The Jewish Origins of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
A Famous Gunfight over a Jewish Prostitute
The thirty second gunfight at the O.K. Corral near Tombstone, Arizona on 26th October 1881 is the epoch-making moment that summarises the American experience of the Wild West.
What you won’t read in many short summaries of the events, or the Wikipedia article is that in addition to the traditional that the gunfight at the O.K. Corrall was caused by petty conflicts and political jealousies between several families in the Old West, but focused on Tombstone. Is that Stuart Lake – whose 1931 biography of Wyatt Earp more or less created his modern legend – pointed out that Johnny Behan – Earp’s successful rival for the position of sheriff – had another reason to pick a fight with Earp: Josephine Sadie Marcus. (1)
Josephine – born into the financially comfortable home of her jewish parents Hyman Marcus and Sophia Lewis in New York and then brought up in California – (2) fled her home and the rigid constrains of Judaism (3) as well as likely an arranged jewish marriage, which was common for jews in California at the time. (4)
She travelled, became an actress – which at that time was not unjustly synonymous with ‘prostitute’ – as well as a dancing hall girl and a concubine. (5)
The reason for this… shall we say… erotic career is aptly summarised by Ann Kirschner as follows:
‘Josephine was beautiful. With her spectacular figure, piles of dark hair, and strong features, she must have looked like a Victorian-era Penelope Cruz, commanding every male eye in Tombstone. As an older woman, her silhouette still amazed Grace Welsh Spolidoro, a close family friend but no fan of Josephine’s: “Her bosoms came in the front door before her body did! She was humongous, and she was a small lady. Little hips, little legs, but those things were the biggest things I ever saw.”’ (6)
Thus it is no surprise when we learn that Johnny Behan had made Josephine his woman – (7) even though he was already married and had fathered a child – but that when she found out that this was the case. She promptly cuckolded Behan with Wyatt Earp in the bed that she and Behan had shared. (8)
It didn’t help that there is some suggestion that Josephine also blew a significant amount of Earp’s friend Doc Holliday’s hard-earned cash at the gaming tables, while invoking Johnny Behan’s name that in turn earned the enmity of Doc Holliday towards her and the jews. (9)
It was in Josephine’s sexual relationship with Earp that cuckolded his rival Johnny Behan that Stuart Lake and Ann Kirschner have pointed to as being the key emotional factor that lay behind the conflict. (10) Isenberg disagrees and claims that there is ‘no evidence’ for this, (11) but offers no counter-argument to Lake’s point about the relationship between Josephine and Wyatt already being in existence before events took a turn for the worse in Tombstone.
Indeed, as Kirschner has argued persuasively, (12) there is every reason to believe that such a relationship did in fact exist and when you factor in a highly emotional element like being cuckolded. Then it makes sense of the downward spiral into violence, which culminated in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
References
(1) Ann Kirschner, 2013, ‘Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp’, 1st Edition, Harper Collins: New York, p. 68
(2) Ibid, p. 24; Andrew Isenberg, 2013, ‘Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life’, 1st Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, p. 228; Loretta Kemsley, 2012, ‘The Earp Wives: Madams, Harlots and their Pimps’, 1st Edition, Smashwords: Los Gatos, p. 190
(3) Kirschner, Op. Cit., p. 12
(4) Robert Levinson, 1978, ‘The Jews in the California Gold Rush’, 1st Edition, Ktav: New York, pp. 61-62
(5) Isenberg, Op. Cit., p. 230
(6) Kirschner, Op. Cit., p. 12
(7) Isenberg, Op. Cit., p. 228
(8) Kirschner, Op. Cit., p. 69
(9) Isenberg, Op. Cit., p. 228
(10) Kirschner, Op. Cit., p. 68
(11) Isenberg, Op. Cit., p. 230
(12) Kirschner, Op. Cit., pp. 68-69