Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp

by Ann Kirschner

  Back on the Yukon River, Josephine felt herself to be an Alaskan veteran among a high-strung crowd of passengers who watched nervously as the boat made its way around each great bend of the river, much of it shallow and muddy. Recent storms had crushed thirty boats that year. They gasped as the expanse of the Bering Sea burst suddenly before them.

  This was the crazy summer of 1898, when Klondike fever clustered around a single idea: Nome.

  Wyatt’s new boss, Mr. Ling, met them on the dock of St. Michael. He painted an alluring picture of the fortune to be made there, which consoled Josephine for the delay in getting to Nome. Ling directed them to a hotel owned by the Alaska Commercial Company. Josephine missed the company of their many friends and their snug little Rampart cabin but she sank gratefully back into comfort she hadn’t experienced since leaving San Francisco.

  St. Michael was a small, active outpost for the company, well situated for boats headed up to Nome or back “outside” to the United States. This year’s crowds were larger and far more frantic than the ones Josephine had observed the last year, when she waited in St. Michael for the Pingree to be finished. The news about Nome had rippled throughout the entire Klondike region. Thousands of prospectors were so desperate to get to Nome that they pooled their last dollars to build small boats and row 1,800 miles across Norton Sound.

  From her hotel window overlooking the port, Josephine watched the steamers and tiny rowboats crossing Norton Sound and the methodical loading and reloading of gold shipments sent down from Dawson to be shipped “outside.” The lineup of people and groceries that snaked along the waterfront were signs of the ringing cash register that guaranteed Wyatt’s financial success, as were the rows of beer barrels rolling toward Wyatt’s “canteen.” Wyatt kept 10 percent of a daily take of about $2,000. Beer was a dollar a bottle, and cigars sold for fifty cents each. The company owned his store as well as almost everything in St. Michael: the warehouses, post office, fur trading house, blacksmith shop, bathhouse, paint shop, powder house, most of the dwellings, the agents’ dining room, the laundry, office building, and water tanks, and the most important and expensive structure in town: the wharf.

  Despite the influx of cash, Josephine was dissatisfied. Surely Wyatt was destined for greater things than making a quick buck selling liquor. At least this retail business was a far cry from the hard-drinking, no-holds-barred consumption of Tombstone days. He was selling mostly beer, and no alcohol was actually consumed on his premises. With some prissy delicacy in her language, she noted “this custom [of no consumption on the company premises] also cut down the need for the services of an arbiter of such difficulties as used to rise in the saloons of Tombstone and Dodge City.” In other words, less booze, no brawls, no bouncer.

  The weather was warm, but Josephine was immediately thrust back into the deep freeze of social isolation, so repellent after Rampart. Wyatt’s world of saloons and gambling and shady ladies pushed her out again to the distant margins of a disapproving society. With no homemaking responsibilities or social engagements, she filled her time with visits and walks about town, sometimes in the company of a new friend, Sarah Vawter. Mrs. Vawter and her husband Cornelius were from prominent Montana families that had fallen on hard economic times. The two women strolled along the waterfront promenade together until Cornelius was named the new U.S. marshal and the Vawters joined the throngs bound for Nome, leaving Josephine alone again.

  With a flood of exuberant letters, Tex Rickard urged Josephine and Wyatt to join him in Nome. His extravagant promises befit the man who would eventually become the greatest sports promoter of his era: deriding Wyatt’s steady income at St. Michael as “chickenfeed,” Tex boasted that the really big money was in Nome. “Let everything go there in St. Michael,” he insisted. Tex was managing Nome’s busiest saloon, the Northern, which was already crowded with roulette, poker, and faro tables. That, plus the lucrative sale of alcohol by girls who danced with the male guests, made the Northern highly profitable. Tex was not worried about competition. Come to Nome and open another saloon, he urged Wyatt.

  They had just arrived, but Josephine felt the frustration of being “merely on the outskirts of adventure, selling refreshments to those who were hurrying to the center of it.” She was impatient to “get hold of a pan” herself. Although Tex’s arguments were persuasive, she did try once more to be the practical one and encouraged Wyatt to weigh the advantages of a few more weeks of easy beer and cigar profits. Besides, everyone was trying to get to Nome, so they might not even get tickets, Josephine reasoned, half hoping, half fearing, that they would be lucky. She hedged with a suggestion that they take a short trip to Nome, just to look around—that is, if they could get a spot on a boat.

