Josephine Sarah "Sadie" Earp (née Marcus; 1860 – December 19, 1944)^[1]was the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp, a famed Old West lawman andgambler. She met Wyatt in 1881 in the frontier boom town of Tombstone,Arizona Territory, when she was living with Johnny Behan, sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona.

Josephine was born in New York to a Prussian Jewish family; her father was a baker. They moved to San Francisco, where Josephine attended dance school as a girl. When her father had difficulty finding work, the family moved in with her older sister and brother-in-law in a working-class tenement. Josephine ran away, possibly as early as age 14, and traveled to Arizona, where she had an "adventure". Much of her life from about 1874 to 1880 is uncertain; she worked hard to keep this period of her life private, even threatening legal action against writers and movie producers. She may have arrived in Prescott, Arizona as early as 1874. There is some evidence that she lived in Prescott and Tip Top, Arizona Territory under the assumed name of Sadie Mansfield, and worked as a prostitute from 1874 to 1876, before becoming ill and returning to San Francisco. The name Sadie Mansfield was also recorded in Tombstone. Researchers have found that the two names share extremely similar characteristics and circumstances.

Later in life Josephine described her first years in Arizona as "a bad dream". What is known for certain is that she traveled to Tombstone using the name Josephine Marcus in October, 1880. She wrote that she met Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan when she was 17 and he was 33. He promised to marry her and she joined him in Tombstone. He reneged but persuaded her to stay. Behan was sympathetic to ranchers and certain outlaw Cowboys, who were at odds with Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp and his brothers, Wyatt and Morgan. Josephine left Behan in 1881, before the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, during which Wyatt and his brothers killed three Cowboys. She went to San Francisco in March 1882 and was joined that fall by Wyatt, with whom she remained in a common-law marriage for 46 years until his death.

Josephine and Wyatt moved throughout their life, from one boomtown to another, until they finally bought a cottage in theSonoran Desert town of Vidal, California on the Colorado River, where they spent the cooler seasons. In the summer they retreated to Los Angeles, where Wyatt struck up relationships with some of the early cowboy actors, including William S. Hartand Tom Mix. Josephine Earp and her relationship to Wyatt became known after amateur historian Glenn Boyer published his book, I Married Wyatt Earp, based on a manuscript allegedly written in part by her. Boyer's book was considered a factual memoir, and cited by scholars, studied in classrooms, and used as a source by filmmakers for 32 years. In 1998, reporters and scholars found that Boyer could not document many of the facts he wrote about the time period in Tombstone. Some critics described the book as a fraud and a hoax, and the University of Arizona withdrew the book from its catalog.

Josephine Sarah Marcus was born in 1860 in New York City, the second of three children of immigrants Carl-Hyman Marcuse (later Henry Marcus) and Sophie Lewis. Her family was Jewish, and came from the Posen region in Prussia, current-day Poland, around 1850.^[2][1][3][4] Her mother Sophie was a widow with a 3-year-old daughter, Rebecca, when she married Marcuse, who was eight years younger than she.^[5] Sophie and Carl had three children together: Nathan (born August 12, 1857), Josephine, and Henrietta (born July 10, 1864).^[5]

Josephine's father Henry struggled to make a living in New York City and read about the growing city of San Francisco.^[1]Henry moved the family to San Francisco in 1868 when Josephine was 7.^[6] They traveled via ship to Panama, went over theIsthmus of Panama, and caught a steamship to San Francisco. They arrived while the city was recovering from the disastrous earthquake of October 21, 1868.^[5] Upon their arrival, her father found a highly stratified Jewish community. On the inside were the German Jews and on the outside were the Polish Jews. The German Jews were usually more affluent, better educated, and spoke German while the Polish Jews, who spoke Yiddish, were typically peddlers and much more religious.^[1] Henry found work as a baker.^[5]

By 1870, San Francisco's population had boomed to 149,473, and housing was in short supply. Apartment buildings were crowded and large homes were converted into rooming houses. The city was riding on the coattails of the still expanding economic boom caused by the mining of silver from the Comstock Lode. Lots of money flowed from Nevada through San Francisco, and for a while the Marcus family prospered. Later that year, Josephine's half-sister Rebecca Levy married Aaron Wiener,^[7] an insurance salesman born in Prussia, as her parents were.^[5]

