On this episode of Our American Stories, for nearly fifty years, Josephine Earp was married to the most famous lawman of the Old West, Wyatt Earp. Ann Kirschner, author of Lady at the O.K Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp, is here to tell her story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
For nearly fifty years, Josephine Erp was married to the
most famous lawman of the Old West, Wyatt Earp. You're
to tell her story is Ann Kirshner, author of Lady
at the OK Corral, The True Story of Josephine Marcus Erp.
(00:35):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
In the nineteen fifties, Wyatt Irp was everywhere on television.
Every single American network had a Wyatt Herb or tombstone
themed show on whiter Bat, Masterson, gun Smoke. And so
when we were watching television and watching wider we certainly
never thought about Widerp having a Jewish wife, and we
(00:59):
thought we knew something about the gunfight. What we didn't
know was that there was this gutsy, busty broad who
had a lover on both sides of the gunfight at
the OK Corral. And we thought we knew something about
Wyatt Earp himself. He was the one with the white hat, right,
But what we didn't know was that the Wyatt Irp
(01:19):
that we knew was in large part a story of.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Josephine Rp's making.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
She had the extraordinary sense of celebrity that in some
ways shaped the legend of Wyattrp into what she would
call a nice, clean story. So let me take you
back to Josephine's beginnings. And in later life, Josephine would
always say that she was the daughter of a wealthy
(01:49):
German merchant.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Not true.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
In fact, most of what Josephine Marcus Erup told us
about herself was not true. So the Marcus family came
from the Pose region around eighteen fifty, and they came
first to New York. Josephine was born in eighteen sixty
and the family was struggling. He was a baker, her father,
and they were reading in the many Jewish newspapers in
(02:14):
New York at the time about the wonders of San
Francisco and you could make your fortune in San Francisco.
And they really were not making their fortune in New York.
So they decided to emigrate again, and off they go
to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama. But the
San Francisco that they arrived in was a highly stratified
(02:37):
Jewish community. The most successful San Francisco Jews were German Jews,
and then there were the other Jews and the Polish Jews,
and that would be Josephine's family. They were definitely on
the wrong side of the tracks. And this prejudice goes
back to those early days of the German Empire, when
(02:57):
it was the German Jews who were better educated, more affluent,
more secular.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The Polish Jews spoke Yiddish rather than German.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
They tended to be pedlars and much more religious than
the German Jews. And that was the stratification that existed
in San Francisco as well. And so Josephine found herself
once again in a community that was highly stratified. And
there was nothing second class about Josephine. She was an
extremely pretty active, outgoing young woman and she felt she
(03:30):
had the world to conquer. The spark for what would
change Josephine's life came from an unexpected source, and that
was the HMS Pinafre craze which swept America in this time.
Every town had a Pinafore troop and the Arizona Territory,
which was just out there to the east of California,
(03:53):
had several touring companies and they were so desperate for
performers that they would go into the amateur dancing academies
and attract young singers and dancers to join the troop.
So Josephine gets recruited to go to the Arizona Territory,
and this strikes her as a terrific idea. She's going
(04:13):
to run away from home, She's going to become an actress.
Josephine had a bit part, so she was too She
was just port of a you know, dancer in the
in the chorus, so she would not have had a
shout out. And she was also using an assumed name
because you know, she was afraid that her parents would
find her and drag her back by the hair, which
(04:33):
is in fact actually what happened the first time. So
Josephine goes off to what is not yet the state
of Arizona, but the territory. When Josephine first came to Tombstone,
she came as the common law wife of Johnny Bian.
She had chosen very badly. Johnny was a dirty dog,
he was a womanizer, and she soon left him, and
(04:58):
in the intervening months she met Wyatt erb who had
a wife. He left his wife, and he and Josephine
had an affair the gunfight. One part was allied with
Johnny Bean and one part was allied with Wyatt Irb.
But the feud that had been ignited just before the
gunfight really never ended, and Wyatt had work to do,
(05:22):
and so Josephine left Tombstone.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
She left.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
She had already left Johnny been, now she left Wyatt
as well. Went back home to wait for Wyatt, while
Wyatt took his wife, put her on a train, and
sent his common law wife, Mattie Blaylock, back to his
mother and father. I think that was probably the most
cowardly act Wyatt Irb ever did, was to send poor
(05:46):
Mattie Blaylock back to his mother to wait for Wyatt.
