Free Lady at the O.K. Corral by Ann Kirschner

have her, especially Wyatt Earp. As Wyatt’s biographer Stuart Lake put it: “In back of all the fighting, the killing and even Wyatt’s duty as a peace officer, the impelling force of his destiny was the nature and acquisition and association in the case of Johnny Behan’s girl. That relationship is the key to the whole yarn of Tombstone.”
    All signs point to the likelihood that Josephine and Wyatt began an affair in Tombstone. The location of their trysts is unknown, but Josephine was surely angry enough to have enjoyed cuckolding Behan in the house they once shared. Young Albert Behan would have been an important consideration, but if his presence was inconvenient, two passionate, determined lovers could find other places to meet.
    Decades later, Stuart Lake would say privately that “everyone” in town was buzzing about the former Mrs. Behan and faithless Wyatt Earp. However, Josephine and Wyatt were quite discreet. There was no general awareness that they were together, or even that Josephine had broken up with Behan. The local newspapers covered politics rather than scandals, so the tangled love life of Sheriff Johnny Behan and Josephine Marcus remained their own private problem. It would take years before Josephine adopted the name Mrs. Earp—Tombstone already had quite a few of those. Allie Earp was skeptical about whether Josephine had even been in Tombstone, let alone that Josephine and Wyatt were lovers there. Early Tombstone chroniclers such as William Breakenridge and Walter Noble Burns never mentioned Josephine—but then again, with rare exceptions, they mentioned no women at all.
    Tombstone had other things on its mind during that endless hot summer, when the temperature often hit 110 degrees in the shade and the wind kicked up an acrid dust that left an unpleasant coating on the tongue. Aside from the weather, the newly formed county was experiencing an unprecedented crime wave that kept the city’s lawmen almost too busy to worry about their love lives.
    Cochise County swiftly became a hotbed of contradictions and jurisdictional challenges. Social, economic, and political rifts opened up, as deep and unstable as the silver mines that yawned below the streets of Tombstone. The wounds of the Civil War remained divisive, with battlefield memories still fresh in the minds of former soldiers. In the Arizona Territory, many cowboys or their families had fought for the Confederacy, and were displaced by carpetbaggers after the war. On the other side were Republican families like the Earps, where three brothers had fought for the Union. There was no middle ground among Tombstone residents: they were committed to one faction or another. The political landscape aligned with economic interests: the Republicans were townspeople who supported law and order to protect investments, and stood in staunch opposition to mostly Democratic rural ranchers and cowboys, who cherished their individual freedoms. The town’s two leading newspapers, the Epitaph (Republican) and the Nugget (Democratic), advocated ceaselessly for their parties. Partisan battles broke out over decisions large and small.
    The town’s peacekeepers proved incapable of setting aside their differences. As representatives of federal and local law, the Earps should have cooperated with county sheriff Johnny Behan. Instead, each side eagerly subverted the other and allowed personal and professional jealousies to compromise their judgment. Behan had the job Wyatt wanted; Wyatt had the girl Behan had brought to Tombstone.
    As a series of serious crimes unfolded in Tombstone, the stalemate between the two sides slowly heated up into an all-out war over a high-stakes prize of money, power, and Josephine Marcus.
    THE ROAD TO the O.K. Corral began with a sequence of thefts and killings that brought the Earp and Behan factions into open opposition. An audacious attack on a Wells Fargo stagecoach going from Benson to