Lady at the O.K. Corral (37 page)

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4       
As Nora Ephron would memorably say of herself
: Ephron was interviewed by Abigail Pogrebin in
Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk about Being Jewish
(New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 168–73.

4       
her silhouette still amazed Grace Welsh Spolidoro
: Interview by Casey Tefertiller, November 8, 1994. Grace compared Josephine to Dolly Parton.

5       
June 2, 1860
: Josephine's birth records are missing, as is often the case with pre–Civil War birth records in New York City. Josephine herself wanted confirmation of the date: on January 18, 1942, she sent a letter (typed by John Flood) to the New York City Department of Health to ask for records of her birth year, emphasizing that “Josephine Marcus was born in New York City; I am positive.”

6       See Carolyn G. Heilbrun,
Writing a Woman's Life
(New York: Norton, 1988).

8       
“Uncle Wyatt's old hang out”
: From the unpublished diary of Edna Lehnhardt Cowing Stoddard Siegriest, November 27, 1954.

13     
just before Christmas, 1880
: Josephine refers in the Cason manuscript to her arrival as “holiday” time, and told Mabel Cason that her arrival coincided with the death of John Clum's wife. Mary Ware Clum died in Tombstone on December 18, 1880.

14     
in the province of Posen
: Hyman, the son of Abraham and Chana Marcus and apprenticed to his father's profession as a baker, was likely from Nakel, Posen. Note that spellings are notoriously tricky for nineteenth-century European/American names. Posen is sometimes known as Posnan. Prussia is sometimes misidentified as Russia. Hyman Marcus is sometimes known as Herman or Henry or Carl-Hyman Marcuse. In the entry for the Marcus family plot in the Hills of Eternity, and on his tombstone, he is Hyman Marcus. Although Sophia is identified as “Sophia Lewis” in most records, her daughter Rebecca (Josephine's half-sister) was identified as “Levy” in her marriage announcement in the
Daily Alta California
on May 4, 1870. For a fuller picture of the Jewish migration from Posen and the internal prejudices, see Hasia Diner,
A Time for Gathering, the Second Migration, 1820–1880
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and Ava F. Kahn and Ellen Eisenberg, “Western Reality: Jewish Diversity During the ‘German' Period” in
American Jewish History
, Volume 92, Number 4, December 2004, pp. 455–479.

16     
a remarkable Jewish success story
: The Jewish population was between 7 and 8 percent of San Francisco's total population by 1870, while Jews made up an estimated 2 to 5 percent of New York City's population. Moses Rischin and John Livingston,
Jews of the American West
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 34.

19     
Rebecca married Aaron Wiener
: They were married by Reverend H. A. Henry, the rabbi at Sherith Israel, one of two synagogues that had been established during the gold rush. The Marcus family synagogue followed the traditions of the Jews from Posen, while Temple Emanu-El catered mostly to the wealthier and more assimilated German Jews. Aside from the clothing, Josephine had no recollection of the wedding, and Mabel Cason later admitted that she made up the accurate but generic description of the Jewish wedding ritual. In fact, Josephine never revealed her sisters' married names in her memoir.

20     
a less than perfect German accent signaled “second class”
: German/Polish tensions figure prominently and poignantly in Harriet Lane Levy's memoir
920 O'Farrell Street
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947). As had Josephine's, Levy's parents had been born in Posen. Unlike Josephine's father, her father had been commercially successful. But that made no difference: she too carried the burden of inferiority. “On the social counter the price tag ‘polack' confessed second class,” Levy recalled. “Upon this basis of discrimination everybody agreed and acted.” These were simply the facts of life: she and her classmates accepted their place below German-Jewish girls “as the denominator takes its stand under the horizontal line.” Like Josephine, Harriet pretended she was German. However, she went on to graduate from Berkeley and moved to Paris with Alice B. Toklas, where she became an intimate of the Gertrude Stein salon.

21     
David Belasco or Gertrude Stein
: Neither Belasco nor Stein retained any traditional Jewish ties. Belasco preferred the dramatic fiction of a childhood in a Roman Catholic monastery to his father's history as former London Jewish clown. Stein, who once proclaimed herself the most famous Jew in the world, left Oakland for Paris, where she would eventually accept the patronage of Nazi protectors to save her life and her art collection.

