flies are a pest, and the mosquitos are worse. . . . Let us set aside the gossip, the envies, the jealousies and all the other useless things of life, and save the situation.”

Josephine was particularly anxious about the fate of the Happy Day mines, once the source of such heady expectations. Mine transactions required site assessments and good faith negotiations for which she had neither the training nor the temperament. Wyatt had always handled their mining affairs, with help from John Flood and other experts. Josephine was understandably a novice, but instead of trusting her advisers, in her inexperience she was prone to a suspiciousness that bordered on paranoia. She would agree to a deal, only to back out at the last minute, alienating the professionals and even some of the friends who were trying to help her. She could swing from grief-stricken widow to aggressive, arrogant negotiator in an instant, as she did in response to a friend who offered assistance: “I do wish I could have my dear husband back again, I have surely suffered since he is gone, but I am going to
fight
for what is mine to a finish, and I have good backing too.”

As the terrible year of 1929 came to a close, Josephine was a woman alone with her thoughts. She was nearly seventy, and struggling to make decisions without consulting Wyatt, as she had during her entire adult life. Flood did his best to lift her spirits. “Take hold on life all over again; you are just in the middle of it,” he exhorted with a burst of religious fervor. “I know that grief is not easy to bear, but life is a riddle—who knows the answer! A wonderful Creator—how grand is the world, all full of His glory!” He urged her to seek distraction in golf, tennis, swimming, horseback riding, taking in the new movie at Grauman's. Although he suggested gently that she consider hiring a private secretary, he volunteered to answer the crush of correspondence after the funeral. Some of those who sent condolence cards and flowers, like Edward Doheny, received individual responses under Josephine's signature. Flood also composed several form letters, one for admiring peace officers, and one for reporters who were asked to respect Wyatt's wish for “silence in the news columns.”

To Stuart Lake's dismay, he became the new center of her life. She sent letters and telegrams, called him at home, and asked him to visit frequently. She wanted assurance that he was making progress on the book. Lake appealed to Bill Hart for help in keeping Josephine at arm's length, and also asked for a recommendation to his publisher, whetting Hart's appetite with hints that Wyatt had told him things that no one else knew, not even Josephine. With a mild reproof, Hart reminded Lake that Wyatt's death was still a fresh wound, but then agreed to write a strong personal recommendation to his editor at Houghton Mifflin, urging him to make a deal for “my dear friend's life story.”

Acting as his own agent and lawyer, Lake negotiated with considerable skill and prescience. He received no advance, but he retained secondary rights such as serialized magazines and movies, downplaying to the publisher what those might be worth in the future. Josephine's participation was written into the publishing contract, indicating an equal division of royalties. By the fall of 1929, Lake sent Josephine a contract for her signature, with some triumph that the terms of the deal were “exactly as we wished them—maybe a little better than I had full right to expect.”