Lady at the O.K. Corral (23 page)

A rift might have opened up between the brothers had they not been immediately consumed with a far more serious concern when they returned to Goldfield: a pneumonia epidemic sweeping through the town. Virgil was the only one of the four to fall sick. His decline was swift: Virgil died on October 19, 1905, at the age of sixty-two.

To many, Virgil had been held in greater esteem than Wyatt or any of the other Earps. He had led “a more exciting life than comes to the average man,” noted his obituary in the
Goldfield News
. Between the reticence of the era and his own taciturn nature, Wyatt said nothing publicly about the loss of his older brother, but according to Josephine, his death stirred the still strong emotions Wyatt had about their life in Tombstone and Morgan's assassination.

Allie had few choices about how and where to live without her lifelong partner. She had no savings, and a few secrets of her own. No one knew, for instance, that she and Virgil had not been ceremonially married, which disqualified her for a pension as a Civil War widow. She accepted the invitation of her niece Hildreth Halliwell to move to Los Angeles. Wyatt and Josephine visited her there, often accepting an invitation to stay for Sunday supper. But without Virgil's warmth to counter Allie's astringent wit and mistrust of Josephine, the three survivors were linked by loyalty and shared history rather than affection.

Of the eight men at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, only Wyatt was still alive.

After Virgil's death, Josephine and Wyatt left Goldfield and resumed their usual pattern. The desert drew them like a magnet. As soon as they unpacked in Los Angeles or another one of their favorite coastal cities—San Diego, San Francisco, or Santa Barbara—they longed to return to their camp near Vidal, California, close to the Arizona border. They had lost none of their love for sleeping under the stars, the smell of rain on the desert, and nights that induced such a profound sense of serenity that Josephine suggested “it would have been hard to find two people with less need for a nerve specialist than we in those years.”

They were blessed with good health; in all their decades of camping out, neither of them had consulted a doctor or dentist more than once or twice. The cosmetic effects of outdoor life concerned Josephine more. She reminded Wyatt that “there are not many women who would live as I do, roughing it with you in this hard country.” Wyatt took the hint and responded loyally: “There are not many women who keep as well as you do. You never need to send for the doctor. Anyway you look good to me.” That was good enough for Josephine, who accepted his plain-speaking words in the place of any high-flying romantic compliments. His days of buying her jewelry might be over, but he was still her hero and protector. One of her happiest days in the desert was when Wyatt surprised her by building a tree house, which he had designed as a bedroom that would keep her safe from snakes.

They had been a strikingly handsome couple in their early days together, but Josephine admitted ruefully that Wyatt had aged far more gracefully. At nearly sixty, his years only added gravitas to his wiry frame, chiseled features, and charisma. Discriminating young women such as Grace Spolidoro, daughter of Wyatt's close friend Charlie Welsh, recalled Wyatt as “tall and erect with steely blue eyes that could stare right through you.” Neighbors remembered his deep voice, carefully chosen words, and chivalrous manners. When in town, Wyatt never joined the breakfast table until he was fully dressed in his dark suit, his collar fastened, necktie in place.

The towering, still powerful figure of Wyatt Earp fit the rugged saga of Tombstone, while Josephine was looking more like a frumpy old aunt. Gravity and extra pounds had taken their toll on her hourglass figure, and her beautiful hair and skin showed the effects of their nomadic circuit. With no particular need to dress up, she wore shapeless housedresses that fit their life at the camp but did little to remind anyone of the saucy young woman of Tombstone. Age did nothing to diminish her bright eyes or the gift of mimicry that made her popular with children, as did the sweets she always had ready to share from her sister's candy store, Lehnhardt's of Oakland. To teenage Grace Welsh Spolidoro, Josephine appeared to be merely a “good guard,” plump and bosomy, always fussing with her hair and hat, inexplicably spoiled by Wyatt. She was amusing, Grace recalled, though she also criticized Josephine for her preference for gambling rather than taking proper care of Wyatt.

