Lady at the O.K. Corral (35 page)

Gilchriese shared these stories with other people, but not with Mabel. However, she had already figured out that this new writing partnership was a mistake. She was learning nothing. In her opinion, Gilchriese had turned out to be “a bag of wind.” She warned Harold that they had been taken by Gilchriese, who was a “good salesman” but a poor writer. “I don't see that he has a bit of material that we do not already have or can get easily,” she wrote to Harold. As far as she was concerned, Gilchriese had broken their agreement.

Without showing her draft to Gilchriese, she sent it to Bobbs Merrill Publishing Company, and it was rejected.

Mabel sent Gilchriese a curt and final dismissal of their relationship: “In view of [the publisher's rejection] and in view of the fact that you do not seem to have material on the Earp story that we do not already have, we will forget about the book on the life of Josephine Earp.”

At first, Mabel hoped to go forward on her own. She was not deterred by the publisher's rejection and she was not afraid of Gilchriese, not even when he threatened a lawsuit and warned that Lake would also prosecute her. Writing at the end of 1955 to her sister, she signed her letter “Mickey de Tough,” and dispassionately analyzed the pros and cons of proceeding alone. “I hate to lay down a job I've started,” she said. She felt that her legal position was strong, both with Gilchriese and with Lake.

But Mabel had little appetite for the protracted strife of a lawsuit. The stress on Harold Ackerman was already showing; he was shocked by the betrayal of his young companion Gilchriese. “Poor Harold—he is so fearful—afraid of life—afraid of death—afraid of men and afraid of himself—it is a pitiable state of mind,” Mabel said to her sister. Was it worth it? “As a Christian I wonder if it has enough of constructive value for me to spend my time and questionable talents on—on the other hand I can sometimes believe that there is something of constructive value in it.”

Mabel consulted with her husband, who advised her to set aside the manuscript for the second and last time, and suggested that they should have prayed more before signing the contract. “Don't mention the words Wyatt and Earp when you visit—them's fightin' words with him,” she warned her sister.

Sadly, 1955 was looking a lot like 1938, as if Josephine had renewed her curse.

Nineteen fifty-five was also the year when the truth about Mattie Blaylock Earp finally emerged.

The thunderbolt came from Kansas. An article about the opening of a new Dodge City museum reminded a Mr. O. H. Marquis from Iowa that he had seen pictures of young Wyatt Earp in a trunk that he inherited from his “Aunt Ceely.” Marquis contacted the museum, which authenticated the photos and a Bible inscribed to Wyatt by the grateful citizens of Dodge City.

When the news reached Mabel, she understood that Josephine's worst nightmare was about to burst into daylight. The whole world would soon know that “Aunt Ceely” was Celia “Mattie” Earp, and that Wyatt and his lover Josephine were the cause of Mattie's degradation and death.

“That is what Josie was covering from us,” Mabel understood. “She seemed to be truly conscience-stricken about it.” It would have been little comfort to Josephine to know that Mattie herself blamed Wyatt most of all.

If Mabel had any doubts about the harsh truth of Wyatt's infidelities and Josephine's role as the other woman, they were removed by corroborating documents from Tombstone, including the mortgage that Wyatt signed with Mattie Blaylock as well as
Epitaph
clippings that bid farewell to “Mrs. Wyatt Earp” after Morgan's murder. “Wyatt Earp seems to have been a very brave man and a stickler for the law,” Mabel noted with some asperity, “but his personal life seems to have left much to be desired.” This was what Josephine meant when she sighed that Wyatt “didn't have the best of principles where women were concerned.” Then again, for generous Mabel, this new realism in the cult of Earp was inevitable when “humans were misrepresented as heroes, instead of ordinary men.”

The discovery about Mattie forced a reinterpretation of everything about Josephine and Wyatt. As Mabel had predicted, Lake's saintly image of Wyatt Earp was about to be stained.

