roots across the united states but has a special meaning for seattle so it's a lot of fun to be here d the fact that both of my books have seattle exhibits this week is particularly fun. what i would like to do is to introduce the book i reading the first couple of pages from the prologue in which i land on -- did you know that wyatt earp was buried in a jewish cemetery? just hearing his name brought me back to my childhood in jackson heights new york city as i rolled on the floor in front of black-and-white television to watch westerns with my big rather chilly dressed up in a special shirt with braided trim and snapped buttons and a black cowboy hat and shiny gun and the full leather holster slung around his hips. joey and i tuned it and pretended to walk the streets of tombstone every week together with millions of americans young and old. joey was my hero and marshall earp was his. brave, courageous, bold and jewish. jewish? that's how it all started, a question from a friend who thought correctly that i would be intrigued by the in congregate between anything jewish and anything tombstone-ish. the first burst of curiosity about wyatt earp's restingplace i soon learned that wyatt the only man to emerge unscathed from the gunfight at the o.k. corral was not jewish but had lived with jewish women for 50 years and she buried him next to her parents and brother and family plot in the synagogue affiliated hills of maternity -- eternity cemetery outside of san francisco and that was my introduction. as children when wyatt earp ruled the airwaves we did know that he had a wife and certainly not a jewish wife from new york. i was jewish from new york so it each revelation that a woman named josephine marcus earp a bet new images that made me smile especially the thought of wyatt earp going home for chicken soup after a tough day fighting for truth and justice in the dusty streets of tombstone arizona but it quickly became more interested in mrs. mrs. earp than her famous husband. contradictions piled up like a freeway collision. how had a beautiful girl from san francisco be in new york and prussia end up in tombstone while the rest of her immigrant family climbed out of poverty and into responsibility? y. had josephine runaway? what inspired five decades of adventure seeking that took her from the arizona territory to california, nevada, alaska and then finally to hollywood? okay so that is how the book begins. and now you have the headline. the writer discovers that wyatt earp was buried in a jewish center which sounded like a parody of something you would read in the obits than something real. let's see if i have got my clicker here. and there is my brother joey. i was the little thing in the crib. aren't i cute? so that was a true story but when i came to this as an adult, what really fascinated me was that the early books about wyatt never mentioned there had any any mrs. earp and in fact if you read the early western books it says that there were no women at all. it was as if men had no mothers, wives or daughters and we didn't hear anything about them. so imagine if you were to write a biography of ronald reagan without mentioning nancy or bill clinton without hillary which covers both sides of the aisle. it's what led me to and i will eventually figure this out, to the real josephine earp. no, no. i may need somebody to help me. clicker. i actually heard in the early days of television, bill paley had someone come and visit him and he said he change the channel and someone said don't you have a remote-control? he said, sure i do. george. and george came and changed the channel so could you teach me, george? it's really eloquence. what am i doing wrong? oh good, it's not just me. i'm usually pretty good with technology. i will just keep going and i'm going to start by telling you a little bit about her family in the united states. josephine's parents immigrated from prussia around 1850 and this is a pretty familiar story of jewish immigration. for the rest of her life josephine would say that her family was german, not prussian. that's a very important distinction. prussia is now poland. and did it really matter? it didn't really matter except that the german jewish tended to be more affluent, better educated, less religious. depression, the eastern european were much more religious and less affluent and spoke yiddish rather than polish, i'm sorry rather than german so it was actually an important distinction. there we go. so there is a circle around the place that her family was from and coincidently that is where my mother was from. even though i had strayed so far from the story of my mother when i dipped into the american frontier in fact there really wasn't that far away. so this is a picture of steamers arriving in san francisco. that is how the family arrived in san francisco around 1870. they spent 10 years, little bit more in a indie dork and have been in new york during the civil war that the family had not succeeded financially and if you were in new york during those years he would the reading in the newspapers constantly about the wonders of san francisco. come to san francisco. everything is terrific there. the family who was doing particularly well decided they would take a second immigration trip and went from new york and then travel down south to the isthmus of panama and took the steamer up to san francisco. and when they arrived in san francisco, the san francisco of that time was in fact a growing and thriving community that they thought it would need. but like new york, it was a highly stratified jewish society where the german jews for the upper-class than everyone else, especially the polish jews, were at the bottom. the fellow you see her on the right his name is isaac benjamin and a lot of what i eventually came to understand as josephine's motivation for leaving san francisco was seeing the german jewish divide. he had lived in the united states for three years and had observed the remarkable intolerance from the german jewish community from some of the other jewish communities. in that divide, between the german jews and the nongerman jews, to me lies the secret of josephine's first running away. she was a teenager. she didn't want to be second class. she was a party girl. she was pretty, outgoing, vivacious and the thought that because of her family's origin and the way that they spoke that somehow she wouldn't go to the the right schools or the right parties seemed outrageous to her. like huckleberry finn josephine lived out for the territory. when she ran away from home she was about 18 years old, and