They lived frugally, but their Alaskan stake was almost gone. At one point, Josephine considered a return trip that might replenish their fortune. “We are talking some of going to Alaska for the summer,” she wrote to a friend, after she and Wyatt were invited to join a prospecting trip. “And I am just in for it, as I do want to find a good gold mine. And I think that's the country.”

Wyatt was then sixty-six, and she was fifty-four. Realistic planning for the future had never been their strong suit.

JOSEPHINE WAS IN
the desert on April 18, 1906, when San Francisco and the Bay Area suffered a major earthquake, followed by a fire that consumed most of the city over the next three days. In what has been described as America's greatest urban catastrophe, more than 3,500 people died, and half of the city's survivors were left homeless. Business came to a total halt. The immigrant Jewish quarter south of Market Street, where the Marcus family once lived, was devastated. So was the personal history of several generations as the earthquake opened a yawning chasm in pre-1906 history that would never be filled, as archives, photographs, public records, and personal memorabilia disappeared forever.

It was a time of communal suffering. The Lehnhardt mansion in nearby Oakland was spared and became even more the center of the family as Hattie and Emil made room for displaced friends and family; Sophia Marcus was already living with them, and Rebecca and Aaron followed with their children. Josephine and Wyatt were the last to move in.

The next few years brought severe aftershocks of a more personal kind. Forty-eight-year-old Nathan Marcus, only recently returned from Alaska, died soon after the earthquake, though the cause of death was listed as diabetes. He was buried next to his father. Nicholas Earp outlived two of his three wives and five of his nine children, and died at ninety-four in 1907 in the Soldier's Home near Los Angeles, identified in his obituary as “father of the noted Earp boys.” Lucky Baldwin died on his ranch in 1909, a still vigorous eighty-year-old who left behind a diminished but still substantial fortune in California real estate.

Times were changing. The only constant was Tombstone, constantly lurking in the background, threatening to reveal the secrets of the past.

“
OF COURSE YOU
know all about the trouble Mr. Earp got mixed up in,” Josephine wrote on August 2, 1911. She and Wyatt had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and Wyatt was arrested in a so-called bunco scheme (con game, in today's parlance) on July 21, 1911. A man who initially put up the money for a friendly game of faro had tipped off the police when he realized that he was the intended mark.

As if to underscore the bewildering changes that twentieth-century life was presenting to an aging Wyatt Earp, the man who had made his living as a frontier gambler was arrested for running a card game in a big-city hotel. He tried to hide his identity at first, but his alias was quickly pierced, and then the other three perpetrators were all but forgotten: it was Wyatt's name that made the headlines. Reporters linked the arrest back to Wyatt's record as controversial Arizona marshal and referee. Thirty years after the O.K. Corral, and fifteen years after the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons debacle, the national headlines proclaimed, “Notorious Marshal Who Disqualified Fitzsimmons Arrested in Raid.” Wyatt was saved from a possible jail sentence only because the police bungled the case: they had instigated the raid before the game had actually begun. Wyatt and his associates were released.

Josephine was miserable over Wyatt's arrest, but stalwart in his defense, insisting “Everything was put on to him just because he was Wyatt Earp.” For help in this crisis, she turned to John Flood, a young engineering graduate of Bucknell and Yale who had been introduced to the Earps by a Los Angeles neighbor. With no family of his own, the unmarried Flood admired Wyatt like a devoted son. His relationship with Josephine was less reverent, but for Wyatt's sake Flood hid his irritation with the often bossy Mrs. Earp. Flood became their legal and financial adviser, real estate agent, and engineering consultant. He was their secretary, typing their letters, sometimes taking dictation from Josephine. Efficient and organized, he kept careful records and carbon copies of their correspondence.

If Wyatt had intended the card game to help their financial situation, he had made it even worse. The couple had to hire a lawyer and use their property as collateral. But in the court of public opinion, Wyatt was well defended by his influential and articulate supporters, the posse of old friends who came to his aid with their words instead of their guns. In former days, Wyatt himself had coordinated the defense. Now, it was Josephine and Flood protecting him and orchestrating these outpourings of support. “Mr. Earp knows his friends believe in him. And for strangers, he cares not,” she declared stoutly to Flood after Wyatt was released from jail.

