Josephine Sarah Marcus entered the world in 1861 in New York City, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Prussia, an area now part of Poland. Like many newcomers to America’s eastern coast in the mid-nineteenth century, the Marcus family struggled. In 1868, when Josephine was only seven, they boarded a ship bound for Panama, then traveled north to the expanding city of San Francisco. Her father, Henry Marcus, found work as a baker, and the family settled into a comfortable if not wealthy existence.
The details of Josephine’s early life, and much of her later life for that matter, remain clouded by two complications. First, Josephine herself was a known liar, and in her later years, once she had acquired a certain fame, she habitually invented or embellished details about her past. Second, much of what the public came to believe about her life rested on a 1976 book called I Married Wyatt Earp, a memoir attributed to Josephine Sarah Marcus. The book was written by Glenn Boyer, an acquaintance of the Earp family, who built most of his account on what relatives of Wyatt and Josephine claimed to have told him and on documents he said he had obtained concerning Josephine’s life.
These included something like a diary allegedly written by Josephine herself. The book sold enormously and was treated for years as a primary reference on the lives of Wyatt and Josephine Earp. But investigative research in the 1990s demonstrated that much of what Boyer wrote was either fabricated entirely or had the facts altered to produce a more exciting narrative. Josephine’s life story was thus distorted first by her own deception, and then by Boyer’s, nearly a century later.
What seems relatively clear is that Josephine Marcus left her family home in San Francisco around 1874, when she was just thirteen. She later wrote in her memoir that she remembered kissing her mother on the cheek as if going to school and never returning home. In her words, there was too much excitement in the air for one to remain a child. She then worked in various places across California and as far east as Arizona.
It is possible she worked in prostitution during those years under the name Sadie Mansfield. By the late 1870s, she appears to have been working as a dancer in burlesque shows. It is almost certain that the deep shame of being both a woman of Jewish descent and a dancer during that period is what drove Josephine to later falsify her personal history. She herself referred to that period of her life as a disturbing nightmare.
Whatever the truth of her late teenage years and early adulthood, one thing is certain. In the late 1870s, she began a relationship with a man named Johnny Behan. One colorful account of their meeting claims Josephine was aboard a horse-drawn wagon headed to Arizona when some renegade Apaches escaped their reservation and returned to their old grounds on the warpath. She was moved to a nearby ranch for protection, where she spent ten days with other travelers, sleeping on the ground.
It was there, according to this account, that she met her future lover, Johnny Behan. Regardless of how they actually met, it is known that they lived in California for a time, then moved to Arizona, where they settled in Tiptop. They did not stay long. In September 1880, the couple moved again, this time to a new settlement that had sprung up in southeastern Arizona within a few months.
Tombstone was a city built on silver fever. In 1877, Ed Schieffelin surveyed the hills east of the San Pedro River and quickly identified extensive silver deposits in the area. He and a business partner filed a claim on the site they had discovered. But once word spread, people began flooding the region to seek their fortunes in the hills and rivers of southeastern Arizona.
As the silver fever developed, a settlement began to emerge rapidly. The booming town soon became known, somewhat ironically, as Tombstone, because Schieffelin had been told before he went prospecting that all he would find in that part of Arizona was his grave. By the time Josephine and Johnny Behan arrived in the fall of 1880, the town’s population had swelled to several thousand. It boasted four churches, a bowling alley, a school, two banks, and an ice cream parlor, while the Grand Hotel had opened only weeks earlier.
But trouble had also arrived in Tombstone. By 1880, there were numerous brothels, as well as 110 saloons and over a dozen gambling halls. Many of the newcomers were rough frontier men, along with cowboys and other Westerners who enjoyed drinking and stealing. Tombstone offered plenty of opportunity for both.
In an attempt to calm the town’s growing disorder, the authorities soon turned to some famous lawmen who had recently arrived. Virgil Earp was a deputy U. S. marshal and a leading lawman in Tombstone during the following period.
But his brother Wyatt Earp was far more famous. Wyatt had earned a reputation as a lawman in Wichita and Dodge City, Kansas, during the 1870s. In 1879, he arrived in Tombstone with several of his brothers and John Doc Holliday, a dentist and gambler closely acquainted with the Earp family. By the time Josephine and Johnny Behan reached town, the Earps and Holliday were increasingly embroiled in a conflict with a number of cowboys led by the McLaurys and Clantons.