But he did, and it took quite a while before
she figured out that he was not coming toget her.
Their adventures from there on in Wyatt herp picks up
Josephine in eighteen eighty two, and for the next forty
seven years they are together. They had adventures in every
(06:09):
boom town that you've heard of, and probably quite a
few boom towns that you haven't heard of. When they
got together, Josephine and Wyatt in eighteen eighty two, they
didn't have any money, and for the.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Next forty seven years, that's really what they did.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Was make money, lose money, make money, lose money. They
never seemed to care about money for the sake of it.
But it was adventure that drove them. Josephine, her love
of adventure, which I think is what first led to
that running away to the Pinafore Troup, really never left her.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And you've been listening to Anne Kirshner, author of Lady
at the Ok Corral, And we know so much about
Whyatt through myth, through legend, and through American Westerns, but
so little. I knew nothing about his wife and did
not know she was Jewish. And the family emigrated from
Europe New York City, than to San Francisco, and from
(07:03):
eighteen eighty two on, after meeting Wyatt earp adventure all
over the frontier is what her pursuit was with her husband.
They never cared about money for the sake of it.
It was adventure. This couple sought it. This adventure they found.
When we come back more of the story of Wyatt
(07:23):
Art's wife, Josephine here on our American Stories. Here at
our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith,
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told. But we can't do it without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
(07:44):
free to make. If you love our stories in America
like we do, please go to our American Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and the story of Josephine Irp as
told by Ann Kirshner. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
And that title Lady at the OK Corral is in
part ironic because Josephine did have those two sides to her.
Part of her wanted to be gung ho for adventure always,
and the other part of her wanted to be a
respectable lady like her sister, her younger sister, who became
a very successful businesswoman and society lady in San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So they roamed around, and as they aged.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
They spent most of their time in a circle between
Los Angeles, the desert between Arizona and California and San Francisco, Oakland,
where Josephine's family lived, and she was very close to
that one sister in particular. In nineteen twenty nine, the
era of Tombstone and the Ok Corral, which had already
(09:09):
been famous throughout their lifetime, got a new shot in
the arm, first of all by the town of Tombstone itself,
which launched what it called hel Dorado Days, but much
more importantly and lastingly, by the creation of Hollywood and
the first films, so many of which had cowboys, indians,
(09:31):
western themes, and two of the most popular stars were
William S. Hart and Tom Mix, who became very very
close to Wyatt and Josephine. So the story of Tombstone
in the Ok Corral was being told, but Josephine didn't
like how it was being told.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
First of all, she was nervous that somebody would find
out about her as missus Bean or the sad story
of Mattie Blaylock. But more importantly, she wanted the image
of Why to be heroic and scrubbed clean, like a
Sunday school teacher. As somebody said later on. What made
her so nervous about Maddie. Was not simply that Wyatt
(10:11):
had had a common law wife before. But after Mattie
figured out that Wyatt was not coming back for her,
she didn't have too many options. You know, women at
that time, particularly women who were not at all educated.
It wasn't as if she could go and get a
job someplace. She became a drug addict, she was a prostitute,
(10:32):
and she committed suicide, and on the day before she died,
she was cursing whitet Erp as the man who'd done
her wrong. So this was the story that Josephine was
most terrified about. When an enterprising writer named Stuart Lake
approached the Earps to tell the story the way Wyatt
(10:52):
and Josephine wanted it told, they thought that was a
really dandy idea, and Wyatt began to sit for interview
with Stuart Lake, Josephine there almost all the time, making
sure that she caught every word. And so it was
Stuart Lake who published the first biography of Whyitet herb
and it was an immediate best seller. America, particularly in
(11:14):
the era of the Depression, was ready for a hero.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
To the end of his days.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Wyatt was this good looking aristocratic guy, while Josephine, well, ladies,
that's not really fair.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
But she didn't quite.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Keep her looks the way Wyatt did. And when Wyatt
died in nineteen twenty nine, it was a national news story,
and the newspapers seized on it as the passing of
the Old West. Josephine didn't even attend the funeral. She
was too distraught, and it took years before she was
(11:50):
seen again in the public eye. But one of the
things that really brought her out of hiding and into
a new era of her life was a letter from
Lincoln Ellsworth, the Arctic explorer, who had read Stuart Lake's book,
thought that Wyattrp was the epitome of American individualism and heroism,
(12:12):
and decided that he would name his boat the White
Irp when he went back to the South Pole, and
he wrote to Josephine, and Josephine, with that modern sense
of celebrity that I think is very special to her,
immediately realized this was a really great thing. In our parlance.
