rational. science is rational, it is the antido trelig irrationality. this itself is the ultimate irrational idea. because the belief that religion is inimical to science and reason in the west is completely untrue. religion underpins science and reason. reason. >> next weekend, author, columnist and winner of the prize for journalism, melanie phillips will take your calls, e-mails, facebook comments in tweets. three hours live next sunday at noon eastern here on booktv. >> booktv continues with ann kirschner. she recounts the life of josephine marcus earp, the common law wife and partner of over 50 years the law man wyatt earp. this is about one hour. >> thank you.

it's a pleasure to be here. this is a story that has deep roots all across the united states, but has a special meeting for cle. so it's fun for me to be here, in fact that both of my books have seattle, seattle exhibits this week is particularly fun. so what i would like to do is just introduced the book by reading the first couple of pages from the prologue in which i landed on planet earth. did you know that wyatt earp was buried in a jewish cemetery? just hearing his name through back to my childhood in the city sprawled on the floor in front of a black and white television watching westerns with my big brother, joey, dressed up in his special shirt with braided trim and snazzy snap buttons and black cowboy hat and shiny guns and a faux leather holster swung

around to see. joey and i tuned in and pretended to walk the streets of tombstone every week together with millions of americans, young and old. joey was my hero, and marshall perp was his. brave, courageous, bold and jewish. jewish? that's how it all started just an instant question from a friend who thought correctly that i would be intrigued by the incongruity between anything jewish and anything tombstone. this first burst of fury us about wyatt earp filed resting place was has a. i soon learned that wide, the only meant to emerge unscathed from the gunfight at the o.k. corral, was not jewish but had lived with a jewish woman for nearly 50 years. she buried him next to her parents and brother in the family plot at the synagogue affiliated hills of eternity cemetery outside of san francisco. and that was my introduction to

mrs. earp. as children, when wyatt earp ruled the airwaves, we did know that he had a wife, certainly not a jewish wife from new york. i was a from new york. so each revelation of a woman named josephine sarah marcus the vote 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 i quickly became far more interested in mrs. earp that in her famous husband. contradictions piled up like a freeway collision. how about a beautiful girl from san francisco via new york and prussia ended up in tombstone? while the rest of her immigrant family climbed out of poverty and into work law respectability, why had josephine runaway? what inspired five decades of adventure seeking that took her from the arizona territory to california, nevada, alaska, and

then, finally, the hollywood? okay, so that's how the book begins. and now you have the headline. block writer discovers that wide earp is buried in jewish cemetery which sounds much more like a parody of something you'd read in the onion than something real. let's see if i have my clicker here. voilà, and there's my brother, chewy. and i am little thing in the crib. aren't i cute? that was a true story. but when it came to this as an adult, what really fascinated me was that the early books about why it never mentioned that there had been any mrs. earp. in fact if you read some of those early western books it was

as if there were no women at all, these men had no mothers or wives or daughters, and we just a new anything about them. so imagine if you were to write a biography of ronald reagan without ever mentioning nancy, or bill clinton without hillary. said i this struck me as pretty amazing. and it's what led me to -- i will eventually figure this out -- to the real mrs. earp. know. no. i may need somebody to click for me. clicker. i actually heard that in the early days of television. bill taylor have someone come and visit him, and he said he needed to change the channel,

and someone said what, don't have a remote control? he said sure i do, george. and george came and changed the channel. so could you teach me, george? so what am i doing wrong wax can you get it? good, it's not just me. i'm usually pretty good with technology. so i will just keep going. and i'm going to start telling you a little bit about her family in the united states. so josephine's parents emigrated from prussia around 1850, and this is a pretty familiar story of jewish immigration. but for the rest of her life josephine would say that a family was german, not prussian. and that's a very important distinction. project is now poland pashtun prussia is now fully. and didn't really matter? it didn't really matter except that the german tended to be more affluent, better educated,

less religious. the prussian, i.e., the eastern european, were much more religious and less affluent and spoke gibberish rather than polish , sorry, rather than german. so it was an important distinction. never go. there's a circle around the place that her family was from. quincy daily right below that that is where my mother is from. so you know i thought i had strayed so far on the story of my mother, when i dipped into the american frontier, factor really wasn't that far away. so this is a picture of steamers arriving in san francisco. that's a josephine's family arrived in san francisco around 1870. they had spent about 10 years, a little bit more in new york. they had been in new york during the civil war.

