Lady at the O.K. Corral (16 page)

S
HE WAS
no longer the runaway teenager throwing it all away for love. Josephine had spent more than ten years as Mrs. Wyatt Earp, in boomtowns and mining camps in Colorado, Texas, California, and Arizona. There was always a flurry of public recognition when they entered a new place, and Josephine listened cautiously for whispers about Mattie or the validity of her claim to be Wyatt's wife. She heard none, other than the low hum of fear she generated herself, a constant dread of discovery and scandal.

In the summer of 1897, Josephine and Wyatt were living in the desert outside of Yuma, Arizona, when news of the Alaskan Klondike gold fields hit. Even in Yuma, Josephine heard fabulous stories of lives transformed by untold riches. Soon the town was so full of gold rush mania that the editor of the local
Sun
volunteered to build a two-hundred-passenger ship to deliver fellow Yumans directly to the gold fields. With mock seriousness, he proposed to hire local notables as journalists, and he nominated Yuma's own Wyatt Earp as his law and order correspondent. Then suddenly old comrades from the boom days of Tombstone, San Diego, and San Francisco began to write to Josephine and Wyatt with one message: Come to Alaska!

Josephine badly needed a new escape plan. Just a few months before, the Earps fled San Francisco in the wake of a scandal that came not from any revelations about Mattie Blaylock's suicide but from an accusation that Wyatt had fixed a high-stakes prizefight. The trouble started with a sensationalized three-part account of Wyatt's frontier adventures. The
San Francisco Examiner
articles sold newspapers, but the exaggerated accounts of Wyatt's exploits set him up for ridicule. On the heels of that misstep, Wyatt agreed to serve as a referee for a championship prizefight between Tom Sharkey and Bob Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons was heavily favored to win the $10,000 purse. The promoters had quarreled over the choice of referee, and compromised on Wyatt only a few hours before the fight.

Josephine and Wyatt dined that night at Goodfellow's Grotto Café, not far from Mechanics' Pavilion, where a capacity crowd of 15,000 was already gathering, one of the first to include women. Josephine had no love of the ring and went home after dinner. Her nephew Isidore, who was interested in anything that interested Wyatt, accompanied him.

Wyatt entered the ring wearing a grin—and a gun. He made no attempt to conceal the weapon, which was tucked into his belt and visible to everyone after he removed his coat. Just darned forgot he was wearing it, he protested when the ringside audience gasped. Decades after Tombstone, where a frontier lawman worked, gambled, and slept with a pistol, Wyatt was “no more conscious of its being there than of my coat or my vest,” he tried to explain to a shocked police officer. Wyatt surrendered the gun without hesitation. But the crowd was already riled up.

The fight began. In round eight, Wyatt called a foul against Fitzsimmons and awarded the decision to the underdog, Sharkey. Wyatt was nearly crushed in the chaos that followed his unpopular ruling. He was defended by Lucky Baldwin and other ringside observers—and by some of the doctors who examined Sharkey—but all of that was about to be buried in an avalanche of negative press.

The next day's headlines screamed “Fitzsimmons Was Robbed!” Sharkey quickly cashed his check for $10,000 and left town. From their rooms at the Baldwin Hotel, Josephine railed loudly against what she considered to be personal attacks against Wyatt, orchestrated by the owner of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, who happened to be one of the big losers that night. The newspapers kept the story alive for weeks, sometimes illustrated with mocking cartoons of Wyatt as a corrupt frontier lawman in the ring, pistols at the ready.

A decade of respectability and careful work to silence the echoes of Tombstone collapsed. The facts were ambiguous. But what was indisputable was that the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight put all the stories about Tombstone, all the lingering tales of Wyatt as a cold-blooded killer and bad man, back on page one, newly amplified with juicy accusations of theft and corruption. “The old lies come bobbing to the surface of the ocean of printed matter,” Josephine lamented. It was not Mattie who had returned to haunt her—at least not yet—but the humiliation was particularly hard to bear in San Francisco, home to Josephine's family, including her socially prominent sister Hattie and her upright brother-in-law Emil Lehnhardt.