  Her doubts were suddenly swept away by momentous news: gold had been found on the beaches of Nome, a barren coastline that became literally “a golden strand.” The fairy tale was swiftly validated by word of mouth that spread rapidly along St. Michael’s waterfront.

  “Better get ready,” Wyatt advised, after a quick scouting trip to the St. Michael dock. “We’re leaving on the Saidie tonight.”

  JOSEPHINE ARRIVED DURING Nome’s first summer as a boomtown, just a few weeks after the discoveries on the beach. Long suspected as a rich source of gold, Nome’s extreme northern location, remote even by Alaskan standards, kept it off-limits. In this gray and barren landscape, there was not a tree between Josephine and the North Pole, nor another to the south for sixty miles. Until now, prospecting for gold had demanded hard labor and significant capital. Change would be radical and swift for the former fishing village and trading post. As Rex Beach noted in his 1905 novel about Nome, The Spoilers, “where a week before mild-eyed natives had dried their cod among the old bronze cannon, now a frenzied horde of gold-seekers paused in their rush to the new El Dorado.”

  Nome’s place in the modern history of gold prospecting traced back to engineer and Civil War veteran David Libby, who found signs of gold while he was stringing telegraph wires across Alaska. A few months later, nearly dead with hunger and sun exposure, he was only too happy to get back to the States—especially when the rescue team informed him that during his absence, the company had abandoned the project that nearly killed him. Some thirty years later, news of nearby Klondike strikes revived his interest. With a team of engineers, he returned to his original site and triumphantly located the first major gold strike on the Seward Peninsula. Libby’s announcement attracted attention from Jafet Lindeberg and his companions, the “Three Lucky Swedes” who followed Libby with major strikes near a large mountain rock that resembled an anvil. The Swedes became celebrity millionaires overnight, and their symbol briefly identified the growing settlement as Anvil City.

  According to local legend, Anvil City became “Nome” when Eskimos answered “Kn-no-me”—”I don’t know”—when asked for the name of the region. An alternative explanation blamed a fifty-year-old spelling mistake. In 1850 a British naval officer on a ship off the coast of Alaska noted that his map lacked a name for the prominent point, and wrote “?Name” next to the spot. Later cartographers interpreted the question mark as a “C,” and thus christened the place as Cape Nome.

  NEWS OF THE first Nome strikes traveled with remarkable speed: within one month, three hundred additional claims were recorded. Hardy miners who had remained in Alaska during the winter of 1898–99 staked the first claims, but as soon as the Bering Sea was navigable, thousands of miners began to arrive, some from the States and others from other parts of the Yukon. By early spring, the first boats left Dawson, with some passengers standing the entire way. Rex Beach described the eager prospectors “like a locust cloud, thousands strong, settling on the edges of the Smoky Sea, waiting the going of the ice that barred them from their Golden Fleece, from Nome the new, where men found fortune in a night.”

  What began as a mad scramble quickly became chaotic and dangerous. Although the mining laws held that citizenship was irrelevant, the Swedes’ claims were hotly contested
on the grounds that they were not Americans. Claim jumping and lawsuits were soon rampant. Ignoring the requirement to demonstrate the presence of minerals before filing for a specific location, “pencil and hatchet” miners posted hastily written notices and carved their marks haphazardly. Large tracts of land were held speculatively.

  “Lawyers are thicker [in Nome] than anything else except gamblers and sporting women,” observed one resident. Litigation “has passed the stage of novelty,” warned a local reporter. “It has become a matter of routine monotony that is growing more and more abhorrent to the public with every succeeding 24 hours.” Powers of attorney were routinely abused, and the authorities responsible for affirming the legality of claims were accused of self-interest and double-dealing. A formal petition was sent to Washington with allegations of corruption and warnings that the mining districts were in danger of a major rebellion.