but the family had not succeeded financially, and if you are in new york during those years you would be reading in the newspapers constantly about the wonders of san francisco, come to san francisco, everything is terrific they. and so the marcus family which was and particularly well on the lower east side of ne new york decided they would take a second immigration pop, and went from new york and then traveled down south, went through panama and then via steamer up to san francisco. and when they arrived in san francisco, the san francisco of the time was, in fact, a growing, thriving community that they had thought it would be. but like new york it was a highly stratified jewish society where the german jews where the upper class, and everyone else, especially the polish jews, were at the bottom.

and his fellow judges here 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 germans, the german jewish divide through his eyes. he had lived in the united states for three years and have observed the remarkable intolerance from the german jewish community to some of the of the parts of the jewish community. and so in that divide between the german jews and the non-german jews, to me lives a secret of josephine's first running away from home. 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 in the way that they spoke that summer she wouldn't go to the right schools and the right parties, that

seemed outrageous to her. so like huckleberry finn, josephine lived out for the territories. now, when she ran away from home she was about 18, and she ran away to join and acting true. it was sweeping deny states, sort of hard to explain how important this was at the time, but when gilbert and sullivan first wrote -- then came to deny states, every town had a pinafore true. they perform in german and italian and everything which can think of. and they were so desperate for act is that they went right into the local amateur schools and took actors right out of them, including someone like josephine who was an enormously talented, but she could dance. so josephine went off, went off

to join the pinafore group that was going to go through the arizona territory. she ran away from home. she did not tell her mother and father that she was going. and when she got there, things were not quite what she thought there 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 law man, and they had a romance. he didn't tell her that he was divorced, that it'd been a nasty, public, ugly divorce and he had been cavorting with prostitutes and had a young son who was taking care. he just said, josephine, mary me and come to tombstone them which was a bustling mining town, and be my wife. josephine, you should have known better to you all know better,

right? look at that. i wish i could -- i know, i'm going to cover up very quickly. i can't tell you exactly what josephine looked like as a woman because there are no authenticated pictures. these two that i'm showing you here, i can't say for sure that they are josephine gay and there are many that are certainly on the web that i can tell the are definitely not josephine. the pictures along the bottom, those are josephine in later life, and those i am sure are her ear and with the help of a professor at the city university of new york, we have done a regression analysis using forensic art technique to try and tease out what josephine might actually have looked like it and all the pictures along the top have been put forth as hostile pictures of josephine. so if you're actually interested in the art of forensic analysis,

i've got a great interview with a professor on my website, laid at the okay corral.com. but 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 about her that her boobs entered the room before she did. [laughter] so she went to tombstone to hook up with johnny she arrived by stagecoach in 1880. and tombstone was a bustling mining town but it was bigger than tucson figure was bigger than phoenix. you could drink champagne. you could eat oysters. it was really a pretty amazing place. wyatt earp and his brothers and other common law wives were already still there. they had arrived a year before. so the picture on the bottom right here is johnny, and

there's the amazing wyatt earp in the middle. and i will tell you all of it about the woman on the left in a minute. so johnny, when josephine arrived, had won a very important election. he was the first sheriff, and he was the person that johnny behan beat out for that job? well, that was wider. so they were political rivals from the very beginning. and when josephine arrived in town, johnny liked her well enough, but he had already have this one disastrous marriage and he was not eager to marry again. and so he let her think that she was going to be his wife and he 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. so josephine, who has not understood this all before, did