23     
the popular actress Pauline Markham
: Pauline Markham's real name was Margaret Hall.
Daily Alta California
, December 28, 1884.

26     
“Miss Pauline Markham of the Pinafore Troupe”
:
Daily Evening Bulletin,
January 28, 1880.

26     
her older sister and brother-in-law dispatched a family friend
: Josephine identifies this man as Jacob Marks, a friend of Aaron Wiener (sometimes spelled Weiner).

34     
one of the great migrations of American history
: Between 1840 and 1870 about 350,000 people made the trip west, most of them in search of land and minerals. In
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey
(New York: Schocken, 1982), Lillian Schlissel observed that in their private writings, men tended to see it as a “mythic” adventure, while the women were more likely to emphasize the family sacrifices of the journey.

34     
threatened to whip if their parents did not
: “Diary Written by Wife of Dr. J.A. Rousseau,”
San Bernardino Museum Association Quarterly
6 (Winter 1968). Quoted in Donald Chaput,
The Earp Papers: In a Brother's Image
(Encampment, Wyo.: Affiliated Writers of America, 1994), 14.

36     
Sally Haspel
: Roger Jay was the first to establish a link between Wyatt Earp and Sally Haspel, also known as Sallie Haskell, in “Wyatt Earp's Lost Year,”
Wild West
16, no. 2 (August 2003): 46. http://www.historynet.com/wyatt-earps-lost-year.htm.

37     
Their friendship was sealed
: The relationship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday has been discussed in the comprehensive biography by Gary Roberts,
Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend
(Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), and in Karen Tanner and Robert K. DeArment,
Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). For another point of view, see Andrew Isenberg, “The Code of the West: Sexuality, Homosociality, and Wyatt Earp,”
Western Historical Quarterly
40, no. 2 (2009): 139, which argues that Josephine was a “heteronormative” replacement for Holliday.

37     
until she met Wyatt, probably in Fort Griffin
: Other accounts have them meeting in Fort Dodge or Fort Scott, as early as 1877 or 1878. Although Stuart Lake declared that during Wyatt's years in Kansas he “steered pretty clear of entangling alliances,” Wyatt had a girl in every camp. Glenn Boyer discusses these years in
Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp
(San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor, 1967), 112.

38     
common-law marriages were easy to create
: Common-law marriage originated in pre-Reformation England and ended in 1753 when Parliament passed Lord Hardwicke's Act, requiring all marriage ceremonies to be performed by officials of the Church of England. Nonetheless, common-law marriage traveled across the Atlantic to the Americas. Arizona banned common-law marriages in 1913. See Cynthia Prescott, “‘Why She Didn't Marry Him': Love, Power, and Marital Choices on the Far Western Frontier,”
Western Historical Quarterly
38, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 25–46. The famous Lotta Crabtree case is even more directly relevant to Wyatt and Josephine; see David Dempsey and Raymond P. Baldwin,
The Triumphs and Trials of Lotta Crabtree
(New York: Morrow, 1968).

38     
left San Bernardino as soon as he sent for her
: Louisa appeared to have been deeply in love with Morgan, but chafed at the famous Earp solidarity, which apparently extended to having her mail opened by Morgan's brothers. She directed her sister to write to her as Louisa Houston, since “any letter that is not directed to this name is allways opened by my husbands brothers.”

40     
lesbian couple embracing in public
: George Parsons's entry of July 16, 1880, describes this Tombstone scene: “I have seen hard cases before in a frontier oil town where but one or two women were thought respectable but have never come across several such cases as are here. It would be impossible to speak here of some or one form of depravity I am sorry to know of—for bad as one can be and low as woman can fall—there is one form of sin here fortunately confined to two persons which would I almost believe bring a blush of shame to a prostitute's cheek.”