  The situation grew more volatile as overcrowded boatloads of fortune hunters arrived each day, only to encounter inadequate housing and a lack of supplies. Most infuriating to the arriving miners was the discovery that “from sea-beach to sky-line the landscape was staked.” After weeks of legal wrangling and rising tensions, some of the disgruntled miners banded together and announced a meeting for July 10, 1899. Their plan was to overturn the Swedes’ original claim and open up the region. Hundreds of men gathered in a meeting hall, with others stationed miles away, waiting to light a bonfire on Anvil Mountain that would signal open season again on mining claims.

  With not enough food, not enough work, and not enough gold, Nome was on the verge of civil war. Violence that night was avoided only by quick action of the local military leadership, which dispersed the meeting at bayonet point. Soon the miners had much more to distract them.

  WAS IT TWO soldiers digging a well? Or was it an old Idaho prospector down on his luck who was sifting sand in desperation? Other fanciful geological theories about the discovery of gold on the Nome beach attributed the miracle to an atmospheric phenomenon in mid-July 1898 that caused gold to come in with the tide like driftwood; or the fable that “a golden lake” within the Bering Sea flooded the sand each day with a new coat of precious metal. Whatever the explanation, beach miners were soon gathering enough gold to earn twenty to eighty dollars per day with minimal effort. Ordinary prospecting required heavy equipment and backbreaking labor, so this discovery seemed like magic: to be able to walk to the edge of the shore, swirl water into a metal pan and discover gold! Anybody with a pie-shaped tin could pan for gold—and everybody did. Even women and children could be alchemists. Unemployment in Nome ceased immediately.

  By the end of August, some two thousand people were working on the Nome beaches.

  Speculation ran wild. Was this a great find? Or a terrible and dangerous waste of time and resources? The rest of the United States heard the siren song of the golden beaches that summer and tuned out the warnings. “Truth about Cape Nome: Gold is there but All Claims are Staked” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, writing from “Anvil City” in July 1899. While there was plenty of gold, the writer went on to admonish the would-be prospector that “there is no chance for newcomers. By the time they could reach here from Seattle or San Francisco and get back into the country . . . it would be winter, and wintering here is almost impossible. Nobody intends to stay during the winter months if he can get out. The coast is fearfully stormy and the cold is intense.” The reporter noted that slogging through the surf was dangerous and expensive, that wages were low, that there were no horses, no wood. His advice: stay away.

  No one listened. That “placer gold,” twinkling so tantalizingly on the earth’s surface, would surely remain plentiful. It seemed that everyone in America longed to see this “poor man’s paradise,” where the streets were covered with mud two feet deep, but the beach was laced with treasure—and it was public property. Some effort was made to impose a tax on the beach miners, but that idea was quickly abandoned. In the absence of clear legal precedent, the miners themselves devised a solution. Meeting in Tex Rickard’s saloon, the miners thrashed out a crude measure of “foot possession” to mark their spot on the beach, i.e., they could mine as much ground as a shovel could reach in a circle from the edge of the hole in which they worked.

  IT TOOK A little more than one day to get from St. Michael to Nome on the creaky, overcrowded Saidie. From a distance, Josephine saw a shoreline shrouded by an unusual thick mist that hugged the ground like swirling snow, despite the warm weather. As the boat came closer, the fluttering waves of mist materialized into white tents staked along the fifteen miles of Nome’s shore. As she drew closer, she saw people and equipment beyond the tents, but no harbor or docks extending into the water.

  Nome seemed relatively accessible—at least until Josephine and Wyatt tried to get ashore. Entering Nome required a three-step maneuver that was a harbinger of the unexpected difficulties of daily life in this most unusual place. As the Saidie pitched from side to side, Wyatt climbed down a rope ladder and then jumped into a small boat that was pulled up alongside, and waited for Josephine, who descended a few minutes later. Rowers struggled to hold the boat steady and then navigated to shore as the tide pulled in the opposite direction. Finally, Josephine heard the welcome sound of sand grinding beneath the boat. But they were still some thirty feet from shore. As the boat bobbed up and down in the breakers, men in rubber boots waded out to them. Wyatt surged ahead through the shallow water, while Josephine and other women climbed aboard the sturdy backs of men who carried them individually to shore. The Bering Sea was now behind her, and Nome beckoned ahead, two blocks wide and five miles long.