figure it out when she was in tombstone, and she left him. and that is the first story that josephine did not want you to know, that she had been in tombstone living as mrs. behan. the other thing she didn't want you to know has to do with the woman on the left hand side here. .. >> have nothing on the two rival newspapers in tombstone which were just ma nikely against each

other. and the deepest rivalry was between wyatt and johnny behan. so johnny had the job that wyatt wanted, the sheriff of the county, which was extremely lucrative because he was also the tax collector that came with being sheriff. even thou josephine had already left him, that didn't mean he wanted wyatt to have her. when we think about the gunfight at the o.k. corral, there are political reasons leading up to the gunfight. the lawmen and the mining interests against the cowboys and the ranchers, that's all true. but what's also true is that josephine marcus had a lover on both sides, because wyatt one side and johnny on the other.

so this was also a love triangle. i don't imagine any of you have seen any of the movies about tombstone? yeah, i guess you've probably seen one or two. so you know that on october 26, 1881, tombstone erupted in a hail of bullets in the middle of the day. the gunfight at the o.k. corral is the most famous gunfight in american history, which is sort of an odd distinction. i have a google alert on o.k. corral, and there's not a single day that goes by that there isn't some reference to the o.k. corral. and sometimes it's as predictable as yesterday's vote on gun control, sometimes it's the o.k. corral used as a metaphor for confrontation. 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 and see any of the rather cheesy reenactments -- [laughter] you see what a small place it really was and how shocking it must have been for this, you know, gunfight to happen in the middle of the day. so after, after the gunfight which resulted in three of the cowboys being killed, opinion was sharply divided as to whether wyatt and his brothers and doc holiday were, you know, innocent or guilty. there was a tremendous amount of legal maneuvering. and wyatt was legally acquitted, but the story didn't end there because the cowboys sought revenge. one of wyatt's brothers, virgil, was shot and maimed. another one of his brothers, morgan, was shot dead many front of wyatt's eyes. johnny behan was trying to arrest wyatt. but at that point wyatt earp declared he had had enough of the law.

from then on he was about justice rather than law. and he embarked on what has been described as a homicidal rage otherwise known as the venn vena ride in which he sought revenge against the people who had shot his brothers. but what was he going to do about the women? so, um, so maddie earp has been living with him at this point for several years, and before wyatt goes off on the vendetta ride, he sends maddie home to his parents. i actually think this was the most cowardly thing wyatt earp ever did, because he sent her off without a word of good-bye, presumably said he would be picking her up, but he never saw her again. josephine went home to her parents, and so you had these two women waiting for wyoming -- wyatt. he never saw maddie, as i said, but he did come in 1882 after the vendetta ride to pick up josephine. i always think about that scene,

you know, henry and sophia marcus, um, an immigrant family meeting wyatt earp and 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. and so josephine's parents did not lock the door and not let her out, not that it would have made any difference because the keystone of josephine's character was this spirit of adventure, this sense of romance. and so before her parents knew what was happening, she was, she was out the door. so the gunfight was only a tiny piece of wyatt and josephine's life. they were together for the next almost 50 years. they never married as far as i can tell.

maddie blalock died in 1888, and that story had a terribly tragic ending, because she figured out -- finally -- that wyatt earp was not coming back for her. how uncomfortable it must have been living with her, you know, sort of in-laws. she was not a woman who had any particular education or training, and so when she left his parents' house, she had no particular means of support. she became a prostitute, 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 most feared for the rest of her life. she didn't want anyone to know that wyatt had left maddie for josephine and that maddie had come to such a sad end. so they went on to this

extraordinary lifetime adventure, but josephine was always hearing the footsteps of tombstone behind her, always fearing exposure. and i did visit many of the places that they had been, but with apologies to san diego and cure delean 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 especiallyhe adventures in nome, alaska. anybody ever been to nome? no. okay. oh, one person. wonderful. so nome is almost as far north of seattle as seattle is west of new york. nome is really, really way up there. and, um, and nome played an extraordinarily interesting part in the story of the alaska gold. and 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 vying to be 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 e rahs us the braynard. so erastus was a marketing and public relations genius. and he felt that this was an incredibly important turning point for seattle. and he was going to do everything he could to insure that seattle appeared to be the gateway to alaska. one of the things he did was reach out to all the business people he could and the employees of those businesses to have them write to their hometown newspapers to say, oh, we've got everything going on here about alaska. and they did. and this was all unpaid media.

