Gunslinger's Grave
TRITTEN, LARRY
Gunslinger's Grave LARRY TRITTEN WHEN I HEARD that Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman, gunfighter, and gambler, was buried in the quiet town of Colma, Calif., outside San Francisco, I decided to...
...the Walter Huston movie, Law and Order, came out in 1931, just two years after his death...
...Corral...
...Oh, yes, five or six a week," he said...
...A man in a wagon...
...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...
...I was simply a little hysterical...
...Some nearby monuments had been pushed over...
...Colma is a 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...
...Wyatt and Josie spent nearly 50 years together, moving around the West (though no record of their marriage has been found...
...Imagine: Earp stopping outlaws in their tracks more than a century after the historic gunfight ar the O.K...
...Without stopping for a bonnet I rushed outside...
...Holding their hats in their hands, they stand among the stones and say a few quiet words to him, before walking back down the slope and driving off in their pickups or Japanese cars...
...We got out of the car and were quickly sized up by an old timer in a baseball cap with "Hills of Eternity" printed on it...
...You would think of Dodge City, or Wichita, or Tombstone, where I saw a headstone marking another gunslinger's grave: Here Lies Lester Moore Four Slugs From a 44 No Les No More Earp, a former deputy sheriff of Tombstone, Ariz., is best remembered for defeating the infamous Clanton Gang in 1881 at the O.K...
...From the end of the driveway, we could see thousands of headstones adorned with stars of David and menorahs, covering a low slope...
...To my amazement, it was a Jewish cemetery...
...I asked...
...Which is why after all these years I found myself on my way to Colma with a friend...
...Picking out a cemetery at random, my friend and I went in, and asked where Wyatt Earp was buried...
...We walked up the green hill past Jewish headstones, past crypts where residents have settled in for the Big Sleep, and found his name among the California palms, on a flat metal plaque set in cement: WYATT EARP 1 8 4 8 - 1 9 2 9 Sharing the plot was another marker: JOSEPHINE EARP 1 8 6 4 - 1 9 4 4 I found myself wondering, was Earp a Jewish name...
...The book Pioneer Jews by Harriet and Fred Rochlin offers a portrait of her life, much of it drawn from a controversial memoir, / Married Wyatt Earp...
...Ultimately they settled in Los Angeles, where Wyatt tried, unsuccessfully, to break into the movie industry...
...You drive south from the city, past the Serramonte shopping center, to this place where Japanese, Chinese, Italian, and Greek cemeteries line both sides of El Camino Real...
...Burt Lancaster, James Garner, Hugh O'Brian, Henry Fonda, and Randolph Scott were among the actors who played him...
...Can you blame me...
...yelled, 'Hop in, lady—I'll run you up to the excitement...
...There are always people, all kinds of cowboys come out looking for his grave...
...What will they think?' But you can imagine my real relief at seeing my love alive...
...Introducing himself as the foreman, he directed us to a grave about 100 yards up the slope...
...Gunslinger's Grave LARRY TRITTEN WHEN I HEARD that Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman, gunfighter, and gambler, was buried in the quiet town of Colma, Calif., outside San Francisco, I decided to check it out...
...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, according to that book...
...Corral: "I jumped up as I heard the firing start...
...Glenn G. Boyer edited (and, some say, embellished) the memoir, which relates that "Josie" ran away from her parents in San Francisco at age 1S to the Arizona Territory, as a cast member of Pauline Markham Troupe's production of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S...
...As a boy, I had watched him gun down, pistol-whip, and give bare-fisted beatings to legions of outlaws, and romance clear-eyed frontier beauties, in countless movies and TV shows...
...Corral, with the help of his brothers Morgan and Virgil...
...Even now, with the hindsight of adult skepticism, his name stirs up the old childhood wonder...
...Do many people come out here looking for him...
...He's the most visited man in Colma...
...Later, thinking about this, I had a vision of some nocturnal vandals doing this dirty work among stones marked Goldberg or Weinstein—then suddenly coming upon the moonlit name of...
...Looking at a photograph of the real Wyatt Earp, one imagines that his legend must have followed him during his lifetime...
...You wouldn't expect one of the most famous figures in the history of the Old West to be interred so far from the landscape where his legend was created...
...A love affair ensued...
...And, three-quarters of a century later, cowboys still come to his final resting place, in a Jewish cemetery, to pay their respects...
...Pinafore...
...She then went with Behan to Tombstone where she met Wyatt Earp— then a deputy sheriff and proprietor of the Oriental Saloon, who was married to his second wife, Mattie...
...the work of anti-Semites, the foreman said...
...After a couple of tries, we were told to try the Hills of Eternity Cemetery...
...At one point they operated a saloon in Nome, Alaska, during the Klondike gold rush...
...Josie's memoir includes a description of the gunfight at the O.K...
...I almost swooned when I saw Wyatt's tall figure very much alive...
...As it turned out, Wyatt Earp was not Jewish—but Josephine Sara Marcus Earp, his wife of almost half a century, was...
...After watching us for a few moments, he called, "You boys looking for Wyatt Earp...
Vol. 26 • October 2001 • No. 5