  On Front Street, the main thoroughfare, she found it nearly impossible to walk without stumbling two feet deep in mud. There were no suitable hotels yet, but Josephine found one of the few wooden shacks on “the spit” a few minutes away from the main street, slightly better than a tent.

  Nome was treeless, and also sleepless. The air seemed to vibrate with the constant clamor of saws and hammers. Some two hundred wooden buildings were under construction, all built from wood imported on the boats that now arrived constantly. Josephine saw no stores, just a foul-smelling fur depot, and the warehouse of the Alaska Commercial Company. There was little in the way of municipal services: basic sanitation was almost nonexistent; sewage emptied into the river that was the only source of drinking water. Along the waterfront, tickets for public toilets were sold at ten cents each, or three for twenty-five cents; the latrines were built on pilings, which were flushed by the tide. Typhoid, bloody dysentery, and pneumonia were common. When an epidemic of smallpox broke out, a hospital was constructed in haste, with an isolation area for infected patients.

  Nome was struggling to become a habitable city as the population swelled to 5,000. That summer, $1 million would be taken from the beach. Everything was being done for the first time, including burying the dead. A cemetery was hastily designated on the outer rim of the tundra, just west of the city limits. A visiting soldier described the macabre process of carving out one of the first graves: When the men finished their arduous preparation, they went to town to collect the body, only to discover upon their return that they had been “jumped.” Another corpse occupied the grave, now filled in and marked by a headstone.

  In spite of the general ugliness and discomfort, Josephine reveled in the excitement of Nome and without hesitation agreed that they should not return to St. Michael. Nome was bigger in every way than St. Michael, and would likely be even more profitable. For Josephine, Nome was all about the “thrill of a new gold camp,” and the “adventure of the thing.” At last, she would be at the center of the action.

  Wyatt formed a partnership with his friend Charlie Hoxsie and built a new saloon called the Dexter. Miners needed to drink, to gamble, and to enjoy the company of women: that is how Wyatt knew how to make money, “mining the miners,” as he said to his brothers. Every minute of that summer was devoted to getting the saloon up and running. This would be Nome�
��s first two-story building and its biggest structure to date, named after John Dexter, whose trading post had been the central gathering point for the pioneers of the Nome gold rush, in the earliest days of the Three Lucky Swedes. Wyatt and Hoxsie purchased “a bar-room license to engage in the sale of intoxicating liquors at retail.” Aided by Wyatt’s celebrity, almost as potent in the northern frontier as it had been in the American territories, the Dexter was an immediate success and enjoyed what the newspapers called “a liberal patronage” during the years of Wyatt’s management, in friendly competition with Tex Rickard’s Northern Saloon as the most popular spot in Nome.

  Josephine was torn between her vague disapproval of Wyatt’s saloon keeping and her frank appreciation for its “lavish financial returns.” In St. Michael, she had comforted herself with the dubious distinction between selling alcohol and encouraging its consumption. In Nome, she could have no such illusions. She rationalized anew: the Dexter, this “better class” saloon, served an “important civic purpose” as the local clubhouse, the town hall, and the forum, where men could arrange political campaigns, transact business, and enjoy social contacts. Into the doors of the Dexter walked any important resident or guest, from writers like Rex Beach and Jack London to mining engineer and future president Herbert Hoover to future prizefighter Jack Dempsey. Wilson Mizner was there too, often entertaining a crowd at Considine’s Hall, singing a lusty version of “Ben Bolt.” “We met and hung out in saloons,” Wyatt later observed with a smile. “There weren’t any YMCAs.”

  The Earps were getting rich, but the Dexter’s popularity did nothing for Josephine. In fact, Nome would later pass an ordinance forbidding the presence of women in saloons. She could have entertained herself in other ways: women were working their own claims, and had seized the right to vote in the city’s elections for its first mayor, city council, and chief of police. However, Josephine was never interested in politics. What passed for high society in Nome was already closed to her. As the wife of Nome’s most famous saloonkeeper, she was invisible, caught once again in an unpleasantly familiar netherworld.