so it was part of what positioned alaska so very well. but en the time the klondike strikes were maturing, let's say 1897 or so, when the first big steamers come into seattle with tons of gold, by then seattle had plowed a tremendous amount of money back into infrastructure to build the ports and railroads and assay offices that would truly make seattle a center for alaska. so when you got off the boat, you saw the fruits of braynard's work. seattle was nome-crazy. so there was a cape nome information center as soon as you get off the steamers, there were nome -- ads for nome underwear, nome tents, nome medicine. my favorite one was something called reed's blizzard defier face protecter which promised

that where your nose is long or short, wide or narrow, inclined to be roman, the wearer can see, hear, breathe, talk, smoke, sweat, chew or ec peck rate just as well with it on or off. [laughter] so for three years -- can't you just imagine it? there's actually a picture in the original ad. so for three years josephine spent her winters in 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. so summer of 1900, the summer of 1900 nome was the center of the world. and the best way to get there was from seattle. so this is a picture of the stampede along the seattle waterfront massing to get to nome. and it wasn't only people, but the holds of the ships that went were filled with tons of

merchandise, hole cities that were collapsed -- whole cities that were collapsed and then intended to to be reassembled wn they got to nome. theaters that were struck down into little pieces and restaurants and hotels, sort of a city in a box. the earps went in may 1900. it was a little hard to get there because there was no natural port in nome, so once you got off the boats, you had to get on these other little boats, and big paul bunyan kind of guys would come out, and the women would climb on the backs of these men and then be carried out to the shore. so that's me in nome. and what i'm trying to show you there is what was so unusual about the gold strike in nome was that the gold was not under the ground as it usually is and requires a great deal of capital

investment and equipment to find it, the gold in nome was right on the surface, right on the sand of the public beaches nome. so you could go out just with a little pan and go like this, and gold nuggets would appear. it was like magic. and so for the summer of 1900, this was absolutely the place to be. josephine was there with her niece. i just recently got this pick cur from josephine's -- picture from jost teach's great, great, great grand nephew, and that's a picture of josephine's niece who was in nome the summer she was there. josephine absolutely loved the excitement of nome, he 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 that's what -- those are the stories that the niece, the niece

brought home. but regardless of she wheth 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 about a million dollars -- mostly not from gold, in fact, almost none of it was from gold. most of it was from what earp called mining the miners. that is, you know, saloon keeping and prostitution. so in the years that followed, they probably could have lived on their money from alaska for the rest of their life if they were careful, but careful was not a word that was really in their, in their vocabulary. so they invested in various things, but they were not, they were not great investors. i don't really think that josephine orwy ever particularly cared about money. they really cared much more about adventure and following

their own inclinations. they spent most of their time in a camp near what is now the town of earp, california. i was out there a couple of months ago. it's, i think, quite unchanged from their time. very remote. [laughter] was that funny? [laughter] and el of creosote in the air. i think it speaks to the contradictions in jost teach's character. there was a part of her that loved nice hotels and clean sheets and nice cloapts and jewelry, but there was another part of her that loved living out in the desert and sleeping under the stars. she was not a particularly religious person. she had a sort of indifferent attitude towards religioning in general and -- religion in general and judaism in particular. she was sort of a pastist, so nature seemed to be the most important thing to her, and they were quite happy, i think, in

