Lady at the O.K. Corral (39 page)

128  
Clum quickly revolutionized mail service in Nome
: After the personal and often violent attacks he endured in Tombstone, Clum must have treasured the appreciative public in Nome: “General Clum is a man of ripe experience, broad minded and practical,” editorialized the
Nome Daily News
. “A frontiersman himself, he knows what to do and how to act in meeting emergencies.” See Fred Lockley,
History of the First Free Delivery of Mail in Alaska at Nome, Alaska, in 1900
(Seattle: Shorey Book Store, 1966).

132  
Nome accounted for almost half of the total gold output
: Alfred H. Brooks, George B. Richardson, and Arthur J. Collier,
A Reconnaissance of the Cape Nome and Adjacent Gold Fields of Seward Peninsula, Alaska, in 1900
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901).

133  “
that I wear as a clip”
: Alice “Peggy” Greenberg, interview by Roger S. Peterson, October 13, 1981, Roger S. Peterson Collection.

133  
The mining claims that Wyatt had filed in Josephine's name
: Interestingly, Wyatt was not too famous to have his name misspelled on the documents for the sale of the Dexter or the transfer of the mining claims, which record his name as “Erp.”

136  
They outfitted themselves for the desert in Los Angeles
: See Carl B. Glasscock,
Gold in Them Hills: The Story of the West's Last Wild Mining Day
s (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1932), one of the best contemporary accounts on life in the boomtowns. Glasscock was subsequently the biographer of Lucky Baldwin. Josephine and Mabel Cason were familiar with his books. See also Jeffrey Kintop and Guy Louis Rocha,
The Earps' Last Frontier: Wyatt and Virgil Earp in the Nevada Mining Camps, 1902–1905
(Reno, Nev.: Great Basin Press, 1989).

137  
“[Wyatt Earp and his wife and A. Martin] are good citizens and we welcome them”
:
Tonopah Bonanza
, February 1, 1902, quoted in Chaput,
Earp Papers
, 189.

138  
Rickard's reputation soared
: See Phillip I. Earl, “Tex Rickard—The Most Dynamic Fight Promoter in History,”
Boxing Insider
, April 15, 2008, http://www.boxinginsider.com/his tory/tex-rickard-the-most-dynamic-fight-promoter-in-history/.

139  
Halliwell was usually quick to blame Josephine
: Halliwell, interview by Bill Oster and Al Turner, Colton, California, September 25, 1971, University of Arizona Special Collections.

139  
noted his obituary in the
Goldfield News: Jane was the daughter of Virgil and Jane Sysdam, who were married briefly in 1860 without parental consent. Allie sent Virgil's body to Jane for burial in Portland, Oregon. See Kintop and Rocha,
Earps' Last Frontier
, 40.

140  
only Wyatt was still alive
: Both Billy Claiborne and Ike Clanton were killed in shootouts; Claiborne in 1882 and Clanton in 1887.

142  
America's greatest urban catastrophe
: See Philip L. Fradkin,
The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

143  
“Notorious Marshal Who Disqualified Fitzsimmons Arrested in Raid”
: See “Earp's Faro Plan Fails,”
New York Times,
July 23, 1911.

143  
John Flood, a young engineering graduate
: According to Lynn Bailey, Flood worked in the Los Angeles offices of Seeley Wintersmith Mudd, an eminent geologist and founder of many companies, and father of Seeley G. Mudd, the prolific benefactor of American colleges, libraries, and science buildings.

146  
Wyatt's earnings declined
: One of these checks is in the Ragsdale Collection, drawn on the Central Bank of Oakland. Hildreth Halliwell considered Wyatt a “bitter man” at having to accept these handouts.

146  
Wyatt was paid a management fee
: Kirschner interview with Walter Cason, April 10, 2010; Boyer, interview with Louis Siegriest, 1983, Boyer Collection.

147  
The sight of Wyatt Earp . . . at a seder
: Melvin Shestack was the television producer who wrote about meeting Wyatt Earp and Henry Fonda in the
Forward,
July 1, 1994.

148  
condemn all those things she did when she was young
: The reverse story is told about Wyatt by the Welsh sisters. They too stayed with Josephine and Wyatt, but in their memory, it was Wyatt who “watched them like a hawk,” and when they stayed too long at the beach, would say slowly in his deep voice, “Grace, time to come home.” Casey Tefertiller, interview with Grace Welsh Spolidoro.

