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July/August 2008
HISTORY BOX
Wyatt Earp and his Jewish Wife
Everyone else called her Josie. He called her Sadie. Josephine Sarah Marcus was a showgirl from a prosperous San Francisco German-Jewish family. He was an itinerant lawman, gambler and saloon owner who was known as a sharpshooter. They met and fell in love in Tombstone, Arizona, a hardscrabble town that rose up near a silver mine. His name was Wyatt Earp.
Acting was not a respectable career for a middle-class woman, especially for one who was Jewish, but Josie ran off in 1879 at age 18 to join the Paulina Markham Theater Company when it wrapped up its San Francisco tour of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. Josie “was not a star, but she was considered a good entertainer,” according to Ron W. Fischer, author of the 2002 The Jewish Pioneers of Tombstone and Arizona Territory.
She wound up in Tombstone. The town’s name came from its reputation for frequent gunfights and its cemetery, one of the largest in the Southwest. Its buildings were pocked by bullets shot by “cowboys," then a pejorative term for roughnecks who rustled horses, mules and cattle—among other forms of lawbreaking. During the boom years from 1880 to 1884, Tombstone’s population exceeded 5,000, including approximately 75 Jewish families who made up most of its merchant class. They included future mayor Abraham Emanuel, who was the superintendent of the town’s water, mill and lumber company, and the owners of the stationery, cigar and tobacco store; the Golden Eagle Saloon; and the barber shop. The Jewish barber, Emil Marks, decided to leave town because of the notorious cowboy clan, the Clantons. “The Clantons often visited Marks’ barber shop to be shaved,” Fischer says. “They had a habit of placing their guns on their chests. Marks did not like to look at a six-shooter while shaving a customer.”
Josie, however, had nothing to do with Arizona’s early Jewish pioneers. She became engaged to Johnny Behan, the non-Jewish sheriff of Cochise County, and they settled in the county seat, Tombstone. When she left Behan for Wyatt Earp, a Methodist who had been widowed but had a current, second common-law wife, the relationship scandalized even Tombstone.
Behan’s and Earp’s “romantic rivalry was one of the factors that led to the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” according to some historians, says Eliezer Segal, a University of Calgary professor, in his 2004 article about the couple in the Jewish Free Press. Behan was purportedly crushed by Josie’s betrayal, and there is evidence that he may have used his status as sheriff to encourage the feud brewing between Earp and cowboys. (According to Fischer, Behan was known to have aligned himself with the town’s criminal element.)
The events leading up to the 30-second shootout—which has inspired many books and films—are a hodgepodge of threats, stolen army mules, stagecoach robberies, and enmity among the Clantons, the McLaury clan and the Earps—Wyatt and his brothers Virgil and Morgan. The October 27, 1881, issue of the Tombstone Daily Epitaph sets the scene: “Stormy as were the early days of Tombstone nothing ever occurred equal to the event of yesterday.” An eyewitness tells of teams of men approaching each other with loaded pistols and rifles. With a posse of his two brothers and Doc Holliday, Virgil Earp declares: “Give up your arms or throw up your arms.” More than 30 shots ring out. The newspaper reports: “Wyatt Earp stood up and fired in rapid succession, as cool as a cucumber, and was not hit.” Josie heard the gunshots and rushed to the scene, where she found Wyatt the only man standing. “I almost swooned,” she was quoted as saying.
The paper eloquently reports the other result: “three men hurled into eternity” (one Clanton and two McLaurys) and three injured (Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday). Ike Clanton was confident that the Earps and Holliday would be convicted of first degree murder, but they were acquitted. Both sides took revenge. First, the remaining Clantons killed Morgan Earp and severely wounded Virgil. In return, Wyatt and Holliday shot them.
Wyatt fled, eventually meeting up with Josie. Together the couple traveled throughout the West and as far away as Nome, Alaska, investing in mines and saloons. They retired to Los Angeles, where they lived off their investments and hobnobbed with the Hollywood elite, including cowboy actors William S. Hart and Tom Mix. When Wyatt died in 1929 at age 80, Mix was a pallbearer at his funeral.
Josie kept her husband’s cremated ashes for months before traveling 400 miles alone to the Hills of Eternity Memorial Park, a Jewish cemetery in Colma, a San Francisco suburb, to inter them near the graves of her parents and brother. She spent her remaining years in Los Angeles vigilantly protecting Wyatt’s legacy. When she died in 1944 at the age of 83, her ashes were buried alongside his.
The gravesite is a popular tourist destination, where visitors leave behind poker chips, cards and occasionally bullets. “We call them ‘Earpers,’” says Judy Edmonson, Hills of Eternity’s general manager.
The couple’s joint headstone characterizes their 50-year romance: “That nothing’s so sacred as honor, and nothing so loyal as love.”—Janet Lubman Rathner