those years in the desert. but josephine feared those footsteps from tombstone, because there were always riders who were interested -- writers who were interested in wyatt earp's story and in what had happened to them at the gunfight at the o.k. corral. finish and america was changing dramatically. all the things that had been legal in the frontier -- gambling, prostitution, common law marriage -- all of these things that had once been quite acceptable were now downright illegal. and prohibition was the law of the land. so things were changing. and our heroine and hero were getting a lot older. you can see that in place of the beautiful and saucy, adventure's josephine marcus is sort of this portly old lady, wyatt kept that sort of aristocratic rook that

he always had. they outlived almost everybody they had known in tombstone, some of whom became respectable pillars of their community. sid growman was a very good friend of theirs. he game drawman of drawman's theater in l. a.. wilson meissner was a famous playwright. john plum was the first u.s. postmaster of alaska. bat masterson became a sports writer. these were all very well established people. tex ri ard was the person who was the most famous promoter, sports promoter of his time and founded madison square garden. wyatt and josephine didn't change a whole lot while america changed tremendously around them. they had a couple of frontiers left, and one of them was hollywood. and the original sign was not

hollywood, but hollywoodland. this was a real estate development when this picture was taken which was 1923. and josephine realized immediately that as the person who was most involved in sculpting the wyatt earp legend, that the add haven't of movies was going -- the advent of movies was going to be very important to them. and, in fact, many of the early hollywood films were what they called horse operas. and the actors of the time were fascinated that many of the legends were still walking around. and so -- oh, we're dead again. oh, darn. and i really like the next picture. okay. so i'm going to ask for help om elliot, and -- or george as i called you before. so william s. hart was a very close friend of josephine's and wyatt's.

as was tom mix who was known as the king ofcowboys. but josep problem was that the reporters, the screen writers kept sniffing around tombstone, and she didn't always like what they were saying. so if they wrote something that she didn't like, then she would call up the reporter and browbeat the reporter. if the reporter went ahead and printed what she didn't like, then she would call the editor, or she would call william rappful to her -- randolph hearst and say, well, your father was a good friend of wyatt earp's, how could you do this to us? and she would demand a retraction. and sometimes she would get it so josephine had a very modern sense of celebrity. she would storm a movie set and demand that they would stop production on a movie that she didn't like. so i think, i think josephine had a really well developed

sense of how you, how you tell a story. and the one she wanted to tell about wyatt was, as she would put it, a nice, clean story. she kept repeating that, a nice, clean story. she wanted you to think about wyatt earp as the guy with the white hat and forget all the other stories, the notorious gunslinger, you know, put him away. when the bad news began piling up much faster than she could stop it, she met a, an enterprising press agent and writer named stuart lake. stuart lake had contacted them, he wanted to write a biography of josephine earp. and josephine agreed to, agreed to do it. and josephine had a lot of trouble with stuart lake, but in the end he, too, agreed to play by josephine's rules. and there's only one mention of josephine in the very famous

1929 biography of wyatt earp called frontier marshal. it's kind of a sappy moment at the end of of book. oh, look, there's william s. hart. will it go down one more? and there you'll see tom mix, yes, tom mix, king of the cowboys. this is like living my life of in slow motion. tab will do it? and there's stuart lake. okay. so, um, so josephine found her calling. her calling was the making of the legend of wyatt earp. george bernard shaw has this, has this famous saying, um, if you can't get rid of the skeletons in your closet, you'd better make them dance. and that really is what josephine did. so for a while those skeletons were dancing, and all was well. wyatt earp died in 1929.

