Along the Way

ALONG THE WAY Searching the Bay Area for the Grave of Wyatt Earp

Years ago I'd heard or read that Wyatt Earp is buried in Colma near San Francisco, a bit of provocative trivia whose truth I'd never been sure of. One day a while back, I decided to check it out. As a boy, I watched a celluloid Wyatt Earp gun down and pistol-whip and give barefisted beatings to legions of outlaws and romance plenty of cleareyed frontier beauties in gingham dresses. Wyatt Earp. The name still stirs up a chill of the old childhood wonderment.

Which is why after all these years, I found myself on my way to Colma, a necropolis a few miles south of San Francisco. My friend and I drove out past the foggy suburb of Pacifica, past the Serramonte shopping center, and came to Colma, where several cemeteries are lined up along both sides of El Camino Real, many catering to specific religious or ethnic groups: Japanese, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Greeks, and others. We were advised to try the Hills of Eternity cemetery. Pulling up to the entrance, we read the sign: HILLS OF ETERNITY / PORTALS OF ETERNITY / GARDENS OF ETERNITY / TEMPLE SHERITH ISRAEL. I was surprised by the realization that it was an exclusively Jewish cemetery.

We got out of the car and were quickly noticed by an old-timer wearing a baseballstyle cap with Hills of Eternity printed on it. "You boys looking for Wyatt Earp?" We told him we were, and he gave us directions to the grave about a hundred yards directly ahead of us up the slope. He introduced himself as the foreman. "Do many people come out here looking for Wyatt?" I asked. "Oh, yes, five or six a week," he said. "He's the most visited man in Colma." We walked up the hill past the green plots where headstones and monuments of every size are neatly ranked in rows. We found the spot. His name caught my eye on one of three flat metal plaques set into cement and sharing the same space, these so small and modest among the surrounding headstones and monuments as to seem almost inconspicuous. WYATT EARP 1848-1929 And with him: JOSEPHINE EARP 1864-1944 And sharing the same plot: MAX WEISS 1870-1947 Wyatt Earp is buried in a Jewish cemetery, surrounded by stone doves, Stars of David, and menorahs. I had never given any thought to his ethnic background but now found myself wondering if Earp is a Jewish name or was his wife Jewish? And who was Max Weiss? Sadly, nearby some of the monuments had been pushed over and have sunken into the ground. On our way out, the foreman told us that this was the work of anti-Semites. Later, thinking about the pillaged monuments, I had a vision of some nocturnal vandals doing this dirty work among the stones predictably marked with names like Goldberg, Weinstein, and the like, then suddenly coming upon the moonlight-illuminated handle of... WYATT EARP! One imagines Wyatt stopping these outlaws in their tracks. The actors who played Wyatt Earp were almost invariably clean-shaven, an exception being Henry Fonda, whose moustache was, however, a debonair Hollywood type rather than the kind whose tips drooped far out past his cheeks like the real Wyatt's. One wonders what those last 30 years must have been like for a man who saw the frontier close, gave up his guns and horses, and became part of a world in which the changes being made were vast and total, seeing the coming of motion pictures, airplanes, automobiles, telephones, radio, electric lights, machine guns, battleships, comic strips, neon signs, and zippers. Whatever the truth was about Wyatt Earp's life as a lawman and the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, the romance and the legend endure. As for the real Wyatt Earp, he lies in the earth a short piece from a modern shopping mall far away from drifting tumbleweeds or howling coyotes, and there is no epitaph on his grave, nothing so elegant as some lines from a favorite poem of mine, "The Ballad of William Sycamore," by Stephen Vincent Benet: Go play with your towns You have built of blocks, The towns where you Would have bound me! I sleep in my earth Like a tired fox, And my buffalo Have found me.