This would be like naming the moon landing, you know,
the shuttle or something after Whiterp. So she sends Lincoln
(12:35):
Ellsworth Wyatt's last eyeglasses and one of his shotguns, and
Lincoln Elsworth creates a little shrine on the boat. And
it's hard to imagine today, but Lincoln Ellsworth's name and
the White Earp, the name of his ship, was in
the New York Times every month for about six years.
(12:57):
And when Lincoln Ellsworth was lost at it was a
front page story, and when he was recovered, it continued
to be a front page story. So this was as
great a polishing up of White Earp's reputation as you
could possibly have. So perhaps the good feeling about Lincoln
Ellsworth was what emboldened Josephine to think, nah, now it's
(13:20):
time to tell my story.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
And she met some distant cousins of.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Wyatt's two women, Vinolia rp Ackerman and Mabel erp Casin,
and began to talk to them about writing her memoirs,
and they worked together on it for several years. And
during these years Josephine lived mostly with their family, and
they even went back to Tombstone. So imagine it's her
(13:45):
first trip back since eighteen eighty two. You know, we
think America has changed in the last you know, ten
or or twenty years. But the era that Josephine lived
through with Wyatt was a time of unbelievable change for America,
you know, going from stagecoaches and horses to planes, trains
and automobiles. Going from an era when a man like
(14:09):
Wyatt could make his money as a saloon keeper and
a gambler. Now you're in an era of prohibition and.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Gambling is illegal.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
So the changes in America were unbelievably powerful. But the
closer that Vinolia and Mabel came to the real story
of Tombstone, and they were fine writers and researchers, the
more nervous Josephine became. That even now, and now it's
in the late nineteen thirties, even now, she hears those
(14:40):
hook beats from Tombstone coming closer, and what if they
out her as missus Bean, or what if they tell
the terrible tale of the demise of Maddie Blaylock. So
she loses her nerve and she forces them to stop
writing the memoir. She has them burned the manuscript, She
watches them burn the manuscript. She puts a hex on
(15:02):
anybody who will tell her story. And as far as
she's concerned, that's the end, her story will never be told.
They didn't burn all the copies, so one of the
copies is in the Ford County Historical Society in Dodge City,
and it was my great pleasure to spend three days
(15:24):
in Dodge City reading that manuscript. She takes to stalking
John Flood, who had been her very close friend and Wyatt's,
and he writes all of this down, So this is
his writing on the back of an old calendar. She
comes to his house, she tries to put her hand
through the screen door. I'll get back at you good
and hard. That's what missus Irup wrote to him. But
(15:47):
when she eventually dies, which is in nineteen forty four,
it is not a national news story. It's a tiny
little piece in the Los Angeles Times that the widow
of Wyater has passed on and nobody attended her funerals.
She died penniless. Sid Grauman of Grauman's Theater and William S.
Hart paid for her funeral, and interestingly it was officiated
(16:11):
over by a rabbi. Josephine's relationship to Judaism was very tenuous.
She wasn't ashamed of it, but she also wasn't very
engaged with Judaism in any way. And yet at that
darkest moment of her life, when Wyatt dies, she decides
that she will bury him in the family plot in
(16:31):
a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California, And then when she dies,
she is buried right next to him, and there they are.
It's the most visited grave in Calma. So when it
comes to American stories, you don't get much more American
than the story of the Frontier West and Tombstone in
(16:52):
the Ok Corral. So I think the great joy for
me was putting this woman back in the picture, and a.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Terrific job on the production editing and storytelling by our
own Greg Hengler. A special thanks to the Library of Congress,
where so many researchers, historians, and ordinary Americans go to
learn more about their own country. And also a special
thanks to Anne Kirshner, author of Lady at the OK Corral,
the true story of Josephine Marcus Erp and my Goodness,
(17:22):
what she and her husband did together was in a
sense create the American West, at least the mythology of it.
And what we love doing on the show is separating
mythology from reality. We do it every day. There's a
great line, all fiction is autobiography, and all autobiography is fiction.
