The gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted less than a minute. During that time about thirty shots were fired, three men were killed, and the legend of an obscure frontier gambler and part-time law officer, Wyatt Earp, was born. The fight took place on October 26, 1881, at Tombstone, a mining town in the Arizona territory. At the time of the famous gunfight, Tombstone boasted more than one hundred saloons, fourteen gambling halls, three newspapers, countless brothels, one bowling alley, and an ice cream parlor. Cowboys who worked the surrounding plains, along with miners who worked the silver claims, came to Tombstone to spend their money on alcohol, gambling, and women.
Virgil Earp was the town’s marshal and a deputy U.S. marshal for the region. By all accounts, he tried to uphold the law and sided with the townspeople. The county sheriff (a law officer with similar authority, but for the surrounding area rather than the town) was John Behan. Behan was more inclined to side with the cowboys, a loose group of which Ike Clanton was a leader. As cattle rustling went unchecked, along with a series of stagecoach robberies, Virgil Earp believed Behan was not doing his job, so he intended to run for county sheriff himself. When Earp had to leave town he would often deputize his brothers, Morgan and Wyatt, to look after matters. The rivalry between the two groups was not helped by the fact that Wyatt Earp, although married, had recently begun a relationship with Behan’s de facto wife, Josephine Marcus.
On September 8, 1881, seven weeks before the famous gunfight, the stagecoach from Bisbee was robbed and Virgil Earp arrested two of Clanton’s friends. In the following weeks, threats, usually made under the influence of alcohol, were exchanged. Siding with the Earps during these verbal confrontations, was John Henry “Doc” Holliday, a former dentist turned gambler and gunman.
Matters came to a head on the evening of October 25, when Clanton and Tom McLaury rode into town wearing their guns. A local ordinance required everyone except peace officers to check their guns at designated locations on the city’s outskirts. Clanton had a noisy argument with Holliday that evening, then settled down in a saloon to pass the night drinking and gambling. The next morning Virgil Earp pistol-whipped Clanton and disarmed him. A short while later, Wyatt Earp did the same to McLaury. Rather than go away and sleep off their intoxication, Clanton and McLaury gathered their kin and began making noisy threats against the Earps. Alarmed citizens saw the cowboys congregate, carrying guns, on Fremont Street. Clanton, still drunk, was proclaiming loudly how he was going to kill all the Earps. Everything was set for the showdown.
Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp were joined by Doc Holliday, and the four men walked west along Fremont Street to where the cowboys had been last reported. The three Earps carried a revolver either in their hand, pocket, or jammed into their trouser belt. Doc Holliday, the only experienced gunfighter in the group, carried a revolver in a holster on his belt and a shotgun concealed under his overcoat. By whatever means the Earps carried their pistols, it was certainly not in belt-mounted holsters. Part way along Fremont Street, Behan rushed forward and told the Earps and Holliday that there was no need for a gunfight. Wyatt Earp later testified in court that:
I heard him [Behan] say to Virgil Earp, “For God’s sake, don’t go down there, you will get murdered!” Virgil Earp replied, “I am going to disarm them.” He, Virgil, being in the lead. When I and Morgan came up to Behan he said, “I have disarmed them.” When he said this, I took my pistol, which I had in my hand, under my coat, and put it in my overcoat pocket. Behan then passed up the street, and we walked on down.1
The confrontation happened at approximately 3:00 P.M. Clanton’s gang was standing on Fremont Street, in front of a photographic studio owned by Camillus Fly. (The O.K. Corral was a block away on Allen Street. A laneway from the rear of the corral led to Fremont Street.) Morgan, Virgil, and Wyatt Earp, along with Doc Holliday, faced Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne. The two groups were standing about six feet apart. History is contradictory as to what, exactly, was said and who fired first. Virgil Earp called on the men to throw up their hands and be disarmed. Profanities were exchanged and someone started shooting. Thirty seconds later Frank and Tom McLaury, along with Billy Clanton, were either dead or dying. Ike Clanton, who had been the most vocal in his threats, hightailed it down the lane, past the famous corral, and didn’t stop running until he was well clear of Tombstone’s city limits. Billy Claiborne wasn’t far behind him. Doc Holliday was grazed on the hip by a bullet. Virgil was shot through the calf, and Morgan was shot in the shoulder blade. Wyatt was unhurt.
