Prairie Times

Josephine Marcus Earp

By Rachel Kovaciny

How did a nice Jewish girl from New York City become Wild West lawman Wyatt Earp’s “common-law wife”? Josephine Marcus’s road from New York to Tombstone, Arizona, wasn’t straightforward, and she worked hard to keep much of her youthful history under wraps, but we know quite a bit about how she met her famous husband, despite her best efforts to gloss over her past.

 

It all started when her parents, Henry and Sophie Marcus, emigrated to the United States around 1850 from Prussia, first settling in New York City, and eventually moving to San Francisco. There, Josephine attended a dance academy and developed a taste for performing and a desire to see the West. She ran away from home in her teens by joining a theatrical traveling troupe, the Pauline Markham Theater Company. The comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan came into vogue in the 1870s, and Josephine scored a minor role in a touring production of H.M.S. Pinafore. 

 

And that’s where the mystery begins. How did she spend her years between leaving home and meeting Wyatt Earp in Tombstone? Either she became a lady of the night, using the name Sadie Mansfield, or she toured as a dancer and actress. She did such a good job of hiding her past nobody will ever know the truth!

 

Twenty-year-old Josephine rolled into Tombstone in early 1879 with the theater company. It didn’t take her long to get romantically involved with Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan, who promised to marry her. He didn’t. She realized Behan wanted a mistress, not a wife, so she left him. It’s possible another reason she left was that she’d met his rival lawman, the already-famous Wyatt Earp.

 

Wyatt Earp lived with a woman named Mattie Blaylock at this time, and told people she was his wife, though they had never been legally married. Mattie was addicted to laudanum, and Josephine swore Wyatt had already left Mattie before he took up with her. We have mainly her word for that, but other sources talk about Wyatt Earp’s distaste for drug use (though he had no problem with alcohol consumption), so it’s plausible it’s true. Josephine returned to her family in San Francisco after breaking off her engagement to Behan, which means she probably wasn’t in town for the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in October 1881. 

 

A year later, Wyatt pursued her to San Francisco, and the two were together from then until his death in 1929. For nearly fifty years, Wyatt and Josephine were a devoted couple, though they never legally married. They were a matched pair of adventure-seekers. Together, they traveled throughout the west, investing in gold mining and oil wells, starting or running saloons and gambling halls, and doing as they pleased. They lived for a short time in booming cities that included Denver and San Diego, and even went up to Nome, Alaska, in 1899, where they opened a popular saloon that capitalized on the latest gold rush.

    

By the 1920s, the aging couple settled in Los Angeles, where they spent much of their time trying to ensure their life stories were told the way they wanted. Magazines, newspapers, and dime novels had all exaggerated Wyatt Earp’s life story, especially his exploits as a lawman in Dodge City and Tombstone. Now, Josephine and Wyatt tried to take control of those accounts—successfully, it seems, since we’ll never know how or when they really met, nor how Josephine spent her teen years.

 

Wyatt made friends with some of the early Hollywood filmmakers, including western star Tom Mix and legendary director John Ford. He probably also encountered a young stuntman named Marion Morrison who would become famous for acting in western movies a few years later, after changing his name to John Wayne. Wyatt and Josephine tried to interest studios in making a film about Earp’s life, but the project never materialized.

  

  After Wyatt died, Josephine collaborated with author Stuart N. Lake on a biography of her husband, called Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. Although historians now consider it to be a highly sanitized and mythologized version of the people and events portrayed, it was a smash hit at the time and provided Josephine with a steady income, even though the country was entering the Great Depression. She lived out her last years with her older sister Hattie and died in 1944.

 

Josephine Marcus Earp’s life story seems like the essential American Story. The daughter of immigrants who came to America seeking a better life for themselves and their children, she “married” a famous man, traveled extensively, found success in a variety of business ventures, and took control of how we would remember her life story. It’s no wonder her story still intrigues us today! ♦