And we try and do the best we can to
(17:43):
make the people we all know and love become real
life human beings, because they were with flaws and imperfections,
just like this great country. The story of Josephine our
peer on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
For nearly fifty years, Josephine Erp was married to the
most famous lawman of the Old West, Wyatt Earp. You're
to tell her story is Ann Kirshner, author of Lady
at the OK Corral, The True Story of Josephine Marcus Erp.
(00:35):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
In the nineteen fifties, Wyatt Irp was everywhere on television.
Every single American network had a Wyatt Herb or tombstone
themed show on whiter Bat, Masterson, gun Smoke. And so
when we were watching television and watching wider we certainly
never thought about Widerp having a Jewish wife, and we
(00:59):
thought we knew something about the gunfight. What we didn't
know was that there was this gutsy, busty broad who
had a lover on both sides of the gunfight at
the OK Corral. And we thought we knew something about
Wyatt Earp himself. He was the one with the white hat, right,
But what we didn't know was that the Wyatt Irp
(01:19):
that we knew was in large part a story of.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Josephine Rp's making.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
She had the extraordinary sense of celebrity that in some
ways shaped the legend of Wyattrp into what she would
call a nice, clean story. So let me take you
back to Josephine's beginnings. And in later life, Josephine would
always say that she was the daughter of a wealthy
(01:49):
German merchant.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Not true.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
In fact, most of what Josephine Marcus Erup told us
about herself was not true. So the Marcus family came
from the Pose region around eighteen fifty, and they came
first to New York. Josephine was born in eighteen sixty
and the family was struggling. He was a baker, her father,
and they were reading in the many Jewish newspapers in
(02:14):
New York at the time about the wonders of San
Francisco and you could make your fortune in San Francisco.
And they really were not making their fortune in New York.
So they decided to emigrate again, and off they go
to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama. But the
San Francisco that they arrived in was a highly stratified
(02:37):
Jewish community. The most successful San Francisco Jews were German Jews,
and then there were the other Jews and the Polish Jews,
and that would be Josephine's family. They were definitely on
the wrong side of the tracks. And this prejudice goes
back to those early days of the German Empire, when
(02:57):
it was the German Jews who were better educated, more affluent,
more secular.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The Polish Jews spoke Yiddish rather than German.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
They tended to be pedlars and much more religious than
the German Jews. And that was the stratification that existed
in San Francisco as well. And so Josephine found herself
once again in a community that was highly stratified. And
there was nothing second class about Josephine. She was an
extremely pretty active, outgoing young woman and she felt she
(03:30):
had the world to conquer. The spark for what would
change Josephine's life came from an unexpected source, and that
was the HMS Pinafre craze which swept America in this time.
Every town had a Pinafore troop and the Arizona Territory,
which was just out there to the east of California,
(03:53):
had several touring companies and they were so desperate for
performers that they would go into the amateur dancing academies
and attract young singers and dancers to join the troop.
So Josephine gets recruited to go to the Arizona Territory,
and this strikes her as a terrific idea. She's going
(04:13):
to run away from home, She's going to become an actress.
Josephine had a bit part, so she was too She
was just port of a you know, dancer in the
in the chorus, so she would not have had a
shout out. And she was also using an assumed name
because you know, she was afraid that her parents would
find her and drag her back by the hair, which
(04:33):
is in fact actually what happened the first time. So
Josephine goes off to what is not yet the state
of Arizona, but the territory. When Josephine first came to Tombstone,
she came as the common law wife of Johnny Bian.
She had chosen very badly. Johnny was a dirty dog,
he was a womanizer, and she soon left him, and
(04:58):
in the intervening months she met Wyatt erb who had
a wife. He left his wife, and he and Josephine
had an affair the gunfight. One part was allied with
Johnny Bean and one part was allied with Wyatt Irb.
But the feud that had been ignited just before the
gunfight really never ended, and Wyatt had work to do,
(05:22):
and so Josephine left Tombstone.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
She left.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
She had already left Johnny been, now she left Wyatt
as well. Went back home to wait for Wyatt, while
Wyatt took his wife, put her on a train, and
sent his common law wife, Mattie Blaylock, back to his
mother and father. I think that was probably the most
cowardly act Wyatt Irb ever did, was to send poor
(05:46):
Mattie Blaylock back to his mother to wait for Wyatt.
But he did, and it took quite a while before
she figured out that he was not coming toget her.