At the end of the fight, Sheriff Behan emerged to arrest the Earps and Holliday for murder. After a monthlong trial they were found not guilty. What followed was known as the Earp Vendetta as cowboys tried to kill the Earp brothers. Virgil Earp was shot two months after the gunfight and lost the use of one arm. He eventually died of pneumonia in 1905. Morgan Earp was shot in the back and killed while playing billiards in 1882. Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis in 1887. Of the two men who ran from the fight, Claiborne was killed in a gunfight a year later, while Clanton was shot dead stealing cattle in 1887.
Wyatt Earp outlived them all. He took up with Josephine Marcus, the former partner of Sheriff Behan. For the next forty-six years they traveled together, with Josephine becoming a chronic gambler and Wyatt’s fortunes rising and falling as he attempted to make a living through mining, gambling, or occasionally working as a peace officer.
The decorative leather gun belts, which combine cartridge belts and smooth “quick-draw” holsters tied to the thighs and adorned with ornaments, are the stuff of Hollywood. Peace officers, cowboys, and workers in the Old West saw their firearms as tools. Holsters for pistols were separate to cartridge belts and sometimes made with a loop or with slits so they could be attached to a belt or strap. It was common practice to wear an ammunition belt around the waist, yet carry a pistol tucked into the trousers or loose in a pocket. Wyatt Earp was casual about his firearms. Once, in 1900, when he had followed the gold rush to Alaska, he checked a pistol into the marshal’s office at Juneau, and never bothered to retrieve it. (The pistol is on display at the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau.) He also wore a cartridge belt, loaded with ammunition, but without a gun holster. When describing how, in March 1882, he was trying to get on his horse during a gunfight he said:
When I tried to get astride I found that it [the cartridge belt] had fallen down over my thighs, keeping my legs together. While I was perched thus, trying to pull my belt higher with one hand, the horn of the saddle was shot off.
The San Francisco Examiner, which carried the report, then went on to describe how Earp, “. . . saved himself and at the same time gave a jerk at the cartridge belt. Then he leapt in the saddle and got away.”2
Sometime around 1910, Wyatt and Josephine settled in California. Wyatt continued to work as a freelance peace officer, but had as many encounters on the wrong side of the law as on the right. He ran card games, was often arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and tried to make various mining claims return a dividend. Josephine, by this time, was a hopeless gambling addict.
Wyatt Earp might have passed into oblivion, along with the gunfight that is synonymous with his name, were it not for novelist Stuart N. Lake.1 During the 1920s, Lake interviewed and wrote about another Old West gunfighter, William “Bat” Masterson, who continually spoke about the bravest man he ever knew, Wyatt Earp. Wanting to record as much western folklore as he could, Lake sought out Earp and asked to write his biography. Earp agreed and Lake conducted a series of interviews.
Wyatt Earp died peacefully at his home on January 13, 1929. Josephine did not attend the funeral. After forty-six years together, during which Wyatt drank and Josephine gambled, the two were barely on speaking terms. Nor did either of them have any money.
Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal was published in October 1931, when the Nautilus was waiting to be scuttled off Bergen, and Ellsworth was considering flying across Antarctica. Lake’s biography glorified not only Earp, but also the Old West in a way that no one had glorified it before—steely-eyed gunfighters facing down desperados, the roaring boom towns that stood ready for carousers at the end of the cattle trails, the wickedness of the gambling halls. And in the middle of it all stood Wyatt Earp, larger than life, the bravest man who ever lived. It was largely escapist fiction, but the world in the grip of the Great Depression lapped it up. Here, in the Old West, was America’s golden age. Here, in Lake’s book, was a new American mythology.
