Josephine Earp

Josephine Sarah Marcus was born in 1861 in New York City, the second of three children of immigrants Carl-Hyman Marcuse (later Henry Marcus) and Sophie Lewis. The Lewis family was Jewish, and came from the Posen region in Prussia, current-day Poland, around 1850. Sophie and Carl had three children together: Nathan (born 1857), Josephine, and Henrietta (born 1864). They traveled via ship to Panama, went over the Isthmus of Panama, and caught a steamship to San Francisco. They arrived while the city was recovering from the disastrous earthquake of October 21, 1868. an insurance salesman born in Prussia, as her parents were. In early 1880, Henry was living with his son-in-law Aaron, who was employed as a bookkeeper. Youth As a girl, Josephine loved going to the theater. "There was far too much excitement in the air to remain a child." 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". Josephine said that she matured early and developed large breasts. == Mixing fact and fiction ==

Throughout her later life, Josephine worked hard to manage what the press and public knew about her and Wyatt's life in Arizona. Josephine told Earp's biographers and others that Earp did not drink, never owned gambling saloons, and that his saloons did not offer prostitutes, which all have been documented. 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." 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. 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. At one point in their contentious relationship, Josephine described Lake's book as made up of "outright lies". After Wyatt died in 1929, Josephine traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, to try to persuade the publisher to stop the release of the book. Concealed Wyatt's former wife As late as 1936, Josephine took legal action to suppress certain details of her and Wyatt's life in Tombstone. 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 did not believe in divorce and refused. She ran away with the gambler anyway, who later abandoned her in Arizona. She would not even talk about the key events of 1881–82, their key years in Tombstone. Based on the story she told the Earp cousins, when correlated with other sources, Josephine may have left her parents’ home in San Francisco for Prescott, Arizona, as early as October 1874, When Stuart Lake was researching his book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal he heard stories about Sadie's personal history. He did not include them in the book, but he did write about them in letters during 1929. Bat Masterson, a friend of Wyatt Earp's who was in Tombstone from February to April 1881, described her to Stuart Lake as "an incredible beauty" and as the "belle of the honkytonks, the prettiest dame in three hundred or so of her kind." and his choice of language ("three hundred or so of her kind") may have referred to Josephine's work as a prostitute. Married women of the era were expected to avoid working outside the home, or risk being considered "public women," a euphemism for prostitute. A few women of the era chose to remain single as a means to maintain their independence from men, and Josephine was among them. Josephine's life on the frontier and possibly as a prostitute allowed her greater independence. She likely enjoyed the social life and independence that accompanied her role. As an unmarried woman in frontier Tombstone, vastly outnumbered by men, she was likely regarded by some as a prostitute, regardless of her true status. == Runaway ==

In a remarkable set of coincidences, the known life of Josephine Sadie Marcus overlapped the life of an otherwise unknown prostitute named Sadie Mansfield. One block away on the 1000 block of Clay Street in a neighborhood known for prostitution was a brothel, owned by Hattie Wells. In 1879, five prostitutes lived there. Josephine had to walk past the brothel every day on her way to school. To her the women appeared not as "soiled doves" but nicely dressed women living a life of leisure. Wells also owned a brothel in Prescott, Arizona. Author Sherry Monahan questions why an 18-year-old woman would be carrying books to school and find it necessary to "run away." Josephine said she left the acting troupe in February 1880, just after the Markham troupe ended its initial run of performances in Prescott. Author Roger Ray thoroughly researched Josephine's story about joining the theater company and found many inconsistencies. The Markham troupe is documented as leaving San Francisco on board the Southern Pacific Railroad, not a ship nor a stagecoach, in October 1879 for Casa Grande, Arizona, the end of the line. Josephine or Sadie