she ran away to join an acting troop her pinafore phrase was sweeping the united states. it's hard to explain how important it was at the time but when gilbert and sullivan first wrote benjamin's pinafore and it came to the united states there was pinafore performed in german and italian and every language you can think of. it was was so desperate for actors that they went right into the local amateur schools and took actors right out of them, including someone like josephine who was not enormously talented but she -- so josephine went off to join the pinafore troop that was going to go to the arizona territory and she ran away from home. she did not tell her mother and father that she was going and when she got there things weren't quite what she thought they were going to be but she caught the eye of a dapper man, quite a bit older than she was, who was an up-and-coming politician and lyman and they had a romance. he didn't tell her that he was divorced. it had been at a nasty ugly public divorce. he didn't tell her any of that. he just said josephine, marry me and come to tombstone which was a bustling mining town, and be my wife. josephine you should have known better. you all know better, right? i wish i could -- i know i am going to cover it up very quickly. i can't tell you exactly what's josephine looked like a sick young woman because there are no authentic pictures. these two that i'm showing you here, i can't say for sure that they are josephine and there were many circulating on the web that i can tell you are definitely not josephine. the pictures along the bottom here, those are josephine in later life into those i am sure our her. with the help of a professor at john jay at the university of new york, we have done a regression using forensic art techniques to try and tease out what josephine might actually have looked like and all the pictures along the top have been put forward as possible pictures of josephine. if you are extremely interested in the art of forensic analysis, i have got a great public or fast or kerry laying on my web site on the okay corral.com. i show you these only to say we don't know exactly what she looked like but we do know that she was beautiful and buxom. actually in later life someone said they entered the room before she did. so she went to tombstone to hook up with him and she arrives by stagecoach in 1880 and tombstone was a bustling mining town, bigger than tucson, bigger than phoenix. you could drink champagne and you could be oysters -- eat wasters. it was pretty an amazing place. wyatt earp and his brother and their common law wives were settled there. they had arrived a year before so the picture on the bottom right here is johnny and there is the amazing -- in the middle and i will tell you about the woman on the left in a minute. so, johnny ian when josephine arrived had won a very important election. he was the first sheriff of cochise county and who was the person that he beat out for that job? well, that was wyatt earp so they were political rivals from the very beginning. when josephine arrived in town johnny liked her well enough but he already had one marriage and he was not eager to marry again. and so he let her think that she was going to be mrs. ian and she let her take care of his young son but he had no interest in marrying her not to mention the fact that his favorite prostitute was back in town. josephine did figure it out when she was in tombstone and she left him. that is her story that josephine did not want you to know that she had been in tombstone living with him. the other thing she didn't want you to know has to do with the woman on the left-hand side here. that is maddy blalock earp who was known as the common law wife of earp and they have been there -- married for several years. now you have the cast of characters. tombstone was a town very much on edge in 1881 in a series of robberies. there was an indian uprising. it was a hot, hot, hot summer, temperature hot and hot also in the political sense of political rivalries. fox and "msnbc" have nothing on the two rival newspapers in tombstone which were maniacally against each other. and the deepest rivalry was between wyatt and johnny bien. johnny bien have a job that wyatt wanted. he was the sheriff of cochise county which is an extremely lucrative job and there was a tax collector that came with being sheriff. johnny at the woman that wyatt wanted. even the josephine had left him, that didn't mean you wanted wyatt to have her. when we think about the gunfight at the o.k. corral there are deep political economic and social reasons leading up to the gunfight, republicans and democrats, the law men in the mining interests against the cowboys and ranchers. that is all true but what is also true is that josephine marcus had a lover on both sides because wyatt was on one side and johnny bien was on the other so this is also a love triangle. i don't imagine any of you have seen the movies. i guess you have probably seen one or two. you know on october 26 tombstone interrupted in a hail of all its in the middle of the day. the gunfight at the o.k. corral is the most famous gunfight in american history. i have a google alert on o.k. corral and there is not a single day that goes by that there is in some reference to the o.k. corral. sometimes it's as predictable as yesterday's vote on gun control. sometimes it's the o.k. corral is a metaphor for confrontation at an nba game, a teachers union fight, a wall street scandal. it's a metaphor that is deep in the american psyche. but you know if you go to tombstone today there is a cheesy reenactment and you see how shocking it must have been for a gunfight happened in the middle of the day. so after the gunfight which resulted in three of the cowboys being killed, opinion was sharply divided as to whether wyatt and his brother doc holliday were innocent or guilty. there was a tremendous amount of legal maneuvering and wyatt was legally acquitted but the story didn't end there. the cowboy sought revenge and one of his brothers virgil was shot and maimed and another one of his brothers shot dead in front of wyatt's eyes. johnny bien was trying to arrest a wyatt but at that point wyatt earp declared he had the law and from the nonwyatt earp was about justice rather than love. he embarked on what has been described as a homicidal rage also known as the vendetta ride in which he sought revenge against the people who had shot his brothers. what was he going to do about the women? matti earp had been living with him at this point for several years and before wyatt goes off on the