151  
“Cowboys” were in ample supply in the Los Angeles stockyards
: Raoul Walsh evokes this era in
Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 75.

152  “
Tamed the baddies, huh?
”: Walsh, 105.

153  “
those ‘damn fool dudes,' as he called them”
: Quoted in Joseph McBride,
Searching for John Ford: A Life
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), 111–12.

153  
The “King of the Cowboys”
: Aside from his accomplishments as an actor and stuntman, Tom Mix appears on the album cover of the Beatles'
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(third row).

153  
“It haunted his mind”
: Roger S. Peterson interview of William S. Hart Jr., April 6, 1983, Roger S. Peterson Collection.

155  
Hooker drafted a manuscript she showed to Wyatt
: The manuscript, “An Arizona Vendetta: The Truth About Wyatt Earp and Some Others,” is in the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles.

156  
“Doc Holliday was about 5
′
10 ½″, slender, good looking”
: Flood notes, dated September 9, 1922, Ragsdale Collection. See ladyattheokcorral.com.

165  
Albert insisted that he was reporting the conversation accurately
: This is the version that Josephine tells in the Cason manuscript and in a letter she sent to Frank Lockwood. However, Wyatt Earp told Frederick Bechdolt that it was Albert's wife Julia Behan, who reported the conversation to Josephine, who then repeated it to Wyatt.

167  
There were lots of good married people there
: See David Dempsey and Raymond P. Baldwin,
The Triumphs and Trials of Lotta Crabtree
(New York: Morrow, 1968).

168  
“Old Wyatt Earp is still on deck”
: William M. Raine to Ira Rich Kent, April 8, 1928, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Raine's article, “Helldorado: Stories of Arizona's Wild Old Days, When You Couldn't Keep a Bad Man Down,” appeared in the magazine
Liberty
on July 16, 1927.

170  
Bat Masterson
: Lake may have known Masterson when he worked at the
Morning Telegraph
and Lake worked at the
New York Herald.
Kirschner interview with Anne Collier. See Collier, “Stuart N. Lake's Wyatt Earp and the Great Depression,” B.A. thesis, University of La Verne, 2011.

171  
Josephine was forced to borrow money
: According to John Gilchriese and William Shillingberg, Josephine used the loan to pay gambling debts, and was barred from seeing Doheny again. Doheny was the model for Daniel Plainview in the film
There Will Be Blood
.

172  
interview Earp about six times
: Tefertiller,
Wyatt Earp
, 325.

173  “
straight as an arrow”
: Roger S. Peterson, interview with Alice “Peggy” and Alvin Greenberg, October 13, 1981, Roger S. Peterson Collection.

174  
Adela Rogers St. John declared that she would never forget seeing Wyatt
: Quoted in Stephens, pp. 231–35. The original article was published in the
American Weekly
, May 22, 1960.

174  
The brothers had not been particularly close
: In later years, Newton's family resented the publicity about Wyatt, especially since they wanted to portray Newton as a successful (and law-abiding) farmer who “remained active in church work, his good deeds never making the newspapers.” Quoted in Chaput,
Earp Papers
, 230.

175  
Dr. Shurtleff stayed all day, as did a nurse
: There is some speculation that the “nurse” that Josephine mentions in the Cason manuscript was actually Flood. He may have preferred anonymity, or perhaps Josephine preferred to write a deathbed scene that included only Dr. Shurtleff, an unnamed nurse, and Josephine herself.

176  
Hattie rode with John Flood in the cortege
: Flood to Edward Earp, June 10, 1952. “Mrs. Earp did not attend her husband's funeral (a reason, I shall explain, to you, personally, upon your visit to LA), so I represented her at the funeral, and rode, in the cortege, with her sister Mrs. Emil Lehnhardt, long since deceased.” Ragsdale Collection.

176  
there was room for Wyatt and, someday, for Josephine
: The ashes of Josephine and Wyatt are buried in a single plot in the Hills of Eternity cemetery in Colma, California, an area of 1.9 square miles, which was created as an incorporated cemetery area after burials were prohibited in San Francisco in 1900.

178  
Fox sent a crew to film the entire event
: Sadly, only a fragment of this remains; the rest of the footage was lost in a plane crash.