Marcus’s name was never included among those on the Markham troupe’s rolls in 1879. Professor Pat Ryan stated that Josephine or Sadie may have used the stage name May Bell as a member of the Markham stage group. On October 21, 1879, the Los Angeles Herald reported that May Bell was among members of the Markham troupe. But, no other corroborating evidence has been found supporting the thesis that Josephine used May Bell as a stage name, and she never claimed so. Sadie was a well-known nickname for Sarah, Josie's middle name, and it was common for prostitutes of that time period to change their first name. She said that Sieber and his scouts led her stagecoach and its passengers to a nearby adobe ranch house. The group spent 10 days sleeping on the floor. Josephine first met John "Johnny" Harris Behan at the ranch house, whom she described as, "young and darkly handsome, with merry black eyes and an engaging smile. My heart was stirred by his attentions in what were very romantic circumstances. It was a diversion from my homesickness though I cannot say I was in love with him.... I am under the impression that he was a deputy sheriff engaged on some official errand." Behan married 17-year-old Victoria Zaff in March 1869 in San Francisco, her step-father's home town. The couple moved back to Prescott, Arizona Territory, where John had been working, and four months later, on June 15, 1869, she had her first child, Henrietta. Behan was on the surface an upstanding citizen, married with a child, but he also frequented brothels. On September 28, 1874, Behan was nominated at the Democratic convention to stand for re-election. The area in which Behan campaigned was also near Cave Creek, where Al Sieber was looking for Indians. Behan was gone for 35 days, returning to Prescott on November 11, 1874, where he lost the election. In 1874, 14-year-old Sadie Mansfield worked under the watchful eye of Madam Josie Roland as a prostitute in a brothel on Granite Street, between Gurley and Alarcon streets, and near the Yavapai County Courthouse where Sheriff Behan worked. The paper also reported on April 9, 1875, that a letter was waiting for her in the post office. On May 22, 1875, Behan's wife Victoria filed for divorce. She took the unusual step of asserting in her divorce petition that Behan "at divers times and places openly and notoriously visited houses of ill-fame and prostitution at said town of Prescott." Victoria cited liaisons with several woman, but specifically mentioned a "Sadie or Sada Mansfield", a 14-year-old "woman of prostitution and ill-fame" as co-respondent in the divorce action. The divorce also cited Behan's threats of violence and unrelenting verbal abuse. Nineteen-year-old Sadie Mansfield, the same person his former wife Victoria had named in their divorce five years earlier, was also living in Tip Top. Her occupation was "Courtesan". Josephine wrote much later that her family wanted to keep her "escapades from the public." In her memoirs she wrote, "the younger children (niece and nephew), and our friends were told that I had gone away for a visit. Mrs. Hirsch, because of Dora’s part in it was as anxious as my people (family), to keep it a secret. The memory of it has been a source of humiliation and regret to me in all the years since that time and I have never until now disclosed it to anyone besides my husband (Wyatt)." Later in life, Josephine was not a practicing Jew and did not seem to care whether her partners were Jewish. Josephine thought Johnny’s marriage proposal was a good excuse to leave home again. She wrote, "life was dull for me in San Francisco. In spite of my bad experience of a few years ago the call to adventure still stirred my blood." information that may have been offered by her parents. But Josephine said that her parents hid her activities, and they may have been covering for her when the census taker appeared on their doorstep. In a set of extraordinary coincidences, Sadie Mansfield and Sadie Marcus had very similar names and initials and were known by their friends as "Sadie." Both made a stagecoach journey from San Francisco to Prescott, Arizona Territory; both traveled with a black woman named Julia; both were sexual partners with Behan; both were 19 years old, born in New York City, and had parents from Germany. The only difference noted in the 1880 census is their occupation: Sadie in San Francisco is listed as "At home", while Sadie in Tip Top is recorded as a "Courtesan". (In the 1920 census, Sadie reported to the census taker that her family was from Hamburg, Germany, bordering Prussia.) == Move to Tombstone ==