As an adult, Josephine claimed her father was German and ran a prosperous mercantile business.^[6] Henry Marcus initially made enough money to send Josephine and her sister Hattie to music and dance classes at the McCarthy Dancing Academy, a family-owned business that taught both children and adults. In I Married Wyatt Earp, author Glen Boyer states that Josephine took dance lessons and had a maid. He wrote (in her voice), "Hattie and I attended the McCarthy Dancing Academy for children on Howard Street (Polk and Pacific). Eugenia and Lottie McCarthy taught us to dance the Highland Fling, the Sailor's Hornpipe, and ballroom dancing."^[8]

During 1874, when Josephine was 13, production of gold and silver from the Comstock Lode had fed a feverish stock market, leading to a great deal of speculation. When the Comstock Lode production began to fade, San Francisco suffered. Her father Henry’s earnings as a baker fell. The family was forced to move in with Josephine's older sister Rebecca and her husband Aaron in the tenements on the flatlands "south of the slot" (south of Market Street). It was a working-class, ethnically mixed neighborhood, where smoke from factory chimneys filled the air.^[9] The 1880 census places the family in that area, known as the 9th Ward, between San Francisco Bay, Channel, Harrison and Seventh streets.^[4][10] In early 1880, Henry was living with his son-in-law Aaron, who was employed as a bookkeeper. They lived four blocks south of Market at 138 Perry Street between 3rd and 2nd at Harrison.^[11]

As a girl, Josephine loved going to the theater.^[8] "There was far too much excitement in the air to remain a child."^[5] She apparently resented treatment by her teachers in the San Francisco schools, describing them as "inconsistent of a tolerant and gay populous acting as merciless and self-righteous as a New England village in bringing up its children." She described the harsh discipline meted out, including the "sting of rattan" and "being slapped for tardiness".^[5] Josephine said that she matured early and developed large breasts.^[12]

Throughout her later life, Josephine worked hard to manage what the press and public knew about her and Wyatt's life in Arizona. When Frank Waters was writing Tombstone Travesty, originally published in 1934, he returned from a research trip to Tombstone to learn that Josephine Earp had visited his mother and sister and threatened court action to prevent him from publishing the book.^[13]:8 Waters' work was later found to be critically flawed, "based upon prevarications, character assassinations, and the psychological battleground that was the brilliant, narcissistic mind of its author."^[14] Josephine told Earp's biographers and others that Earp didn't drink, never owned gambling saloons, and that he didn't offer prostitutes upstairs, when all have been documented.^[12]

In the course of writing Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), Stuart Lake learned that Josephine had lived with Johnny Behan in Tombstone and other aspects of Josephine's life that she wanted to keep private. At one point in their contentious relationship, Josephine described Lake's book as made up of "outright lies".^[15] Josephine and Wyatt went to great lengths to keep her name out of Lake's book, and she threatened litigation to keep it that way.^[16]:101[17] After Wyatt died in 1929, Josephine traveled to Boston, Massachusetts to try to persuade the publisher to stop the release of the book.^[18] Although the biography became a bestseller, it was later strongly criticized for fictionalizing Earp's life and was found to be markedly inaccurate. As late as 1936, Josephine took legal action to suppress certain details of her and Wyatt's life in Tombstone.^[19]:36 During those later years of her life, in addition to burnishing the life and legend of husband Wyatt Earp, "she scripted a history of make believe to hide a number of things of which she was not terribly proud."^[20]

Josephine worked hard to conceal Wyatt's prior relationship to his common-law wife and former prostitute Mattie Blaylock, with whom Wyatt was living when Josephine first met him. While Blaylock was living with Earp, she suffered from severe headaches and became addicted to laudanum, an opiate-based pain reliever widely available at the time. After Earp left Tombstone and Blaylock, she waited in Colton, California to hear from him, but he never contacted her. She met a gambler from Arizona who asked her to marry him. She asked Wyatt for a divorce, but Wyatt didn't believe in divorce and refused. She ran away with the gambler anyway, who later abandoned her in Arizona.^[21] Mattie resumed life as a prostitute and committed "suicide by opium poisoning" on July 3, 1888.^{[12][22][23][24]:47[24]:65}

