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

by Ann Kirschner

  Sadly, 1955 was looking a lot like 1938, as if Josephine had renewed her curse.

  Nineteen fifty-five was also the year when the truth about Mattie Blaylock Earp finally emerged.

  The thunderbolt came from Kansas. An article about the opening of a new Dodge City museum reminded a Mr. O. H. Marquis from Iowa that he had seen pictures of young Wyatt Earp in a trunk that he inherited from his “Aunt Ceely.” Marquis contacted the museum, which authenticated the photos and a Bible inscribed to Wyatt by the grateful citizens of Dodge City.

  When the news reached Mabel, she understood that Josephine’s worst nightmare was about to burst into daylight. The whole world would soon know that “Aunt Ceely” was Celia “Mattie” Earp, and that Wyatt and his lover Josephine were the cause of Mattie’s degradation and death.

  “That is what Josie was covering from us,” Mabel understood. “She seemed to be truly conscience-stricken about it.” It would have been little comfort to Josephine to know that Mattie herself blamed Wyatt most of all.

  If Mabel had any doubts about the harsh truth of Wyatt’s infidelities and Josephine’s role as the other woman, they were removed by corroborating documents from Tombstone, including the mortgage that Wyatt signed with Mattie Blaylock as well as Epitaph clippings that bid farewell to “Mrs. Wyatt Earp” after Morgan’s murder. “Wyatt Earp seems to have been a very brave man and a stickler for the law,” Mabel noted with some asperity, “but his personal life seems to have left much to be desired.” This was what Josephine meant when she sighed that Wyatt “didn’t have the best of principles where women were concerned.” Then again, for generous Mabel, this new realism in the cult of Earp was inevitable when “humans were misrepresented as heroes, instead of ordinary men.”

  The discovery about Mattie forced a reinterpretation of everything about Josephine and Wyatt. As Mabel had predicted, Lake’s saintly image of Wyatt Earp was about to be stained.

  More debunking came about with Frank Waters’s long-delayed publication of The Earp Brothers of Tombstone in 1960, which arrived in time to match the national mood of cynicism and mistrust over the coming Vietnam War. In his view, it was not enough for false heroes to be made human: the old icons had to be utterly smashed. Stuart Lake had written a “fictitious legend of preposterous proportions,” America’s most hateful “morality play,” and the source of our “tragic national psychosis.” The real Wyatt Earp had spawned America’s materialistic ideology, the pop culture expressions of pulp fiction, radio serials, toy pistols, and tin badges. Waters inveighed against the destruction of the environment, the contamination of the water supply, and ultimately, the degraded quality of human life and the American obsession with “the omnipotent dollar, economic and police corruption on all levels, and the streak of violence imbedded in our nature as a people.”

  As for Josephine Earp, her sins were more modestly carnal. Waters found her guilty of nothing more cosmic than breaking Mattie Blaylock’s heart. He used Allie Earp to reimagine the romance of Wyatt and Josephine as public debauchery that ground vulnerable Mattie into the dust of depression, from which even her loving sisters-in-law and a sympathetic Big Nose Kate could not rescue her. He told of bitter fights between Mattie and Wyatt, and Mattie’s humiliation at the spectacle of Sadie Marcus, the slut of Tombstone, flouncing along the streets of Tombstone. All of this was dramatized in Allie’s irresistibly folksy dialect:

  “We all knew about it and Mattie did too,” said Allie. “That’s why we never said anything to her. We didn’t have to. We could see her with her eyes all red from cryin’, thinkin’ of Wyatt’s carryin’ on. I didn’t have to peek out at night to see if the light was still burnin’ in her window for Wyatt. I knew it would still be burnin’ at daylight when I got up. . . . Everything Wyatt did stuck the knife deeper into Mattie’s heart. Polishin’ his boots so he could prance into a fancy restaurant with Sadie. Cleanin’ his guns to show off to Sadie. You never saw his hair combed so proper or his long, slim hands so beautiful clean and soft.”

  Allie, however, had said nothing of the kind.

  It would be decades before Waters’s portrayal of Allie would be exposed by resourceful researchers and historians as “hogwash,” as author and historian Casey Tefertiller later put it, the charred remains of a torched Earp legend that was every bit as distorted as Lake’s hagiography.