More debunking came about with Frank Waters's long-delayed publication of
The Earp Brothers of Tombstone
in 1960, which arrived in time to match the national mood of cynicism and mistrust over the coming Vietnam War. In his view, it was not enough for false heroes to be made human: the old icons had to be utterly smashed. Stuart Lake had written a “fictitious legend of preposterous proportions,” America's most hateful “morality play,” and the source of our “tragic national psychosis.” The real Wyatt Earp had spawned America's materialistic ideology, the pop culture expressions of pulp fiction, radio serials, toy pistols, and tin badges. Waters inveighed against the destruction of the environment, the contamination of the water supply, and ultimately, the degraded quality of human life and the American obsession with “the omnipotent dollar, economic and police corruption on all levels, and the streak of violence imbedded in our nature as a people.”

As for Josephine Earp, her sins were more modestly carnal. Waters found her guilty of nothing more cosmic than breaking Mattie Blaylock's heart. He used Allie Earp to reimagine the romance of Wyatt and Josephine as public debauchery that ground vulnerable Mattie into the dust of depression, from which even her loving sisters-in-law and a sympathetic Big Nose Kate could not rescue her. He told of bitter fights between Mattie and Wyatt, and Mattie's humiliation at the spectacle of Sadie Marcus, the slut of Tombstone, flouncing along the streets of Tombstone. All of this was dramatized in Allie's irresistibly folksy dialect:

“We all knew about it and Mattie did too,” said Allie. “That's why we never said anything to her. We didn't have to. We could see her with her eyes all red from cryin', thinkin' of Wyatt's carryin' on. I didn't have to peek out at night to see if the light was still burnin' in her window for Wyatt. I knew it would still be burnin' at daylight when I got up. . . . Everything Wyatt did stuck the knife deeper into Mattie's heart. Polishin' his boots so he could prance into a fancy restaurant with Sadie. Cleanin' his guns to show off to Sadie. You never saw his hair combed so proper or his long, slim hands so beautiful clean and soft.”

Allie, however, had said nothing of the kind.

It would be decades before Waters's portrayal of Allie would be exposed by resourceful researchers and historians as “hogwash,” as author and historian Casey Tefertiller later put it, the charred remains of a torched Earp legend that was every bit as distorted as Lake's hagiography.

In a letter to the Arizona Historical Society, Waters later admitted that he had combined Allie's words with a “cold, objective analysis” and “expose” of the whole subject. However, he influenced a generation of readers who thought they had heard the true voice of Allie Earp, and adjusted their views to accommodate the figure of Josephine as the heartless hussy of Tombstone with Wyatt as her villainous consort. These were the new legends of Tombstone.

AMONG THOSE ENRAGED
by the new anti-Earp dogma were Wyatt's grandniece Estelle Josephine Miller and her husband Bill Miller. Despite having been named after Josephine, Estelle had to struggle to remember anything particularly good to say about her aunt. Wyatt, though, was entirely different: she remembered him as considerate and friendly, a gentle giant who bounced her on his knee. “My Uncle Wyatt wasn't like them writers say,” she insisted. He was neither Boy Scout nor Saint Wyatt the Just, but a “rough, tough, profane, rooting-tooting frontiersman.” They consulted with an interesting writer of their acquaintance: What could be done to rescue Wyatt Earp from the mud that threatened to sink him forever?

Glenn Boyer was the writer, a dashing Air Force pilot with a wide iconoclastic streak and an obsession with all things western. His interest in Wyatt Earp began with a 1937 article in the
Chicago Tribune
titled “Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die,” which led him to
Frontier Marshal
and a brief correspondence with Stuart Lake. Boyer had a good nose for research. When military duty brought him to Earp-rich locations such as San Bernardino and Colton, he haunted local archives and chatted up the old-timers, and eventually found his way to the Millers.

With the Millers' encouragement, Boyer began to think about writing a more balanced, nuanced portrait of Wyatt Earp. This would be his second book; the first was a slim pamphlet called
The Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday
, the cover of which promised “Sensational Photo Discoveries.” He delivered on that promise, with previously unpublished documents and photographs that were indeed sensational, especially a newly discovered letter from Doc to a friend identified only as “Peanut,” in which Doc Holliday admitted that he and Wyatt Earp had killed two men in Colorado and buried them under rocks.

Boyer was recognized as a major new voice in western history. In his next book,
Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp
, Boyer put forth a stylish and entertaining argument that the historical Wyatt Earp had been supplanted by equally misleading caricatures: a plaster saint or grotesque villain. With Boyer's apparent dedication to telling the truth about Earp, the wildly swinging pendulum seemed to have reached a new equilibrium and identified a new champion for Josephine and Wyatt.