And for Lincoln Ellsworth, here in Wyatt Earp was a new hero. He immediately became an enamored fan, later writing:
I am frankly a hero-worshipper and sentimentalist. For years I have made almost a cult of the memory of Wyatt Earp. I have spent much time collecting every souvenir and trinket I could find associated with that unbelievably brave man.3
While most of the world worried about where its next meal was coming from, Ellsworth dreamt of glory, gunfights, and standing side by side with the man who tamed the West. For the sensitive and solitary Ellsworth, Earp was everything he wanted to be. He summed up his admiration by writing:
What appeals to me most about the career of Wyatt Earp was his domination over men . . . On the buffalo range, in cow towns, in Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone he altered the course of Western history by his domination over men and events . . . Wyatt Earp has done more for me than any other figure who ever lived.4
Ellsworth always sought objects he could possess in the vain hope that somehow the strength or power of their previous owner would be transferred to him. So immediately after he read Simon Lake’s book he wanted something that had been owned by Wyatt Earp. He visited Josephine at her home in California and found her eager to sell her husband’s artifacts.2 The first things Ellsworth purchased were a cartridge belt and Earp’s wedding ring. Had the belt been worn at the gunfight at the O.K. Corral when Earp had put his pistol in his overcoat pocket? Was it the same cartridge belt that slipped around his legs when he attempted to mount his horse while being shot at? No one knows. In fact, if Wyatt Earp could be interviewed from beyond the grave, it’s doubtful he would know, such was his casual attitude to guns and their accessories. But the belt was certainly owned by Josephine and most likely by Earp, and it served to embolden Ellsworth.
Armed with new symbols of strength and manly vitality, Ellsworth felt ready to stride back into the public glare. He could walk tall and proud again, like the Earps marching down Fremont Street, ready to challenge anyone who stood in his way. And, in Sir Hubert Wilkins, destiny had delivered his Doc Holliday.
Following the unsuccessful voyage of the Nautilus, Wilkins’s ambitions were still firmly focused on getting another submarine and returning to the Arctic. But when Ellsworth asked him to organize an expedition to cross Antarctica, Wilkins was in no position to refuse. Whether or not he legally owed Ellsworth money, Wilkins certainly felt he owed him a moral debt for sponsoring the Nautilus. Plus Wilkins had no money and was finding it difficult, during the Depression, to get crowds to pay to hear him speak and show his films. Wilkins agreed to help Ellsworth fly across Antarctica and set his mind to accomplishing the task.
Wilkins had previously traveled to Antarctica four times, with a view to either crossing it in an airplane, or exploring its interior from the air. On the first expedition, in 1920, Wilkins had learned the importance of having the whalers on his side and using their established bases whenever possible. On his second trip south, aboard Quest with Sir Ernest Shackleton, the most important lesson Wilkins had learned was to have a sturdy ship, capable of a long voyage through stormy seas. Quest had been totally unsuitable. On the Wilkins-Hearst Antarctic Expeditions, Wilkins’s two attempts to fly across the continent had been thwarted by the lack of a suitable flat surface from which to get a fully laden plane airborne. Both times Wilkins’s airplane was capable of flying 2,500 miles and both times the steep mountains, rocky ground, or thin bay ice had reduced his flying to short distances.
But in 1928 and 1929, while Wilkins had been on the Graham Land side of Antarctica seeking a suitable flat runway, Richard Byrd had been on the Ross Sea side, repeatedly getting his large three-engine planes airborne from the ice shelf. Although Wilkins had never seen the shelf, it seemed a safe bet to provide a flat runway. He also knew that airplane design had progressed in the five years since his Lockheed Vega had been built, and some were now capable of flying 4,000 miles without refueling.
A further consideration was the weather. Wilkins was aware that, because of the strong winter winds, the earliest he could get a plane airborne from either side of Antarctica was the middle of November, while getting a ship through the ice pack at the edge of the Ross Sea was difficult before December. Byrd, Amundsen, and Scott, on their expeditions, had only been able to set out for the South Pole earlier than December because they had spent the previous winter in Antarctica. But Wilkins had no intention of spending a winter. He wanted to go south, let Ellsworth fly across the continent, then return north as soon as possible, so he could concentrate on getting another submarine. A large expedition that established bases and wintered there was out of the question.