Josephine foresaw the need for greater vigilance in managing Wyatt. “This will teach him a lesson never again to enter a gaming club,” she hoped. She wanted him to be known as a gentleman who owned real estate, horses, and mines. A day at the track, wearing fine clothes, and drinking champagne with Lucky Baldwin: in her view, that's where Mr. and Mrs. Earp belonged.

So she wanted to believe—except that Lucky Baldwin was dead, and Josephine could no longer fit into her beautiful gowns. Wyatt had nearly found himself back in the “cold and silent calaboose.”

What was commonplace at the frontier had been pushed to the margins of American society. Wyatt was caught on the wrong side of the pendulum that swung back and forth between taboo and tolerance. Gambling tables were forbidden, and now an even bigger change was coming: Prohibition. Wyatt had owned or operated ten saloons in six towns in six different states. He and other saloonkeepers had been more than convivial alcohol salesmen; they had played essential roles in frontier communities as bankers, information sources, and political conveners, furnishing the government with much needed tax revenues. Now the crazy quilt of state regulations about alcohol distribution was being gathered together into an unstoppable national movement.

When Prohibition was proposed in Arizona in 1909, the
Tombstone Epitaph
editorialized: “If the present and proposed prohibition laws and antigambling laws become effective in Arizona, Tombstone will become as prosaic and goody good as a New England church town. Shades of Holliday and Earp, how times have changed.”

Remarkably, Tombstone itself would soon be dry, an early casualty of state-enacted prohibition six years before the rest of the country closed its bars and saloons.

JOSEPHINE HAD ALWAYS
been the unpredictable one in the Marcus family, the one who seemed to invite the question, “What will happen to her next?” It was her sister Hattie, however, who suddenly eclipsed even Wyatt's arrest and the advent of prohibition.

“Rich, but Weary of Life, Confectioner Kills Self” was the unexpected headline on January 27, 1912. Hattie's husband, Emil Lehnhardt, was found dead in the basement of his store, a self-inflicted bullet wound in his head. No one had gauged the depths of Emil's depression or even knew that he had a gun. Known to all as “Oakland's Candy King,” a pillar of the community, Unitarian church, and Masonic order, he personified the self-made man, a first-generation American who had arrived in San Francisco as a traveling salesman and built Lehnhardt's from a local sweet shop into one of the largest confectionary businesses on the Pacific coast, employing 140 people. He was about to open another factory, this one primarily for exporting to Pacific markets.

Lehnhardt had recently lost his sister after a long illness that left her paralyzed. After he too experienced a series of minor strokes, the doctors warned that he might be similarly afflicted. He accepted his doctors' recommendation to retire and authorized Hattie to sign checks. Son-in-law Estes Joseph Cowing was recruited to become general manager of the business. Cowing had married Edna Lehnhardt in October 1908, and they had two children, Emil and Marjorie.

Hattie and Josephine were still struggling to regain their balance from Emil's suicide when their mother, Sophia Marcus, died on August 19, 1912. She had been living in Hattie's large home since the death of Josephine's father. Sophia was identified as a “pioneer of the state” in the obituaries. Despite her dramatically different path, Josephine had always remained close to her mother, who inspired Josephine's love of nature. It was her mother's lullaby, “Lieber Gott,” which haunted Josephine in her first lonely days as a young runaway with Pauline Markham's Pinafore troupe. Now there were three members of the Marcus family in the Hills of Eternity cemetery. Both Josephine and Wyatt had lost their parents, another sign that their age was catching up with them.

For more than five years, Hattie and her son-in-law ran the business together but then a third family cataclysm occurred when Edna got divorced. An aspiring artist, Edna moved back into the family home at Oakland with her children. Hattie took over Lehnhardt's and became a well-known businesswoman of the Bay Area, featured in the society columns as a philanthropist and supporter of the San Francisco Opera Association and other cultural organizations, and listed in
Who's Who
among the women of California.

Josephine traveled continually to Oakland during these trying years. “I am particularly glad to know that Edna is well again after her sorrow and trouble,” John Flood wrote sympathetically.