In the aftermath of the fight, Josephine was desperate to escape the finger-pointing and notoriety. Ably represented by a Wells Fargo lawyer, Wyatt appeared at police headquarters to answer a charge of carrying a concealed weapon. He paid his fifty-dollar fine, but that did nothing to quell the public outcry. Proclaiming herself tired of the “contention and greed” of the sporting world, Josephine was relieved when Wyatt proposed a permanent move to the California desert to raise cattle or to prospect around the Colorado River.

This would be Josephine's first camping experience. A city girl, she instinctively feared the desert and its barren isolation. But time alone with Wyatt was always welcome, and she waged an internal battle to conquer her fears. “Notwithstanding my faint courage in the face of danger, I had a certain spirit of adventure that lured me into the very experiences that I feared most. I knew, however, that Wyatt had enough courage for both of us and felt that as long as he was with me I would dare anything.” She had no home, no crops or store to tend, no children to educate, no compelling ties to any place in the world.

Hoping that their infamy and embarrassment would dissipate in the “sweet breath of the desert,” the couple sold off some of their investments. Wyatt happily slid back into the outdoor life, “like a boy in his eager enjoyment.” To Josephine's delight, their retreat awakened in her a love of nature, the more rugged and unusual the better, and a particular affinity for the desert.

The respite would be brief, hardly the prolonged retreat that Josephine had sought. The gold rush chatter proved irresistible to Wyatt, who proposed that they return immediately to San Francisco and outfit themselves for Alaska. Josephine was reluctant to sell off the camp gear that they had so recently acquired and to return to the city that had just been the site of their greatest disgrace. But Wyatt's warning about Alaska—“There will be hardships”—had the reverse effect of overcoming her fears. She still thought of herself as a “scaredy-cat” but was proud that she had survived in a dozen exotic locales. “Hardships, hmph!” she responded to Wyatt. “I'd like to see the hardships a man can endure that are too great for a healthy woman. They will not be any harder for me than for you.” Her next words coyly evoked the conventional marriage vows that she had not yet spoken, and never would: “Besides, I promised to stick with you ‘till death do us part' didn't I?”

Her Alaska sojourn would turn out to be the most demanding time of her life, but also the happiest. Surely there, so close to the Arctic Circle, she could lay down the burden of the past.

“
ON THE TRAIN
to San Francisco all we could hear was
GOLD
and the
KLONDIKE
,” Josephine recalled. Alaska “was a remote frozen country few of us had heard of before and which seemed as far away and unknown as the land of Cathay did to Europeans in the days of Marco Polo.” Their plan was to make their way to Dawson, the capital of the Canadian territory, via the recently opened Chilkoot “White” Pass.

An accident delayed their departure and changed their lives. Wyatt was riding down Market Street on a public streetcar when he caught sight of a crowd standing around the first automobile that most of them (including Wyatt) had ever seen. Hoping for a closer look at the shiny object drawing all eyes, Wyatt jumped off the trolley, slipped on the rain-slick street, and bruised his hip badly enough to keep him in bed for three weeks. Steamer after steamer left for Alaska. Finally Wyatt pronounced himself well enough to book passage for two on the
City of Seattle
, bound for Wrangell, one of the popular gateways to the Klondike.

Josephine and Wyatt entered Alaska at the moment when the wilderness was being pushed back forever. Just twenty years before, naturalist John Muir had declared Wrangell “the most inhospitable place at first sight I had ever seen.” That Wrangell was gone; in its place was a rough-and-tumble mining town like so many other boomtowns. This one was just that much more remote, and soon, much colder. Despite the obvious climatic differences between the Arizona desert and the Alaskan frontier, northern boomtowns were equally lively with the familiar sounds of saloons and gambling. Fortunes were being taken out of the ground, but also out of the pockets of the miners. Con artists proliferated, including one former Tombstone acquaintance, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, who reigned briefly as chief swindler of boomtown Skagway, before being killed in a gunfight. Among Alaska's crop of unusual entrepreneurs was Josephine's friend Sidney Grauman. The future movie impresario of Los Angeles got his start selling fifty-dollar newspapers to Alaskan storekeepers, who read the news for a fee to homesick miners.