179  
inquired when he could expect his copy of Stuart Lake's book
: “When will Wyatt's story be in print and available? I am exceedingly anxious to read it?” U.S. Marshal Mauk to Josephine Marcus Earp, September 17, 1931, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

180  
head over to the Welsh home to scrounge for food
: Grace Welsh Spolidoro, interview by Tefertiller, Tefertiller Collection.

184  
“minor thefts of official funds to felonies of scandalous proportions”
: Lake to Josephine, April 27, 1929, Lake Collection, Huntington Library.

186  
his broad hint that “the person” was Josephine
: In his letter of October 8, 1939, Leussler states definitively that “Forty-dollar Sadie” Mansfield was not Josephine “Sadie” Marcus. Lake Collection, Huntington Library. There are other arguments to consider: Sadie Mansfield's name appears in the 1882 Tombstone census, which was compiled in July. By then, Wyatt Earp was long gone from Tombstone. It is unlikely that Josephine would have stayed behind to work and even more unlikely that she would return to using her nom de plume as a prostitute, one already linked publicly to Johnny Behan,
after
she and Johnny split up. This (to me) settles the question that Josephine was not the prostitute Sadie Mansfield. Aside from the Mansfield confusion, there has been speculation that Josephine left home as early as 1874 and had been a teenage prostitute. I have found no corroboration for this theory, other than one tantalizing and unsubstantiated reference from Leonard Cason. He told his sister Jeanne Cason Laing that Josephine was no dance-hall girl. He believed that she ran away from home and became a prostitute when she was fifteen years old, then met Behan, and that the Tombstone fight was “all over her.” Jeanne Cason Laing asked her brother for evidence about Josephine's teenage years, and when he offered none, she dismissed his comments as speculative. There the matter stands, unless and until additional evidence comes to light. Jeanne Cason Laing interview, Boyer Collection.

186  
“she was known as Sadie Behan”
: Lake to Kent, February 13, 1930, Lake Collection, Houghton Library.

187  
Kent brushed off Lake's circumstantial case against Josephine
: Kent to Lake, February 17, 1930, Lake Collection.

187  
“hit her right between the eyes”
: Leussler to Lake, March 6, 1929, Lake Collection.

188  
“She is undependable, mentally; unbalanced, psychopathically suspicious”
: Lake to Kent, October 15, 1930, Lake Collection.

188  
“We signed the paper as a matter of record for possible publishers”
: Lake to Dodge, February 7, 1929, Lake Collection.

189  
“tact, patience, kindliness, and forbearance”
: Kent to Lake, October 23, 1930. Lake Collection.

189  
“what your well-meaning but entirely mis-informed friends and advisors tell you”
: Lake to Josephine, January 10, 1931, Lake Collection.

190  
Kent accepted Lake's edited manuscript and sent the author a flattering telegram
: Josephine to Lake, February 9, 1931, on Hunsaker and Cosgrove, Attorneys and Counselors at Law, stationery, and telegram from Kent to Lake, March 4, 1931, Lake Collection.

191 Frontier Marshal
was a runaway success
: Lake had just one major sales disappointment: the mighty Book-of-the-Month Club selected
The Epic of America
by James Truslow Adams, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian who coined the phrase “the American Dream.” Interestingly, both
Frontier Marshal
and
Epic of America
are still in print.

192
“I think it is the best story of the old West”
: Clum to Dodge, November 9, 1931, Lake Collection.

192
He must have been hypnotized by Wyatt
: Raine to Ticknor, January 6, 1932, Lake Collection.

193
Josephine was losing her circle of allies
: Lake to Kent, January 15, 1933. “That makes 3 [deaths] in a year,” Lake noted, in a letter that he signed, “Yours, until Franklin D. Roosevelt deals from a straight deck.” Lake Collection.

194
the book was “dictated to Mr. Lake by my husband”
: Josephine to Dr. Sonnichsen, February 13, 1939, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

196
Edna could live comfortably on her inheritance
: By 1958 the oil royalties were more than half of Edna's annual income. She eventually became a respected artist whose works were shown at the Whitney Museum in New York and galleries in Oakland and San Francisco. In 1958 she married artist Lou Siegriest, and she died in 1966 on a sketching trip to Mexico. Until her death, her husband was unaware of her true age and that the family was Jewish. Kirschner interview with Suzanne Westaway.