It would soon lead to the most famous gunfight in the history of the American West. After arriving in Tombstone, Josephine and Johnny Behan were joined by Behan’s eight-year-old son Albert from a previous marriage. In early 1881, Josephine visited San Francisco to bring Albert back for medical care for some hearing problems. When they returned, she found Behan in bed with the wife of a friend.
She promptly threw him out of the house. Josephine may have begun a relationship with Wyatt Earp within weeks of Behan’s expulsion. The timeline is unclear, and the affair would have been kept secret because Earp was already married and his wife had come to Tombstone with him. It is not clear how far things had developed between them when the disputes reached their climax on October 26, 1881, after a series of escalating conflicts.
Virgil Earp, now the town marshal of Tombstone, decided to disarm the cowboys that day. The ensuing gunfight became known as the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral.
Within thirty seconds of shooting, Virgil, Morgan, and Doc were wounded, but Wyatt was unharmed. Billy Clanton and the McLaurys were killed, but Ike Clanton and several of his allies escaped, and the conflict continued for months. As the feud continued, it is known that Josephine and Wyatt were already living together. In the spring of 1882, she went to San Francisco to keep out of sight, using the name Mrs.
J. Earp. That same year, Wyatt’s brother Morgan was ambushed and killed by Ike Clanton’s gang. In response, Wyatt set out with an armed posse into the Arizona wilderness to pursue those responsible, in what became known as the Earp Vendetta Ride.
Afterward, he stopped writing to his wife, and it became clear he had decided to leave her. She turned to prostitution and died of a laudanum overdose. Josephine, by contrast, joined Wyatt in Colorado in early 1883, and they soon went to Eagle City, Idaho, a town emerging from a gold and silver boom, where Earp opened a saloon called the White Elephant. They then moved again toward California.
The couple spent four years in San Diego, which had just been connected to the rest of America with the arrival of the first railroad to the southwestern tip of the United States. In 1891, they returned to San Francisco, now relatively well-off, having bought several saloons and gambling halls during the late 1880s and 1890s. Josephine and Wyatt appear to have finally married in 1892 aboard a yacht off the coast of California. Though the evidence rests on individual reports from those present, no marriage record has ever been found.
They continued moving frequently, though over short distances. Between 1891 and 1896, they spent most of their time in San Francisco, but moved between at least four homes. Theirs was a turbulent marriage. Josephine frequently scolded Wyatt for not being financially successful, while he called her Sadie, a name she hated because it reminded her of her days as a prostitute and burlesque dancer.
He would also disappear on long walks to get away from her and indulge in extended drinking binges. Both had affairs, and their relationship was likely further strained by Josephine’s inability to have children. She had been pregnant at least twice but miscarried both times. In the late 1890s, Wyatt and Josephine went to Alaska to try to get rich again during the Klondike gold rush.
That attempt failed as well, and they soon returned south in the early twentieth century. The couple began moving between mining towns in California again. One such town in the Sonoran Desert yielded something, though not the kind of wealth that would make the couple rich. They bought a cabin there, and it became the place where they settled more than at any other time during their thirty-year relationship.
In the early 1920s, the aging couple began spending summer days in Los Angeles, a city gradually transforming into America’s entertainment capital as new movies were produced in great numbers. Many old cowboys flocked there to try to find a place in the film world. Wyatt made many friends and became a consultant on some films depicting life in the Old West. He also participated in attempts to produce a film about his own life, but no agreement was reached during his lifetime.
Wyatt fell seriously ill in 1928. The final years of his life and Josephine’s afterward were quite grim. She had always been a gambler, and in her later years she developed a serious problem, often losing the allowance she received from her family as soon as it arrived. Her ability to care for Wyatt was severely limited, and observers of his final illness before his death in January 1929 claimed Josephine never did a good job in that regard.
Josephine lived until 1944, dying at the age of 83. Little is known about her life after Wyatt’s death, perhaps because his fame as a lawman had drawn attention to them both, and also because her behavior became increasingly eccentric. In 1939, she filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox when they attempted to release a film called Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, the kind of film Earp had sought to produce during his lifetime. It was released anyway, but only under the title Frontier Marshal.
Josephine Earp spent her final years in Los Angeles. Her death was as mysterious as many parts of her early life in the infamous days of Tombstone.