Their adventures from there on in Wyatt herp picks up
Josephine in eighteen eighty two, and for the next forty
seven years they are together. They had adventures in every
(06:09):
boom town that you've heard of, and probably quite a
few boom towns that you haven't heard of. When they
got together, Josephine and Wyatt in eighteen eighty two, they
didn't have any money, and for the.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Next forty seven years, that's really what they did.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Was make money, lose money, make money, lose money. They
never seemed to care about money for the sake of it.
But it was adventure that drove them. Josephine, her love
of adventure, which I think is what first led to
that running away to the Pinafore Troup, really never left her.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And you've been listening to Anne Kirshner, author of Lady
at the Ok Corral, And we know so much about
Whyatt through myth, through legend, and through American Westerns, but
so little. I knew nothing about his wife and did
not know she was Jewish. And the family emigrated from
Europe New York City, than to San Francisco, and from
(07:03):
eighteen eighty two on, after meeting Wyatt earp adventure all
over the frontier is what her pursuit was with her husband.
They never cared about money for the sake of it.
It was adventure. This couple sought it. This adventure they found.
When we come back more of the story of Wyatt
(07:23):
Art's wife, Josephine here on our American Stories. Here at
our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith,
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told. But we can't do it without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
(07:44):
free to make. If you love our stories in America
like we do, please go to our American Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and the story of Josephine Irp as
told by Ann Kirshner. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
And that title Lady at the OK Corral is in
part ironic because Josephine did have those two sides to her.
Part of her wanted to be gung ho for adventure always,
and the other part of her wanted to be a
respectable lady like her sister, her younger sister, who became
a very successful businesswoman and society lady in San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So they roamed around, and as they aged.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
They spent most of their time in a circle between
Los Angeles, the desert between Arizona and California and San Francisco, Oakland,
where Josephine's family lived, and she was very close to
that one sister in particular. In nineteen twenty nine, the
era of Tombstone and the Ok Corral, which had already
(09:09):
been famous throughout their lifetime, got a new shot in
the arm, first of all by the town of Tombstone itself,
which launched what it called hel Dorado Days, but much
more importantly and lastingly, by the creation of Hollywood and
the first films, so many of which had cowboys, indians,
(09:31):
western themes, and two of the most popular stars were
William S. Hart and Tom Mix, who became very very
close to Wyatt and Josephine. So the story of Tombstone
in the Ok Corral was being told, but Josephine didn't
like how it was being told.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
First of all, she was nervous that somebody would find
out about her as missus Bean or the sad story
of Mattie Blaylock. But more importantly, she wanted the image
of Why to be heroic and scrubbed clean, like a
Sunday school teacher. As somebody said later on. What made
her so nervous about Maddie. Was not simply that Wyatt
(10:11):
had had a common law wife before. But after Mattie
figured out that Wyatt was not coming back for her,
she didn't have too many options. You know, women at
that time, particularly women who were not at all educated.
It wasn't as if she could go and get a
job someplace. She became a drug addict, she was a prostitute,
(10:32):
and she committed suicide, and on the day before she died,
she was cursing whitet Erp as the man who'd done
her wrong. So this was the story that Josephine was
most terrified about. When an enterprising writer named Stuart Lake
approached the Earps to tell the story the way Wyatt
(10:52):
and Josephine wanted it told, they thought that was a
really dandy idea, and Wyatt began to sit for interview
with Stuart Lake, Josephine there almost all the time, making
sure that she caught every word. And so it was
Stuart Lake who published the first biography of Whyitet herb
and it was an immediate best seller. America, particularly in
(11:14):
the era of the Depression, was ready for a hero.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
To the end of his days.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Wyatt was this good looking aristocratic guy, while Josephine, well, ladies,
that's not really fair.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
But she didn't quite.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Keep her looks the way Wyatt did. And when Wyatt
died in nineteen twenty nine, it was a national news story,
and the newspapers seized on it as the passing of
the Old West. Josephine didn't even attend the funeral. She
was too distraught, and it took years before she was
(11:50):
seen again in the public eye. But one of the
things that really brought her out of hiding and into
a new era of her life was a letter from
Lincoln Ellsworth, the Arctic explorer, who had read Stuart Lake's book,
thought that Wyattrp was the epitome of American individualism and heroism,
(12:12):
and decided that he would name his boat the White
Irp when he went back to the South Pole, and
he wrote to Josephine, and Josephine, with that modern sense
of celebrity that I think is very special to her,
immediately realized this was a really great thing. In our parlance.