Josephine and Wyatt inquired about getting to the gold fields and the northern prospecting towns. The fastest route would take them over the Chilkoot Pass, later made famous by Jack London as “the worst trail this side of hell,” thirty-three miles of treacherous hiking where thousands of would-be fortune hunters struggled like ants up nearly forty-degree inclines. Once they descended, conditions were hardly better on the other side. Miners endured a life of hunger, fever, dysentery, and scurvy. Had Wyatt's accident not delayed them, Josephine might have taken her turn on the so-called Golden Staircase. But the time was dangerously close to the onset of winter, and Josephine feared that Wyatt was not yet well enough to endure the arduous mountain crossing.

In the end, it was not only cold weather and Wyatt's bruised hip that changed their plans: Josephine discovered that she was pregnant.

She had been pregnant at least once before, and may have undergone an abortion in Tombstone or in San Diego, according to dark hints that she dropped to family members and friends. But now Josephine wanted to be a mother. At thirty-six, she was relatively old to be bearing her first child. She was confident that Wyatt would propose an immediate return to the States. He did: Wyatt was as eager to have a child as she was.

Josephine's pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. The stillborn child was a boy, although there is no record of an infant's burial. According to conversations reported by family members and friends, the loss was devastating. Josephine's age, their nomadic life—all were poor indicators that she would have another chance. She blamed her own anatomy for the loss of her baby, lamenting, “God didn't make me right for having children.” But sorrow and disappointment did not curdle into bitterness. In later life, she delighted in the pregnancies of friends, and was quick with a gift or telegram to share the joy of a new baby. She was playful and affectionate with young children, whether they were strangers or her own nieces and nephews. Albert Behan remained a close friend, an improbable relationship that survived the bitter breakup between Josephine and his father, as well as the still more divisive events that pitted Wyatt and Behan against each other at the O.K. Corral and during the Vendetta Ride.

Her miscarriage slowed her down but did not end gold rush dreams. “We had to try Alaska again,” Josephine recalled. She recuperated in San Francisco. As soon as spring weather arrived, she declared herself fit for another run at Dawson. However, conditions at the Chilkoot Pass had grown still more dangerous. The pass had recently been the site of a massive avalanche in which about sixty people were buried alive. This time, Josephine and Wyatt chose the slower but safer all-water route, which would take them up the west coast to Alaska, then along the Yukon River to St. Michael, a small settlement near the mouth of the Yukon, and then to Dawson.

They negotiated to get tickets on “any old tub that could be got to float” and found space on the creaky SS
Brixon.
After a few days, uncomfortable conditions and meager rations caused a passenger rebellion, which escalated into a full mutiny of the crew. Josephine was proud that Wyatt was asked to arbitrate the dispute, after which the captain regained control in time to fill the
Brixon
's food stores at the port of Unalaska. They reached St. Michael, expecting to transfer to another vessel, but found there only a half-built skeleton of a boat. Delays multiplied: after construction was finished and the boat declared seaworthy, the newly christened
Pingree
sprung a leak on its maiden voyage and limped back to shore. Nervous about the approach of winter, the passengers passed the time cutting wood for fuel in the mosquito-thick forests along the riverbank. Finally, the boat was ready to begin its 1,500-mile voyage through the winding Yukon River, where shifting currents and dangerous sandbars challenged even the most experienced captains.

As she had fallen in love with the California desert, now Josephine reveled in the “wildly picturesque” landscape of the Yukon River, flanked on both sides by steep mountains with tall trees marching down to the water's edge. The wind was still warm with the last summer breezes. But soon Josephine felt the autumn chill and could see the shallow parts of the river beginning to freeze. Snow was falling steadily as they drew close to Rampart, a small settlement halfway between St. Michael and Dawson. The steamer struggled forward as more ice solidified. One more bend of the river—and they were locked in a deep freeze.

The passengers left the boat. Some of them made immediate plans to continue their trip by dogsled. Josephine canvassed the opinion of acquaintances, who predicted that business would be better in the American part of Alaska. “You are under the good old Stars and Stripes,” they urged. “Up at Dawson, the Union Jack flies above you and they don't favor Yankees.”