right he sends maddy off to his parents. actually this is the most cowardly thing that wyatt earp did because he sent her off without a word of good by and he said he would be picking her up but he never saw her again. josephine went home to her parents and so you have these two women waiting for wyatt. he never saw maddy as i said but he did come in in 1882 after the vendetta ride to pick up josephine. i always think about that scene. henry and sophia marcus, an immigrant family and wyatt earp trying to figure out what this girl josephine is thinking of. what wyatt did have going for him was, he was uncommonly handsome and charismatic. and what a remarkable couple they must have appeared to be so josephine's parents did not lock the door and not let her out, not that would have made any difference. the character was the spirited adventurer, the sense of romance and so before her parents know was happening she was out the door. so the gunfight was only a tiny piece of wyatt and josephine's life. they were together for almost the next 50 years. they never married as far as i can tell. patty blalock died in 1888 and he had it tragic ending. she figured out finally that wyatt earp was not coming back for her. how uncomfortable it must have been living with her in-laws. she was not a woman who had education or training and so when she left his parents house she had no means of support. she became a prostitute and she was a drug addict. she ended up committing suicide and cursed wyatt earp on her final day. this was the second part of what josephine's most feared for the rest of her life. she didn't want anyone to know that wyatt had left maddie for josephine and that maddy had come to such a sad end. so they went on to this extraordinary lifetime adventure but josephine was always hearing the footsteps of the tombstone behind her. always fearing exposure and i think -- i did visit many of the places they had been, san diego and cord to lean and goldfield and various other places. i confess that as i followed josephine around my favorite adventure was the three years that they spent between seattle and alaska and especially their dentures in nome alaska. has anybody ever been to gnome? one person, wonderful. gnome is as far north as seattle and seattle is west. it's really way up there. they played an extraordinarily interesting part in the story of the gold rush. seattle played as many of you probably know an important role in the history of alaska. so there were a number of cities that were fighting to the gateway to alaska, portland, tacoma, san francisco which was in the lead but seattle had a secret weapon and the secret weapon was a man named arrest this brainerd. he was a marketing and public relations genius and he felt that this would be incredibly important turning point for seattle. he was doing everything he could to ensure that seattle appeared to be the gateway to alaska. one of the things he did was reach out to all the business people that he could and the employees to have them write to their hometown newspapers to say we have got everything going on here about alaska. and they did and this was all paid media. it was part of what provision to alaska so very well but then by the time the klondike strike is really maturing, let's say 1897 or so, when the first big steamers come into seattle with tons of old, by then seattle had plowed a tremendous amount of money back into infrastructure to build railroads and offices that would truly make seattle a center for alaska. when you got off the boat, you saw the fruits. seattle was nome crazy so there was a nome information center. as soon as you got off the steamer there was nome tense, no medicine and my favorite was something called face protector which promised whether your nose is long or short wide or narrow ,-com,-com ma inclined to be roman or french the wearer can see here brief talk smoke chew or expectorate just as well. so for three years, can you just imagine? there is a picture of the original ad. for three years josephine spencer winters and seattle and her summers in nome and much of what she was doing was outfitting what would become wyatt's extremely successful saloon in alaska called the dexter. the summer of 1900, the summer of 1900 nome was the center of the world and the best way to get there was from seattle. this was a picture of the stampede along the seattle waterfront amassing to get to nome. it wasn't only people but the whole ship was filled with tons of merchandise, whole cities that were collapsed and intended to reassemble once they got to nome so theaters that were struck down into little pieces and restaurants and hotels. a city in a box. there was no natural port in nome so once you got off the boat you have to get on these other little boats and big paul bunyan guys would come out and the women would climb on the backs of these men and be carried out to the shore. so, that is nome and what i'm trying to show you their is what was so unusual was the gold was not under the ground as it usually is and requires a great deal of capital investment. the gold in nome was right on the service, right on the sand of the public beaches in nome so you could go out just with a little pin and go like this and gold nuggets would appear. it was like magic. in the summer of 1900 this was absolutely the place to be. josephine was there when her niece had just recently gotten this picture from josephine's great great great grand nephew and that is a picture of his grandmother, josephine who was there. josephine loved the excitement of nome. she loved everything except the fact that wyatt earp was running the dexter with rooms upstairs for prostitutes. she didn't love that part particularly, and we know that because those are the stories that the knees brought home but regardless of whether she was furious with wyatt or not they went to nome together and they came back from nome together and when they came back they were actually quite rich. they had taken out the equivalent of a million dollars, mostly not from gold and in fact almost none of it was from gold. most of it was from what earp called mining the minors, prostitution. in the years that followed they probably could have lived on their money from alaska for the rest of their lives if they were careful, but careful was not a word that was in their vocabulary. so they invested in various things. they were not great investors. i don't think that josephine or wyatt really cared about money. they cared much more about it venture and following their own inclinations. they spent most of their time in a camp near w