In September 1880, Behan and Sadie left Tip Top for Tombstone. Soon after they arrived, Behan's ex-wife sent their eight-year-old son Albert to live with him. In Josephine's version of her life story, she left San Francisco to join Behan to Tombstone in October 1880, and was hoping he would fulfill his promises to marry her. When he delayed, she was ready to leave him. At the time, her parents, her sister Henrietta, and her brother Nathan were all living in a lower-class neighborhood south of Market Street in San Francisco with their daughter, her husband, their four children, and a boarder. Her father worked as a baker. It is unlikely that he was a "wealthy German merchant" as she described him. While there are no records that her father sent her money, researchers have located records of money orders totaling $50 sent by Josephine to her family in San Francisco. One of these was sent after she ended her relationship with Johnny Behan, indicating that she was earning money as a single woman. One version of the story is that she had taken Behan's son Albert, who was hearing impaired, to San Francisco for treatment. Upon their return, they arrived late in the evening and a day earlier than expected, at the house built with her father's money. Finding Behan in bed with the wife of a friend of theirs, she kicked him out. Early relationship with Wyatt Earp How and when she and Wyatt Earp began their relationship is unknown. Tombstone diarist George W. Parsons never mentioned seeing Wyatt and Josephine together and neither did John Clum in his memoirs. While there are no contemporary records in Tombstone of a relationship between them, they certainly knew each other, as Behan and Earp both had offices above the Crystal Palace Saloon. In his book, The Tombstone Travesty (later republished as The Earp Brothers of Tombstone), Frank Waters quotes Virgil Earp's wife, Allie, as saying that "Sadie's charms were undeniable. She had a small, trim body and a meneo of the hips that kept her full, flounced skirts bouncing. During their stay in Albuquerque, the two men ate at The Retreat Restaurant owned by "Fat Charlie". Otero wrote in his letter, "Holiday said something about Earp becoming 'a damn Jew-boy.' Earp became angry and left…. [Henry] Jaffa told me later that Earp’s woman was a Jewess. Earp did mezuzah when entering the house." Earp's anger at Holliday's ethnic slur may indicate that his feelings for Josephine was more serious at the time than is commonly known. The information in the letter is compelling because at the time it was written in the 1940s, the relationship between Wyatt Earp and Josephine Marcus while living in Tombstone was virtually unknown. The only way Otero could write about these things was if he had a personal relationship with some of the individuals involved. The Earp party split up in Albuquerque, and Holliday and Dan Tipton rode on to Pueblo, while the rest of the group headed for Gunnison. Names used in Tombstone In June 1881, Sadie sent a postal money order to her mother using the name Josephine Behan, The next month, in July 1881, Josephine Behan was reported to be leaving Tombstone by stage. But in August a Tombstone newspaper reported a letter waiting at the post office for Sadie Mansfield. Sadie was apparently no longer claiming to be Behan's wife. Presence after gunfight Josephine is quoted in I Married Wyatt Earp as saying that on October 26, 1881, the day of the shootout at the O.K. Corral, she was at her home when she heard the sound of gunfire. Running into town in the direction of the shots, Josephine was relieved to see that Wyatt was uninjured. Other researchers and writers aren't even sure she was in town that day. No contemporary accounts place her at the scene of the gunfight afterward. After the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Ike Clanton filed murder charges against the Earps and Doc Holliday. During a month-long preliminary hearing, Judge Wells Spicer heard testimony from a large number of witnesses. The Tombstone Epitaph reported on November 11, 1881, that "S. Mansfield" from San Francisco had passed Colton, California (where Wyatt Earp's parents lived) en route to Arizona, a few days before Wyatt's testimony at the Spicer hearing. This was one week after Morgan Earp was assassinated and five days after Wyatt set out in pursuit of those he believed responsible. After the Earp Vendetta Ride ended in April 1882, Wyatt left Arizona for Colorado. Earp's former wife, Mattie Blaylock traveled with other Earp family members in April 1882, to Colton, California, waiting for Wyatt to telegraph her and invite her to join him. Wyatt never sent for her and she moved to Pinal, Arizona, where she resumed life as a prostitute, eventually committing suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum. Sadie Mansfield reappeared in Tombstone when she was noted in the July 1882 Tombstone census, but Josephine Marcus and Josephine Behan were not. Sadie and John Behan lived at different addresses. == Life after Tombstone ==