41     
“Everything was nice if you had money, and we didn't so it wasn't”
: For two essential articles on the controversy surrounding Allie Earp's recollections, as filtered through Frank Waters, see Gary Roberts, “Allie's Story: Mrs. Virgil Earp and the
Tombstone Travesty
,” http://home.earthlink.net/~knuthco1/Travesty/
AlliesStory1source.ht, and Casey Tefertiller, “What Was Not in
Tombstone Travesty
,” http://home.earthlink.net/~knuthco1/
Travesty/notintravestysource.htm.

42     
Earp's stepdaughter had married
: Hattie Catchim Earp, Bessie's daughter, is often (erroneously) thought to have run off with one of the Tombstone cowboys. See Anne Collier, “Harriet ‘Hattie' Catchim: A Controversial Earp Family Member,”
Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association (WOLA) Journal
16, no. 2 (Summer 2007).

46     
Johnny Behan with another woman
: Some accounts have Josephine returning from a trip to San Francisco and catching Johnny in bed with another woman. Mabel Cason wrote on May 20, 1959, that Josephine “told us about her time in Tombstone, how she had gone there with a theatrical troupe playing Pinafore, that she had met John Behan there and went back later with the understanding that they were to be married, kept house for him, looked after his 10 year old son Albert. She built a house for them with money that her father had sent her and some derived from the sale of her diamonds. Finally [Behan] began running around with a married woman and neglecting her—and she met Wyatt Earp.” Original letter is in the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

46     a likely candidate was Emma Dunbar
: Emma Dunbar's letters to John Behan (Special Collections, University of Arizona) document that they had an affair in Tombstone, though the timing is not conclusive. Emma and Johnny corresponded for years afterward; when she heard that he was headed for Alaska, she warned him that he was not up to the rigors of the frozen north: “My dear boy what in heavens name would you with your dainty ways and white hands do in a country where men who have roughed it all their lives die. . . . You have not the strength or endurance, and why should you go?”

46-47  
disturbing signs that Johnny had contracted syphilis
: Although the date when Behan contracted syphilis is unknown, John Gilchriese believed that he was infected in Tombstone. It could have been as late as the mid-1880s. Lynn Bailey reports Behan's trips to the West Coast for treatment are documented in newspapers of the late 1880s and '90s. His disease reached the tertiary stage by the early 1890s, and eventually contributed to his early death.

47     
Tombstone's sex trade was regulated
: For discussions of prostitution in Tombstone, see Ben Traywick,
Behind the Red Lights
(Tombstone, Ariz.: Red Marie's, 1993); Anne M. Butler,
Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–90
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Anne Seagraves,
Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West
(Hayden, Idaho: Wesanne, 1994).

49      “
the key to the whole yarn of Tombstone”
: Stuart Lake to Ira Rich Kent, February 13, 1930, Houghton Mifflin Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

53      “
very grave results will follow”
: Quoted in Paula M. Marks,
And Die in the West: The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight
(New York: Morrow, 1989), 174–75.

55     
Who shot first?
The arguments rage on. For the best recent comprehensive account, see Jeff Guinn's
The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral and How It Changed the American West
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

59     
Spicer issued a strong verdict
: The complete inquest records were recently discovered in Cochise County and are online at http://azmemory.lib.az.us/cdm/search/collection/ccolch. For a well-documented summary of some of the key evidence presented at the hearing, see Jeff Morey, “‘Blaze Away!' Doc Holliday's Role in the West's Most Famous Gunfight,” http://home.earthlink.net/~knuthco1/
Itemsofinterest4/blazeawaysource.htm.

60     
the Grand Hotel across the street
: There is some evidence that Mattie stayed behind when the rest of the family moved to the hotel. See Marks,
And Die in the West
, 241.

61     
a comedy at Schieffelin Hall
: It is baffling, but provocative, that in the manuscript of Flood's biography of Wyatt Earp in the Ford County Historical Society, he has Wyatt accompany Morgan to a Pauline Markham production of
Pinafore
, not
Stolen Kisses.
The Markham troupe (including Josephine) had indeed performed
Pinafore
in Tombstone, but that was in 1879, more than two years before Morgan's death. “Here was Pauline Markham, and Pinafore,” Flood has Morgan appealing to Wyatt. “There would be nothing like it for another year.” I would suggest that this was an inside joke planted by Josephine, except that nothing about Morgan's death was funny.