This would be like naming the moon landing, you know,
the shuttle or something after Whiterp. So she sends Lincoln
(12:35):
Ellsworth Wyatt's last eyeglasses and one of his shotguns, and
Lincoln Elsworth creates a little shrine on the boat. And
it's hard to imagine today, but Lincoln Ellsworth's name and
the White Earp, the name of his ship, was in
the New York Times every month for about six years.
(12:57):
And when Lincoln Ellsworth was lost at it was a
front page story, and when he was recovered, it continued
to be a front page story. So this was as
great a polishing up of White Earp's reputation as you
could possibly have. So perhaps the good feeling about Lincoln
Ellsworth was what emboldened Josephine to think, nah, now it's
(13:20):
time to tell my story.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
And she met some distant cousins of.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Wyatt's two women, Vinolia rp Ackerman and Mabel erp Casin,
and began to talk to them about writing her memoirs,
and they worked together on it for several years. And
during these years Josephine lived mostly with their family, and
they even went back to Tombstone. So imagine it's her
(13:45):
first trip back since eighteen eighty two. You know, we
think America has changed in the last you know, ten
or or twenty years. But the era that Josephine lived
through with Wyatt was a time of unbelievable change for America,
you know, going from stagecoaches and horses to planes, trains
and automobiles. Going from an era when a man like
(14:09):
Wyatt could make his money as a saloon keeper and
a gambler. Now you're in an era of prohibition and.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Gambling is illegal.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
So the changes in America were unbelievably powerful. But the
closer that Vinolia and Mabel came to the real story
of Tombstone, and they were fine writers and researchers, the
more nervous Josephine became. That even now, and now it's
in the late nineteen thirties, even now, she hears those
(14:40):
hook beats from Tombstone coming closer, and what if they
out her as missus Bean, or what if they tell
the terrible tale of the demise of Maddie Blaylock. So
she loses her nerve and she forces them to stop
writing the memoir. She has them burned the manuscript, She
watches them burn the manuscript. She puts a hex on
(15:02):
anybody who will tell her story. And as far as
she's concerned, that's the end, her story will never be told.
They didn't burn all the copies, so one of the
copies is in the Ford County Historical Society in Dodge City,
and it was my great pleasure to spend three days
(15:24):
in Dodge City reading that manuscript. She takes to stalking
John Flood, who had been her very close friend and Wyatt's,
and he writes all of this down, So this is
his writing on the back of an old calendar. She
comes to his house, she tries to put her hand
through the screen door. I'll get back at you good
and hard. That's what missus Irup wrote to him. But
(15:47):
when she eventually dies, which is in nineteen forty four,
it is not a national news story. It's a tiny
little piece in the Los Angeles Times that the widow
of Wyater has passed on and nobody attended her funerals.
She died penniless. Sid Grauman of Grauman's Theater and William S.
Hart paid for her funeral, and interestingly it was officiated
(16:11):
over by a rabbi. Josephine's relationship to Judaism was very tenuous.
She wasn't ashamed of it, but she also wasn't very
engaged with Judaism in any way. And yet at that
darkest moment of her life, when Wyatt dies, she decides
that she will bury him in the family plot in
(16:31):
a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California, And then when she dies,
she is buried right next to him, and there they are.
It's the most visited grave in Calma. So when it
comes to American stories, you don't get much more American
than the story of the Frontier West and Tombstone in
(16:52):
the Ok Corral. So I think the great joy for
me was putting this woman back in the picture, and a.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Terrific job on the production editing and storytelling by our
own Greg Hengler. A special thanks to the Library of Congress,
where so many researchers, historians, and ordinary Americans go to
learn more about their own country. And also a special
thanks to Anne Kirshner, author of Lady at the OK Corral,
the true story of Josephine Marcus Erp and my Goodness,
(17:22):
what she and her husband did together was in a
sense create the American West, at least the mythology of it.
And what we love doing on the show is separating
mythology from reality. We do it every day. There's a
great line, all fiction is autobiography, and all autobiography is fiction.
And we try and do the best we can to
(17:43):
make the people we all know and love become real
life human beings, because they were with flaws and imperfections,
just like this great country. The story of Josephine our
peer on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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