he was 80 years old. he had outlived pretty much all of his, all of his peers. and his funeral was covered as a national news event. there's william s. hart and tom mix again together with play wright william, wilson meissner and some others. this was very much treated as the passing of the old west. and it was the dark days of the depression by now. josephine had a pretty good deal from the lake biography. she also had an oil well that she and wyatt had signed over to her sister, her younger sister who was her best friend. but then her sister died. now wyatt had died, her sister died, that subsidy from the oil well was taken away by her niece who decided she didn't need to share with her aunt, and josephine was getting older, lonelier. those stories about tombstone never ended, and how was she

going to protect the legend of wyatt earp? voila. a sudden, a sudden, new player enters the picture, and that is lincoln ellsworth who was the american explorer of antarctica. and he approached josephine with the idea of naming his boat, which was going to go to antarctica, after wyatt earp. and he created a little shrine on the ship with eyeglasses that josephine gave him and a rifle and all of these things. and teen thought this was a -- josephine thought this was a great idea. it's hard to imagine now, but it was sort of like naming the space shuttle after wyatt earp. i tracked the stories in "the new york times," there were hundreds of them. and, basically, wyatt earp's fame was in the newspapers at least once a month for six years in the 1930s. so take a look at the front page

of "the new york times," january 22, 1936. this is the same day that edward viii is proclaimed the king of england, and there over on the left-hand column is a story about lincoln ellsworth who had been lost at sea, and -- whoops. oh, i don't know how i'm going to get back to that. oh, there we go. and he's reporting aboard the motor ship, the wyatt earp. so this, once again, polished up wyatt earp's reputation and suddenly he was yoked to the greatest story of adventure in the united states in the 19 1930s. so i think josephine was heartened and emboldened by the lincol ellsworth sensation and thought maybe it was time to tell her story. she met some distant earp relatives. she's shown here with that family. there's josephine over on the left. she's lost a lot of weight here,

and she kind of looks like an italian widow with her black and her white here. when she would go out, um, when she was ready to go out, she would say let me just polish up the old furniture, and then she would put on her powder. i mean, she was vain but self-depracating at the same time. so she move inside with them and work -- moved in with them and worked on this biography, and they really liked her a lot. and together they went back to tombstone. can you imagine? this was josephine's first trip back to tombstone since 1882. and they stopped on the way in the town near where their camp had been which had now been renamed in honor of wyatt earp. but the closer that this family got to the real story, the more nervous josephine became. they really wanted to tell the truth. they were doing a lot of research on josephine's story,

and these two skeletons in josephine's closet -- the fact that she had been mrs. behan and the death of maddie earp -- weighed on her tremendously. and so she became more and more nervous and eventually put a stop to the project completely, made them burn the manuscript, watched them burn the manuscript and uttered a curse over it, over anyone who would tell her story. this is usually the part where people begin moving away from me. [laughter] but there's a statute of limitations. i've definitely decided there's a statute of limitations. so the memoir was not destroyed. there was another copy of it, and i had the privilege of working with that. it's in the ford county his to historical society archives in dodge city, kansas. but the project itself during josephine's lifetime fell apart completely.

and from there on in, it was pretty much downhill for josephine's life and her health and her mind. once that subsidy stopped, she was poorer and poorer. any money there was from alaska was long gone. and be she took to stalking -- and she took to stalking friends including one of the men who had been closest to wyatt and to her, a fellow named john flood. and he used the back of a calendar to record her visits like this one on sunday, april 18th, 1943, when she put her fist through his screen door and tried to get in. i'll get back at you good and hard. so he kept track of her movements. december 19th, 1944, she dies. there's a tiny little article in the los angeles times that says, you know, widow of famed lawman wyatt earp is dead. she was penniless, in fact, she

was in debt. sidney grauman paid for her funeral, and then she was cremated as wyatt had been. and she was buried by her nieces in that same cemetery outside of san francisco, and she was buried next to her mother, her brother, her father and, of course, next to wyatt. so, um, so that's our story of this woman of the west. i had a tremendous amount of fun researching it and writing it, and i hope you enjoy it too. to my mind, there is no more american story than the story of the frontier and the gunfight and wyatt earp which sunk such deep roots into our american psyche. but you can't understand any of that without putting the women