A bold plan began to form in Wilkins’s mind. A plan that, he believed, would get Ellsworth down to Antarctica, across it, then back north in one southern summer. Wilkins would take a ship, with a small crew, a pilot, and an airplane to Dunedin, New Zealand. Once Ellsworth came on board, the ship could then be sailed down to the Ross Ice Shelf in mid-December. Wilkins would not waste time establishing a base. Instead the crew would eat and sleep on the ship. The plane could be unloaded onto the flat ice of the shelf, Ellsworth and a pilot could take off, fly across the continent to the edge of the Weddell Sea, then without landing simply turn around and fly back. The total distance, if Ellsworth only flew as far as the edge of the Weddell Sea, would be 2,900 miles, while the flight time would be approximately twenty hours. At the completion of the crossing they could load the plane back on the ship and return north, arriving back in New Zealand in February, or March at the latest. Wilkins explained the plan to Ellsworth who, having no alternative, instructed him to get on with it.
Wilkins, first and foremost, needed a ship. He went to Norway where, after looking at various vessels, he settled on the Fanefjord. It had been built in 1919 as a fishing boat at a time when fishing in Norway required a stout vessel capable of withstanding crushing pack ice. It had a large hold in which to store a catch and Wilkins noted it could also store a small plane, if the wings were removed. The Fanefjord boasted a 350-brake horsepower, four-cylinder semidiesel engine, which was supplemented by sails. With a fuel capacity of one hundred tons of oil, while burning it at a rate of one and a half tons per day and traveling at seven knots, the Fanefjord had a range of around eleven thousand nautical miles. Wilkins felt it should do the job nicely, and cabled details of his proposed choice to Ellsworth, who told him to buy it. The price was 75,000 kroner (about US$15,000).
The Fanefjord was modified and its hull reinforced. Two-and-a-half-inch oak sheathing covered the forward part of the hull, with twelve-gauge galvanized iron covering the remainder. The hull was additionally sheathed in three-quarter-inch iron plating. All sturdy enough, it was hoped, to act as an icebreaker if necessary. The forward hatch was widened to facilitate the loading of a plane, additional tanks were added to hold another ten tons of oil, new masts and sails were fitted, along with new water tanks and a host of minor equipment upgrades.
For a plane Wilkins turned to Jack Northrop, the innovative designer of his successful Lockheed Vega. Northrop’s breakthrough design on the Vega had been the monocoque body. Rather than a frame over which a lighter material, such as canvas, was stretched, the Vega’s body provided strength from its shell. On the Vega, Northrop had achieved this strength by stressing sheets of plywood over concrete molds and fixing the panels together. Since designing the Vega, Northrop had left the Lockheed Company, formed the Northrop Corporation with Donald Douglas and replaced plywood with metal. His first plane with Douglas was the Northrop Alpha. It carried six passengers inside a sleek metal fuselage while the pilot sat at the rear in an open cockpit. Alphas went into service carrying passengers across America—something unheard of only a few years earlier. Northrop followed the Alpha with the Gamma, which was a streamlined, single-engine plane designed for high speeds over long distances. The first model was purchased by Frank Hawks, a noted pilot of the era, who immediately proved its efficiency by setting a record from Los Angeles to New York (over 2,400 miles) flying at an average speed of 180 mph. A pertinent feature of the Gamma was its low wing. Landing on snow, Wilkins reasoned, the wing could sit flat on the surface if the wheels were dug in, and therefore reduce the chance of the plane being lifted and blown away in a blizzard. Wilkins believed the Gamma would be the ideal plane for Ellsworth and ordered one. Northrop began building a second Gamma, the main difference from the first being that Ellsworth’s plane would be a dual cockpit model, so Ellsworth could sit behind the pilot.
For the pilot, Wilkins knew the best man for the job was Bernt Balchen, who had returned to America after flying Byrd to the South Pole in 1929. Balchen’s relationship with Byrd had become strained. “For a leader he is too prone to listen to gossip and flattery,”5 Balchen said. Balchen was fed up with Byrd’s mood swings; friendly one moment, aloof or angry the next. He didn’t believe Byrd had made it to the North Pole and thought the record of his 1926 flight was a hoax. Shortly after returning to America from Antarctica, Balchen had planned an around-the-world flight, but was unable to raise sponsorship. After that he got married, became an American citizen, and struggled to support his wife in a world in the grip of the Depression. In 1932 he found work teaching Amelia Earhart navigation and advanced flying skills. He modified a Lockheed Vega, then flew it and Earhart to Newfoundland, from where she flew the plane solo across the Atlantic. Then Balchen began looking for another opportunity.