  In a letter to the Arizona Historical Society, Waters later admitted that he had combined Allie’s words with a “cold, objective analysis” and “expose” of the whole subject. However, he influenced a generation of readers who thought they had heard the true voice of Allie Earp, and adjusted their views to accommodate the figure of Josephine as the heartless hussy of Tombstone with Wyatt as her villainous consort. These were the new legends of Tombstone.

  AMONG THOSE ENRAGED by the new anti-Earp dogma were Wyatt’s grandniece Estelle Josephine Miller and her husband Bill Miller. Despite having been named after Josephine, Estelle had to struggle to remember anything particularly good to say about her aunt. Wyatt, though, was entirely different: she remembered him as considerate and friendly, a gentle giant who bounced her on his knee. “My Uncle Wyatt wasn’t like them writers say,” she insisted. He was neither Boy Scout nor Saint Wyatt the Just, but a “rough, tough, profane, rooting-tooting frontiersman.” They consulted with an interesting writer of their acquaintance: What could be done to rescue Wyatt Earp from the mud that threatened to sink him forever?

  Glenn Boyer was the writer, a dashing Air Force pilot with a wide iconoclastic streak and an obsession with all things western. His interest in Wyatt Earp began with a 1937 article in the Chicago Tribune titled “Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die,” which led him to Frontier Marshal and a brief correspondence with Stuart Lake. Boyer had a good nose for research. When military duty brought him to Earp-rich locations such as San Bernardino and Colton, he haunted local archives and chatted up the old-timers, and eventually found his way to the Millers.

  With the Millers’ encouragement, Boyer began to think about writing a more balanced, nuanced portrait of Wyatt Earp. This would be his second book; the first was a slim pamphlet called The Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday, the cover of which promised “Sensational Photo Discoveries.” He delivered on that promise, with previously unpublished documents and photographs that were indeed sensational, especially a newly discovered letter from Doc to a friend identified only as “Peanut,” in which Doc Holliday admitted that he and Wyatt Earp had killed two men in Colorado and buried them under rocks.

  Boyer was recognized as a major new voice in western history. In his next book, Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp, Boyer put forth a stylish and entertaining argument that the historical Wyatt Earp had been supplanted by equally misleading caricatures: a plaster saint or grotesque villain. With Boyer’s apparent dedication to telling the truth about Earp, the wildly swinging pendulum seemed to have reached a new equilibrium and identified a new champion for Josephine and Wyatt.

  Boyer next contacted the Casons to propose a book based on their material. Ernest Cason responded with the sad news of Mabel’s death in 1965. Despite his oft-expressed distaste for anything to do with the Earps, he verified what Mabel had learned about Mattie’s life. Ernest’s interest was in fidelity to the facts and he dismissed Stuart Lake’s book with the comment that it should be “considered fiction rather than history.”

  Boyer’s approach was well timed. After all, Jeanne Cason Laing told her father, Boyer was a colonel in the Air Force, “not just some bum off the wayside.” The Cason family admired Boyer’s previous books and agreed that Boyer would be a worthy choice to finish Mabel’s work.

  With Ernest’s approval, his daughter Jeanne Cason Laing scoured her mother’s files and sent them to Boyer. It was “a stack of material almost a foot high” that belonged to the three different eras of Mabel’s immersion as Josephine’s biographer: drafts and notes from Mabel’s and Vinnolia’s first manuscript in the late 1930s, which included something that Jeanne called “
the Clum manuscript”; materials and letters that related to the 1955 attempt, including correspondence with Gilchriese and Houghton Mifflin; and clippings and correspondence with researchers during the mid-1960s. “You and my mother and my aunt would have liked each other,” said Leonard Cason, echoing the warmth that the rest of the family felt toward Glenn Boyer.

  Over the next four decades, Jeanne Cason Laing and her family would have reason to reconsider whether they had chosen the right candidate to complete Mabel’s mission of truth.

  JEANNE CASON LAING became the main liaison to Boyer. The whole family was a bit jaundiced about the subject, she warned him, and she bristled immediately at his clumsy suggestion that her mother, who was known as Mabel Earp Cason, had traded on the name Earp. It was simply her maiden name, a choice that Jeanne too had made. “There are many more worthwhile Earps than Wyatt—and I count my mother among them,” she scolded him. If anything, “the whoop-de-do about Wyatt has cheapened the name.”