back in the picture. and to my mind, there's no more interesting woman to put back in the picture than josephine marcus earp. so thank you very much for listening to her story, and thank you, seattle. [applause] >> i just want to remind anyone that if you have any questions, you can come down to this mic so we can get it on the recording. we have roughly 20 minutes for questions. thank you. >> i think he wants you to come to the mic. >> yeah. if you have a question, you can come to the microphone. thank you. >> hi. you said that the manuscript had been burned. she had burned it and, you know, said it was it was terrible. but then you went on to say that there was a copy of it in dodge

city? >> yes. >> archives. and i wondered how -- >> how could that be? >> yeah, yeah. >> um, the sisters who were working on it, um, had their own copies. and so they burned one copy of it. but they had devoted years to this project. so they weren't going to give up on it quite so easily. and so they kept this other copy, and that's the one that's in dodge city. and there were, there were several other attempts to publish that because in 1955 when the television show came out, how many of you could seem the theme song? i won't make you sing it, but you do know it, right? brave, courageous and bold. so when all the publicity came out about the television show, it eventually led to the feoff you of maaed -- nephew of maddie

blalock earp remembering something about a relationship between his aunt and wyatt earp, and that's when the story of maddie blalock came out. so it didn't come out until 11 years after josephine died. and the sisters who had written her memoir, who had worked on that memoir with josephine were not surprised. they had always suspected that there was a story like that, and that's why josephine had been so nervous. ..

then bear any resemblance to truth. it's a terrible and very themed tv movie with marie osmond -- i swear. i we should never have been. so this is just as six weeks, so who knows what the future was told. i certainly would like to see the full story told. in particular, i am deeply interested in the alaska part of the life, which is so unusual that no 1900 was such an important place in the world is

hard for us to imagine, but it really was. >> do you think josephine has been part of the reason for the okay corral? >> absolutely. >> said there was a rivalry for her? the back to the two-man. i would say is the only reason, but it's part of the picture. i don't seek unchain see how you could talk about the relationship between wyatt earp and john ebm without an sinead ever romantically involved with the same woman. that wanted to soberly do about it. it wasn't an era in which that sort of gossip take it to the newspapers.

unless you were a vice versa, they didn't write about the affairs, so it shouldn't surprise us that didn't come out in the quest for the news reports. they were the began to instead of pesci spent the rest of the man who would become the most bonhomme on it in american history. you've got to put back together and say something happened in tombstone. a lot of the people who work on wider history and tombstone history are male, which probably won't surprise any of you. since i'd just like to funny discussions like one fellow who is actually very help both of me, who assured me he knew what wyatt earp was doing every single day in the fall of 1881

at the time of the gunfight and he couldn't possibly have had time for an affair. [laughter] i think the women are laughing harder than the man. it's the most ridiculous thing i've ever heard. have a favorite josephine heard i think the two enterprising, and i see young people could manage to find a place in the city of tombstone to have a romantic conclusion at the time. one wire. >> so you mention nothing about children. was there anything in the memoirs about choices? >> yes. josephine had at least one, probably two miscarriages. they loves children.

they were very close to wife's family and for young children there. josephine was very close to her nieces. even though she had run away from home, she remained close to her family for the rest of her life. he loves little kids. so i think they would've had children had they been able to. but for whatever reason, they were not able to. so it's interesting, all of weitz brothers, i think only if half-brother culminate in how children. the rest of the brothers did not. virgil actually had a child. he didn't know he had a child. it was before he went on to the civil war. he later was put in contact with her and that the only exception. the rest of them did not have children. it was at one time a very large family affair.