Boyer next contacted the Casons to propose a book based on their material. Ernest Cason responded with the sad news of Mabel's death in 1965. Despite his oft-expressed distaste for anything to do with the Earps, he verified what Mabel had learned about Mattie's life. Ernest's interest was in fidelity to the facts and he dismissed Stuart Lake's book with the comment that it should be “considered fiction rather than history.”

Boyer's approach was well timed. After all, Jeanne Cason Laing told her father, Boyer was a colonel in the Air Force, “not just some bum off the wayside.” The Cason family admired Boyer's previous books and agreed that Boyer would be a worthy choice to finish Mabel's work.

With Ernest's approval, his daughter Jeanne Cason Laing scoured her mother's files and sent them to Boyer. It was “a stack of material almost a foot high” that belonged to the three different eras of Mabel's immersion as Josephine's biographer: drafts and notes from Mabel's and Vinnolia's first manuscript in the late 1930s, which included something that Jeanne called “the Clum manuscript”; materials and letters that related to the 1955 attempt, including correspondence with Gilchriese and Houghton Mifflin; and clippings and correspondence with researchers during the mid-1960s. “You and my mother and my aunt would have liked each other,” said Leonard Cason, echoing the warmth that the rest of the family felt toward Glenn Boyer.

Over the next four decades, Jeanne Cason Laing and her family would have reason to reconsider whether they had chosen the right candidate to complete Mabel's mission of truth.

JEANNE CASON LAING
became the main liaison to Boyer. The whole family was a bit jaundiced about the subject, she warned him, and she bristled immediately at his clumsy suggestion that her mother, who was known as Mabel Earp Cason, had traded on the name Earp. It was simply her maiden name, a choice that Jeanne too had made. “There are many more worthwhile Earps than Wyatt—and I count my mother among them,” she scolded him. If anything, “the whoop-de-do about Wyatt has cheapened the name.”

Boyer recovered from this misstep and for the next nine years, Jeanne gave him exclusive access to the original manuscripts and to the family's still vivid memories of Aunt Josie. He also tracked down Josephine's living relatives, sometimes accompanied on his visits by an enthusiastic Jeanne Laing. The women laughed at his banter about their sex lives and physical appearances, while he talked about shotguns and shootouts with the men, all the while advancing his research agenda with reasonable grace. “If you happen to run into a casual picture of Wyatt as he is headed out for a stroll, please don't give it to the Salvation Army,” he instructed his interview subjects, who promised to be on the lookout for documents, photos, and memorabilia.

With the help of Mabel's research materials, interviews with the Miller, Cason, and Marcus families, and his own independent research, Boyer published
I Married Wyatt Earp
in 1976 with the University of Arizona Press; the title had been originally suggested by Mabel and Vinnolia. For sources, Boyer leaned heavily on the Cason manuscript and interviews with the Millers and the Casons, supplemented by “the Clum manuscript,” documented by an entertaining set of footnotes. On the book's cover was a nearly nude figure, her voluptuous figure thinly veiled, her brown eyes framed by a fall of dark brown hair. Boyer identified the woman as Josephine, who posed for the provocative photograph at Johnny Behan's request.

A great title, a lively story, and a racy cover goosed the sales and Boyer's reputation. His Josephine was neither Waters's whore nor Gilchriese's materialistic dominatrix. She was an energetic, affectionate, and good-humored woman, her sentimentality balanced by a bottomless appetite for adventure and a love of nature. The Casons were pleased. The sisters requested autographed copies and complimented the author on “the most truthful account” of the Earp saga. “We're so glad to see all of Mother's and Aunt Vinnolia's work brought to fruition,” they wrote. Josephine's family was also enthusiastic. Any historian's heart would have beaten faster to hear about a sheath of typewritten pages found by Josephine's grandniece Alice Greenberg, together with what appeared to be drawings of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. This turned out to be the only two copies of John Flood's typed manuscript, with his original sketch of the gunfight, drawn from Wyatt's memory. Boyer purchased and published the manuscript as a commemorative edition in 1981, the centennial of the gunfight.