  Boyer recovered from this misstep and for the next nine years, Jeanne gave him exclusive access to the original manuscripts and to the family’s still vivid memories of Aunt Josie. He also tracked down Josephine’s living relatives, sometimes accompanied on his visits by an enthusiastic Jeanne Laing. The women laughed at his banter about their sex lives and physical appearances, while he talked about shotguns and shootouts with the men, all the while advancing his research agenda with reasonable grace. “If you happen to run into a casual picture of Wyatt as he is headed out for a stroll, please don’t give it to the Salvation Army,” he instructed his interview subjects, who promised to be on the lookout for documents, photos, and memorabilia.

  With the help of Mabel’s research materials, interviews with the Miller, Cason, and Marcus families, and his own independent research, Boyer published I Married Wyatt Earp in 1976 with the University of Arizona Press; the title had been originally suggested by Mabel and Vinnolia. For sources, Boyer leaned heavily on the Cason manuscript and interviews with the Millers and the Casons, supplemented by “the Clum manuscript,” documented by an entertaining set of footnotes. On the book’s cover was a nearly nude figure, her voluptuous figure thinly veiled, her brown eyes framed by a fall of dark brown hair. Boyer identified the woman as Josephine, who posed for the provocative photograph at Johnny Behan’s request.

  A great title, a lively story, and a racy cover goosed the sales and Boyer’s reputation. His Josephine was neither Waters’s whore nor Gilchriese’s materialistic dominatrix. She was an energetic, affectionate, and good-humored woman, her sentimentality balanced by a bottomless appetite for adventure and a love of nature. The Casons were pleased. The sisters requested autographed copies and complimented the author on “the most truthful account” of the Earp saga. “We’re so glad to see all of Mother’s and Aunt Vinnolia’s work brought to fruition,” they wrote. Josephine’s family was also enthusiastic. Any historian’s heart would have beaten faster to hear about a sheath of typewritten pages found by Josephine’s grandniece Alice Greenberg, together with what appeared to be drawings of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. This turned out to be the only two copies of John Flood’s typed manuscript, with his original sketch of the gunfight, drawn from Wyatt’s memory. Boyer purchased and published the manuscript as a commemorative edition in 1981, the centennial of the gunfight.

  Now he had it all.

  Boyer kept up a steady stream of publications and appearances after I Married Wyatt Earp, and also stayed in touch with the Cason and Marcus family. It was, however, one of the rare dips in the popularity of Earp-themed films, and Hollywood did not come a-calling. Instead, Boyer received a film credit on a low-budget television movie starring Marie Osmond as Josephine Earp.

  Questions first arose about the authenticity of Boyer’s work when his book on Doc Holliday came under attack. His great discovery, the “Peanut” letter in which Doc Holliday confessed to another murder, was no scoop at all, just a rollicking good bit of creative writing. Eight years after its publication, after at least one unsuspecting historian relied on its findings, Boyer declared that the early work was a deliberate spoof, a “wild story” intended to entertain readers and entrap sloppy writers. He released it again with a new advertisement that admitted its fictional roots. However, sharp eyes were watching.

  With Boyer’s next book, Tombstone Vendetta, he flaunted his indifference about whether his critics found his research to be good enough. Almost immediately, the book was accused of being another fictional flight. The sins of Doc Holliday and Tombstone Vendetta were then visited on I Married Wyatt Earp: if Boyer fooled us twice, perhaps he had also bowdlerized the memoirs of Josephine Earp.

  Boyer lobbied the University of Arizona Press with a blizzard of letters that proclaimed the historical authenticity of I Married Wyatt Earp. But the Press was looking worriedly over its shoulder at Boyer’s noisy and persistent critics. The lawyers threatened to withdraw the book unless they were allowed to label it “historical fiction.”

  The legitimacy of I Married Wyatt Earp took another blow when that provocative cover photograph of Josephine was alleged to have been mass-produced around 1914, long after Tombstone.

  “If it isn’t Josie, it ought to be,” Boyer grumbled.

  Under pressure from indignant historians and journalists, the Press gave up all rights and returned its unsold copies to Boyer, who promptly announced that he intended to write his own account of the scandal, to be called I Divorced Wyatt Earp.