In addition to Josephine's concealing Wyatt's past relationship with Blaylock, modern researchers think she may also have been trying to conceal her own past as a "sporting lady" or prostitute.^[25] While prostitutes were ostracized by "respectable" women, many madams and prostitutes had more control of their lives and greater independence than other women.^[26]Josephine always sought excitement in her life. In the book I Married Wyatt Earp (1967), based on a manuscript which she purportedly wrote, author Glenn Boyer quotes her as saying, "I liked the traveling sort of man... better than the kind that sat back in one town all his life and wrote down little rows of figures all day or hustled dry goods or groceries and that sort of thing... My blood demanded excitement, variety and change."^[27] The type of work available to most women in that era was as laundresses, seamstresses, or other dull work which Josephine avoided.

Her life on the frontier and possibly as a prostitute allowed her greater independence. She likely enjoyed the social life that accompanied her role. As an unmarried woman in frontier Tombstone, vastly outnumbered by men, she may have been regarded by some as a prostitute, regardless of her true status.^[28]:101

Bat Masterson, a friend of Wyatt Earp's who was in Tombstone from February^[29]:41 to April 1881,^[30] described her to Stuart Lake as "an incredible beauty"^[31] and as the "belle of the honkytonks, the prettiest dame in three hundred or so of her kind."^[27] Honkytonk bars in that era often had a reputation as place for prostitution^[32] and his choice of language ("three hundred or so of her kind") may have referred to Josephine's work as a prostitute.^[31]

The facts about Josephine's life in the Arizona Territory and in Tombstone have been obscured by her legal and personal efforts to keep that period private.^[33] Josephine's own story offers a conflicting account of when she first reached Arizona. Her confusing recollection of events show how easily Josephine mixed fact and fiction.^[34]:45

After Wyatt's death, Josephine collaborated with two of her husband's cousins, Mabel Earp Cason and her sister Vinolia Earp Ackerman, to document her life. The cousins recorded events in her later life, but they found Josephine evasive about the timing and nature of events during her time in the Arizona Territory and Tombstone.^[33] She would not even talk about the key events of 1881-82, their key years in Tombstone.^[20] The most she would say is that she returned to the Arizona Territory in 1881 and joined Johnny Behan in Tombstone. She said that she had believed Behan was planning to marry her, but he kept putting it off, and she grew disillusioned.^[35]

Based on the story she told the Earp cousins, when correlated with other sources, Josephine may have left her parent's home in San Francisco for Prescott, Arizona, as early as October 1874,^[9] when she was 13 or 14 years old,^[33] not 1879 as she told everyone later on. Cason says she and her sister "finally abandoned work on the manuscript because she [Josie] would not clear up the Tombstone sequence where it pertained to her and Wyatt."^[33]

Hattie Wells owned a brothel on the 1000 block of Clay Street in San Francisco, a district known for prostitution, and only one block from Josephine's school on Powell Street. Wells also owned a brothel in Prescott, Arizona. Josephine had to walk past the brothel everyday on her way to school. To her the women appeared not as "soiled doves" but nicely dressed women living a life of leisure. In 1879, five prostitutes lived there.^[34]:44

In I Married Wyatt Earp, Josephine wrote that one day, "I left my home one morning, carrying my books just as though I was going to school as usual."^[36] She said that at the age of 18, she ran away with two friends, Dora Hirsch, daughter of her music teacher, and a girl named Agnes, who had a role in Pauline Markham troupe's production of H.M.S. Pinafore in San Francisco.^[6][36] Author Sherry Monahan questions why an 18-year-old woman would be carrying books to school and find it necessary to "run away."^[34]:42

In the Cason manuscript, which was partly a basis for the book I Married Wyatt Earp, Josephine says she and her friend Dora joined the Pauline Markham Theater Company in 1879, when it visited San Francisco on its Western tour.^[6] Markham already had a national reputation as a burlesque dancer and songstress. She often appeared on stage and in publicity photos wearing a corset and pink tights: shocking attire for the 1870s.^[37] Josephine wrote that Dora was hired as a singer, and she was hired as a dancer. Josie said the two of them sailed with the other six members of the Pauline Markham troupe from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, where they stayed for a few days, performing in San Bernardino before leaving for Prescott, Arizona Territory, by stagecoach.