Josephine's life after Tombstone and with Wyatt Earp is not well known, although it isn't as obscured by stories of her life in Tombstone that she told to hide facts. The San Diego Union printed a report from the San Francisco Call on July 9, 1882, that Virgil Earp was in San Francisco (receiving treatment for his shattered arm) and that Wyatt was expected to arrive there that day. although it was learned later that the horses were leased. At Santa Rosa, Earp personally competed in and won a harness race. The Sacramento Daily Record reported on October 20, 1882, that Virgil had arrived in town from Tombstone to greet his brother Wyatt arriving from the east, although Virgil was living in Colton at the time. Wyatt followed the crowd looking for gold in the Murray-Eagle mining district and paid $2,250 for a diameter white circus, in which they opened a dance hall and saloon called The White Elephant. After the Coeur d'Alene mining venture died out, Earp and Josie briefly went to El Paso, Texas before moving in 1887 to San Diego where the railroad was about to arrive and a real estate boom was underway. They stayed for about four years, living most of the time in the Brooklyn Hotel. Earp speculated in San Diego's booming real estate market. Between 1887 and around 1896 he bought four saloons and gambling halls, one on Fourth Street and two near Sixth and E, all in the "respectable" part of town. The Earps moved back to San Francisco in 1891 Marriage to Wyatt Josephine wrote in I Married Wyatt Earp that she and Wyatt were married in 1892 offshore by the captain of Lucky Baldwin's yacht. Raymond Nez wrote that his grandparents witnessed their marriage off the California coast. No public record of their marriage has ever been found. Josephine frequently griped about Wyatt’s lack of work and financial success and even his character and personality. Wyatt would often go on long walks to get away from her. Nevada to Alaska to Nevada , circa 1902. The man in the center is believed to be Wyatt Earp, and the woman on the left is often identified as Josephine Earp. On August 5, 1897, Earp and Josie once again joined in a mining boom and left Yuma, Arizona for San Francisco. They planned to head for Alaska to join in the Alaska Gold Rush, but their departure was delayed for three weeks when Wyatt fell while getting off Market Street streetcar and bruised his hip. When they got to Wrangell, the season was already late, and they chose to winter in Rampart. They rented a cabin from Rex Beach for $100 a month and spent the winter of 1898–1899 there. He managed a small store during the spring of 1899 in St. Michael on the Norton Sound, a major gateway to the Alaskan interior via the Yukon River. In the spring they decided the gold rush in Dawson was drawing to an end and headed for Nome instead. Earp and partner Charles E. Hoxie built the Dexter Saloon, the largest in Nome. Josephine gambled so recklessly that Wyatt cut her off and asked other gambling houses to do the same. She also gambled on the boats to and from Alaska. Although gambling was illegal, the police were paid by John Considine, owner of the three largest gambling concessions, to look the other way. Considine tried to keep Earp from succeeding, and arranged for his establishment to be raided. The Earps returned briefly to San Francisco in April 1900, but they returned to Seattle before boarding the steamer SS Alliance. On June 14, 1900, Wyatt and Josephine were bound for Nome, Alaska. In February 1902, they arrived in Tonopah, Nevada, known as the "Queen of the Silver Camps," where silver and gold had been discovered in 1900 and a boom was under way. He opened the Northern Saloon in Tonopah and served as a Deputy U.S. Marshal under Marshal J.F. Emmitt. Desert cottage After Tonopah's gold strike waned, Wyatt staked mining claims just outside Death Valley and elsewhere in the Mojave Desert. In 1906 he discovered several deposits of gold and copper near the Sonoran Desert town of Vidal, California, on the Colorado River and filed more than 100 mining claims Wyatt and Josie Earp summered in Los Angeles and lived in at least nine small Los Angeles rentals as early as 1885 and as late as 1929, mostly in the summer. Wyatt had some modest success with the gold mines and they lived on the slim proceeds of income from that and investments in Oakland and Kern