  Boyer lost the ability to see his seminal work influence the next generation of Earp writers. If he believed that nobody could produce major new works without access to his knowledge, or at the very least, without some citation as a source, he was wrong. In 1997, Casey Tefertiller published Wyatt Earp: The Life behind the Legend, a comprehensive and scrupulously researched biography that almost completely omitted Boyer, turning back to original source material and also cultivating the author’s own relationship with the Cason, Marcus, and Welsh families. Boyer was also invisible in Allen Barra’s Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends, and from Barra’s bully pulpit as a respected and prolific freelance journalist for publications that included the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, he kept up the heat on Boyer’s credibility.

  In 1990 the community of Earp writers and historians was galvanized by the announcement of two major Hollywood productions, Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer, and Wyatt Earp, starring Kevin Costner. Fame and fortune were on the line, as Earp experts vied for lucrative contracts and the all-important bragging rights that went with being official consultants on a major Hollywood production.

  Boyer was completely shut out of the biggest and most exciting game in town: the dueling arrival of two major motion pictures about a subject that he believed he knew better than anyone else in the world.

  JOSEPHINE WAS USED as a punching bag by all sides of the I Married Wyatt Earp controversy. Over the years, memories grew dimmer, tempers shorter, and the authenticity of original Earp documents more hotly contested: experts and amateurs jousted about the Flood manuscript, Allie Earp’s memoirs, the transcript from the 1881 Tombstone hearing, the letters of Louisa Earp, the manuscript of Forrestine Hooker, the maybe-but-not-for-sure diary of Wyatt’s niece Adelia Edwards, the papers of Big Nose Kate, and a Grand Canyon–size collection of miscellaneous guns, recordings, beds, scraps of cloth, and photographs of questionable provenance. But none caused more grief than the so-called Clum manuscript.

  The idea that John Clum had written an early, unfinished version of Josephine’s story originated with Mabel’s daughter Jeanne Cason Laing. Neither a writer nor a historian, Laing was vague about what was in the uncataloged pile of papers that she identified as “the Clum manuscript,” which she turned over to Boyer in 1967. Over the years, her recollection would change about the source of the papers and which copies of the Cason-Ackerman manuscript were burned and which were kept. But neither Laing nor her siblings repudiated the idea that Josephine had “st
arted a manuscript” with John Clum. In a 1983 affidavit, Laing made this clear: “My mother and Aunt were aware of the earlier ‘Clum’ manuscript covering the Tombstone years, and for that reason were willing to burn that portion of their manuscript at Mrs. Earp’s request. My Aunt had written that portion.”

  When experts demanded that Glenn Boyer produce the Clum manuscript, he refused, which was taken as evidence of more chicanery on his part. But Boyer could not show anyone the Clum manuscript because it never existed as a “manuscript,” i.e., a single document of some internal coherence such as the Cason manuscript. So what was in that “stack of papers almost a foot high”? Probably a precious heap of handwritten letters and notes relating to the Tombstone era, which Clum and others had gathered for Josephine, supplemented by Mabel’s own research, her extensive correspondence in the 1950s as she went in and out of partnership with John Gilchriese, and then more letters, clippings, and research notes about the momentous discovery of the Mattie Blaylock story.

  It has been a long time since anyone looked beneath the deceptive surface that Josephine herself created, never guessing that she would be followed by others with their own reasons to extend her trail of deceit. The advent of online message boards for the Earp faithful kept the idea of a conspiracy front and center, with extravagant claims that Boyer had perpetrated the greatest hoax since the Clifford Irving autobiography of Howard Hughes or the forged Hitler diaries. Anonymity of comments lent to the discussion the occasional raw sewage scent of anti-Semitism and homophobia.

  The ad hominem attacks displaced the focus on history. The result was that in the six or so decades since Josephine’s death, she has had no honest broker like Mabel Cason.

  One wonders, what would Mabel do now?

  UNTIL THE END of her life, Jeanne Cason Laing stayed in touch with Glenn Boyer, trading stories about hip replacements, hearing aids, and the endless round of doctor’s appointments that consume much of octogenarian life. Their relationship survived a rough patch when her family demanded the return of the Cason manuscript, arguing that Ernest had intended a loan rather than a gift. Boyer reacted with his usual restraint. He threatened a lawsuit and unleashed his own accusations of a “criminal conspiracy” motivated by the greed of the younger Cason generation. The conflict was never resolved, and today, the manuscript sits in the Dodge City Historical Society, with Laing’s affidavit affixed on top, available only to those who have received Boyer’s permission in advance.