On Wilkins’s recommendation, Balchen talked with Ellsworth, who explained plans were well underway for a flight across Antarctica. Balchen agreed to be the pilot if he was paid $800 a month plus his expenses, for the length of the expedition. For a successful flight across Antarctica he would receive a $14,700 bonus. It was a lucrative contract at a time when professionals, such as doctors, were earning $60 per week and production workers were lucky to manage $17.
Balchen traveled to California, met with Jack Northrop, and inspected the plane. When it was completed, in August 1932, Balchen flew it successfully from California to New York to test its fuel consumption. Ellsworth wired that he wanted it named Polar Star. At the completion of the test flights, the Polar Star was disassembled and crated for shipping. Balchen, his wife Emmy, their baby son, and the Polar Star sailed to Norway, where Balchen met with Wilkins and inspected the Fanefjord. He made small models of the plane and ship to see if the plane could be stored below decks. It could.
Meanwhile, Ellsworth had grown fond of his castle. After his first visit, he adopted the habit of vacationing there each year. In the northern summer of 1932, while Wilkins was having the Fanefjord modified and Balchen was testing the Polar Star, Ellsworth traveled to Lenzburg to “keep my rendezvous with the ghost of Frederick Barbarossa.”6 After a brief stay he aimlessly traveled to Paris where he booked a passage to New York, planning to “buckle down to the concrete job of organizing my expedition.”7 But before he sailed he changed his mind and, on a whim, decided to improve his photography. Ellsworth had carried a Leica 35mm camera for years, but was unhappy with his results. Perhaps, he thought, he should take lessons. Typically, Ellsworth didn’t want lessons from just anyone, or worse, to apply himself to time-consuming study and practice. As he often did when faced with a challenge, Ellsworth sought the best expert in the field and offered them money. So instead of returning to America, Ellsworth took a train to Zurich and introduced himself to a renowned pilot and photographer, Walter Mittelholzer who, for a fee, gave him lessons on how to use his simple camera.
While at Mittelholzer’s airfield, the fifty-two-year-old Ellsworth met Mary Louise Ulmer, a fellow American, twenty-five years his junior, who was taking flying lessons. Ulmer was the daughter of an industrialist, Jacob Ulmer (who had died in 1928) and Eldora, who was fulfilling her duty as the wealthy, idle socialite mother of a plain, awkward, and painfully shy daughter. Eldora was dragging her child around Europe in the hope of finding a suitable husband. When Ellsworth and Mary Louise met at Mittelholzer’s airfield, Eldora instantly knew she had hit the jackpot. Ellsworth was older, equally shy, and, she may have suspected from his bachelor status, gay. But he had two qualities that made him an ideal son-in-law: he was incredibly wealthy and he was well practiced in doing what he was told. Beekman Pool, who interviewed Mary Louise for his biography on Ellsworth, wrote that at the time of their meeting, “she was not pretty, but had verve.”8 Ellsworth invited mother and daughter to visit his castle and, ten days after they met, Ellsworth proposed marriage to Mary Louise. She accepted. In his autobiography, Ellsworth gave little hint as to why he chose to marry, explaining of the period:
I protracted my camera instructions for two weeks, greatly to my technical and domestic advantage. My Leica shots of the Antarctic mountains were as good as I could wish; and at the end of my two weeks in Zurich, I, a lone eagle for fifty-two years and almost a creature of the womanless parts of the Earth, was engaged to marry Mary Louise Ulmer.9
Having succeeded in her safari to the continent to hunt down a husband for her daughter, Eldora’s next task was to return to America to display the trophy. Any fleeting attention Ellsworth might have given to his polar expedition was redirected to surviving the less forgiving environment of a society wedding.