County oil field. Josie's three nieces, daughters of her half-sister Rebecca and husband Aaron Wiener, would frequently visit the couple during the winter months at their desert camp. The Earps were frequent visitors and often spent the holidays with the Welsh family, but they did not appreciate Josephine's gambling habits. and developed a serious gambling habit, While they lived in San Diego, Wyatt raced Otto Rex, the horse he had won in a card game. The horse was a frequent winner and sometimes Wyatt bought Josephine some jewelry with the proceeds. To feed her gambling habit, Josephine would pawn the jewelry to millionaire Lucky Baldwin, but Wyatt would later buy the jewelry back. Josephine eventually sold virtually all of her jewelry to Baldwin. During an investigation of the boxing match by a panel appointed by San Francisco Mayor Washington Bartlett, they learned Josephine Earp was a "degenerate horseplayer" and that she frequently took loans out against her jewelry. The San Francisco Examiner ran a series of stories over three days describing Earp's life in exaggerated detail that ridiculed him. In the 1920s, Wyatt gave Josie signed legal papers and filing fees to a claim for an oil lease in Kern County, California. She gambled away the filing fees and lied to Wyatt about what happened to the lease, which later turned out to be valuable. Distrustful of her ability to manage her finances, Wyatt made an arrangement with her sister Henrietta Lenhardt. Wyatt put oil leases he owned in Henrietta's name with the agreement that the proceeds would benefit Josie after his death. Henrietta's three children voided the agreement after their mother's death and didn't pass on the royalties to Josephine. Later relationship with Wyatt Grace Welsh Spolidora, Welsh's daughter, spent a lot of time with the Earps. She said that during the last years of Wyatt's life, Josephine received an allowance from her family and gambled it away, often leaving Wyatt hungry. Wyatt became critically ill in late 1928. Grace recalled that Josie, who had never had many domestic skills, did very little housekeeping or cooking for Wyatt. She and her sister-in-law Alma were concerned about the care Josie gave Wyatt. Even though he was very ill, she still didn't cook for him. Grace, her sisters, Alma, and her mother brought in meals. She received some royalties from the movie and one-half of the royalties earned by Stuart Lake's book about her husband. After Wyatt died, Josephine spent her last years in Los Angeles. Death and burial When Wyatt died in 1929, Josephine Earp had his body cremated and secretly buried him in the Marcus family plot in the Jewish Hills of Eternity Memorial Park in Colma, California. She died penniless. Sid Grauman of Grauman's Theater and cowboy actor and long-time friend of Wyatt Earp William S. Hart paid for her funeral and burial. Although she was never active in her Jewish faith, her service was conducted by a rabbi. Her body was cremated and buried next to Wyatt's remains. Actor Hugh O'Brian, who was playing Earp in the 1955–61 television series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, offered a reward for the stone’s return. It was located for sale in a flea market. == In popular culture ==

In their later years Josephine worked hard to eliminate any mention that she had been Johnny Behan's mistress or of Wyatt's previous common law marriage to the prostitute Mattie Blaylock. Book I Married Wyatt Earp '', by Glenn Boyer, based in part on the so-called "Clum manuscript" supposedly written by Josephine. The book was discredited as largely fictional in 1999. She successfully kept both women's names out of Stuart Lake's biography of Wyatt and after he died, Josephine may have threatened litigation to keep it that way. She was also in need of money, and tried to sell a collection of books to Lake while he was writing the book. and is now in the custody of the Ford County Historical Society in Dodge City. Beginning in about 1994, critics began to challenge the accuracy of the book, and eventually many parts of the book were refuted as fictional. In 1998, a series of articles by Tony Ortega in the Phoenix New Times, including interviews with Glenn Boyer, argued that Boyer invented large portions of the book. In 2000, the University responded to criticism of the university and the book and removed it from their catalog. The book has become an example of how supposedly factual works can trip up researchers, historians, and librarians. It was described by the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology in 2006 as a creative exercise that cannot be substantiated or relied on. == References ==