You`d think that one of the most famous figures in the history of the Old West would have ended up as part of the landscape that played an intimate part in the formation of his legend. In the case of Wyatt Earp, this would mean Dodge City, Wichita or, more appropriately, Tombstone. The mind conjures up a perfect image of a simple headstone on Boot Hill in Tombstone, not far from the most memorable marker in that graveyard:
HERE LIES LESTER MOORE
FOUR SLUGS FROM A 44
NO LES NO MORE
But you won`t find Earp in Dodge City. Or Wichita. Or Tombstone.
Instead, for the final word on the legend of Wyatt Earp, you have to come to this necropolis a few miles south of San Francisco, the place to which the city`s dead were removed in 1914 and where they have been buried ever since. Several cemeteries line both sides of El Camino Real here.
But which one hold`s Earp`s remains?
I went with a friend and we picked out a cemetery office at random, went in and asked the people behind the counter if they could tell us where Wyatt Earp was buried. After a couple of such tries, we were told to try the Hills of Eternity cemetery. Pulling up at the entrance, we read the sign:
HILLS OF ETERNITY
PORTALS OF ETERNITY
GARDENS OF ETERNITY
TEMPLE SHERITH ISRAEL
I was surprised by the realization that it was a Jewish cemetery.
Mission is apparent
At the end of the driveway one is confronted by hundreds, seemingly thousands, of headstones and monuments stretching back along a low slope. We got out of the car and were quickly noticed by an old timer sitting nearby in a blue station wagon and wearing a baseball style cap with HILLS OF ETERNITY printed on it. After watching us look indecisively at the countless stones for a few moments, he called, ”You boys looking for Wyatt Earp?”
We said that we were and he gave us directions on how to locate the grave about a hundred yards directly ahead of us up the slope. He introduced himself as the foreman.
”Do many people come out here looking for him?” I asked.
”Oh, yes, five or six a week,” he said. ”There are always people, all kinds of cowboys come out looking for his grave. He`s the most visited man in Colma.”
We walked up the hill past the green plots where white and gray headstones and monuments of every size are neatly ranked in rows; past imposing crypts, little stone condos where residents have settled in for the Big Sleep, to use a metaphor from a literary genre more popular than the Western. Then we found the spot. His name caught my eye on one of three flat metal plaques set into concrete and sharing the same space. They seemed so small and modest among the surrounding headstones as to appear almost inconspicuous:
WYATT EARP: 1848-1929
And with him:
JOSEPHINE EARP: 1864-1944
And sharing the same plot:
MAX WEISS: 1870-1947
Wyatt Earp is buried in a Jewish cemetery, surrounded by tombstones adorned with stone doves, stars of David and Menorahs, amid a sprinkling of different types of Northern California palm trees. All my life I had never given any thought to his ethnic background, but now found myself wondering if Earp is a Jewish name or was his wife Jewish? And-in a mystery I never solved- who was Max Weiss, the man buried beside them?
Wyatt Earp was not Jewish, but his wife was. The book ”Pioneer Jews” by Harriet and Fred Rochlin offers a portrait of her life, much of which came from a book titled ”I Married Wyatt Earp.” They`re supposedly her memoirs, although I have a letter from a woman who says that Josephine`s niece married her great-uncle, who ”insisted that they were not her memoirs and a lot of it was bunk.”
In any case, the book tells how Josephine (”Josie”) ran away from her parents in San Francisco when she was 15 to the Arizona Territory as a cast member of Pauline Markham Troupe`s production of Gilbert and Sullivan`s
”H.M.S. Pinafore.” She was apprehended and returned to San Francisco, but in the meantime had acquired a suitor, Johnny Behan, who followed her back to the city to ask her parents for her hand in marriage. Josie then went with Behan to Tombstone where, after the romance soured, she met Wyatt Earp, then a deputy sheriff, proprietor of the Oriental Saloon, and married to his second wife, Mattie. A love affair ensued.
The O.K. Corral
Josie`s book includes a description of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral:
”I jumped up as I heard the firing start. . . . Without stopping for a bonnet I rushed outside. . . . A man in a wagon . . . yelled, `Hop in, lady . . . I`ll run you up to the excitement!` . . . I almost swooned when I saw Wyatt`s tall figure very much alive. . . . He spotted me, and came across the street. Like a feather-brained girl, my only thought was, `My God, I haven`t got a bonnet on. What will they think?` But you can imagine my real relief at seeing my love alive. I was simply a little hysterical. Can you blame me?”
Wyatt and Josie spent nearly 50 years together, moving around the West. Despite her claim that they were married, no record of the marriage has been found. At one point they operated a saloon in Nome, Alaska, during the Klondike gold rush. Ultimately they settled in Los Angeles, where Wyatt hoped to cash in with his experiences in the movie industry, but it never happened. About Wyatt`s burial, Josie wrote: ”Wyatt`s family were almost all gone and we had no children. My only home was where my parents rest. So I took Wyatt`s ashes to San Francisco.”
Looking at a photograph of the real Wyatt Earp, one wonders to what extent his legend followed him during his lifetime. Many actors have played him (Burt Lancaster, James Garner, Hugh O`Brian, Henry Fonda, Randolph Scott, etc.), but Walter Huston was the first in ”Law and Order,” which came out in 1931, two years after Wyatt was brought to Colma. One wonders, too, what those last 30 years must have been like for a man who saw the frontier close, gave up his guns and horses and became part of a world in which the changes were total and spectacular. He saw the coming of electric lights, telephones, motion pictures, airplanes, automobiles, radio, machine guns, battleships, comic strips, neon signs and zippers.
Romance endures
Whatever the truth was about Wyatt Earp`s life as a lawman and the gunfight at O.K. Corral, the romance and the legend endure. As for the real Wyatt Earp, he lies in the earth a short distance from a modern shopping mall in a place far from any drifting tumbleweeds or howling coyotes. There is no epitaph on his marker, nothing so quaint as Lester Moore`s, nor as elegant as some lines from a favorite poem of mine, ”The Ballad of William Sycamore”
(1790-1871) by Stephen Vincent Benet:
Go play with your towns you have built of blocks,
The towns where you would have bound me!
I sleep in my earth like a tired fox,
And my buffalo have found me.
But well over half a century after his death visitors keep finding him. Cowboys keep showing up to stand among the stones and hold their hats in their hands while saying a few quiet words to him or thinking a few private thoughts before walking back down the slope to drive off into the modern West in their pickups and Japanese cars.
It is interesting to note that the fictional William Sycamore lived to the age of 81, just like Wyatt Earp.