that one part of it for wyatt earp's parents really died out almost completely. thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> for more information, visit the author's website, kirchner.org. >> knowing about you and the covenant house it was a no-brainer, but he felt privileged to write the foreword for it because it gave me chance to recognize the fact my dad but for the kindness of others would've been homeless himself. he was born to a single mother, very poor. my father now exaggerates even more dramatically. he was not poor. it was an extraordinary

community that was very intact and watchful of the children of my father was basically taken by another family, the pilgrims who threw extraordinary thoughts kept my father on nature check to refer word. people in the community for dollar bills together to help them afford his first semester's tuition so college became a reality for him. all these things that caught the conspiracy of love have happened that made me who i am today really starts with the young people. what bothers me is the talk so dramatically in such a negative fashion about the adults who fill our prisons. we don't realize every one of those adults was a child whom he could have done more for cheaper than a lot of the challenges they face as an adult. it's easier to raise strong

children then he'll broken then. so i just feel a real urgency in america that we do not prioritize our children as much as we should. >> tina has been fainter in the book to her that her first parties to forward which is lovely because they worked for two and a half years on the book. but it's so moving because it's so from the heart. your engaged with folks about what this that challenges them why you're doing this. >> my staff teases me. i was up late with micro from twitter. [laughter] it was sunday night before is going to bed i was just going back and forth. for those who have few social media, people just think they're frankly. this is an intellectual question about the role of government and

said government should not provide for the nutrition of children. it struck a chord to me because i really don't think people think about what that would mean that we don't realize is that in a society if we make small amounts of investments early, we won't have to make a big investment late and we all intact are deeply invested because the more successful the children are, the more our economy grows, professors, entrepreneurs, you name it. the greatest natural resource we have in america is our children, they get with even under cultivated. long story short, the senate said this and i go back at her and she goes back to me and i say finally, why don't we see what it's like to live on food stamps or the snap program. so i went to bed, thinking no big deal and i woke up and it

was a big story. so i called my staff and said guess what i'm doing. but it was a powerful thing because for one of 14 cities in america that is a food policy director. we had already done a lot of work trying to expand affordable healthy options. the more attachmate group policy director he said this is a great and if we could not only raise the levels of compassionate understanding and dispel bad stereotypes about snape and families on snape and focus them instead on the reality of that, but also the changes we could make at a local level to empower -- to address food insecurity, to expand our healthy options. that's really what we are doing this week. today i had a very poignant

moment where we also have to think of our society as a whole. i had a moment today when i had security guards in my office and we were talking with them because these are guys come as some of them making $7 change an hour. many of them working overtime to make more money, but still qualify for programs like snape. so here we are allowing many of our employees, especially behind the curtains. that is the one curtain off here. [laughter] it's like a 711, the line across the magazines. say you guys should picture book on the sex i/o. >> it was so much better. >> we should've called it 50 shades of homelessness. >> it would've sold a lot better. >> you guys have such dirty mind. get back to the subject at hand.

but the testimonies here telling us because you live in a society where here are frontline first responders. they talk about intervening in a decried. one of the buildings targeted by people who a terrorist contempts and there on the front lines of this and yet we can only pay them $7 change in our and they have no benefit, no retirement security. one guy worked for 10 years with no health care. that's not the america i think of. so i'm really hoping this week to finish the overly long answer is to really bring more attention to these problems. right now, this session congress is debating cuts in the snap program and in this time for posterity, we can't cut things that ultimately provide long-term benefits, entitlements that are investment in us and our society we should begin to prioritize the same federally as

well as actions local. >> you are speaking in your forward about the small actions people to help your father. we talk in the book quite a bit about the small actions people take that can help homeless young people. can you talk about how that helps the city clerk's >> first of all of conversations with people who have made it from famous people like tyler perry, who was homeless, living in a car to people i know throughout my community have gotten broken drug addictions, who have dealt with brutally hates you because they came out at a young age. all these stories. it's amazing to me that everybody, including tyler perry, have one small act of kindness as a difference maker for them.

because it shows that the biggest thing we do any day could be a small act of kindness to someone else. the vulnerability and fragility really get personal in cities like ours in new york and newark, new jersey and how it doesn't take that much after to be there for our kids.

>> next on booktv, les leopold talks about the hidden world of hedge funds and hedge fund managers and argues they are bad for our economy. this is about an hour of