Wyatt Earp’s Wife Was The Wildest Woman In The West, But We’re Still Unsure Of Her Identity

Being married to one of the Wild West’s most famous lawmen has got to give you a bit of street cred. But Josephine Earp was an icon in her own right. This fascinating woman was always enveloped in a cloak of mystery, even during her own lifetime. She actively worked to obscure the truth about her past, and now, eight decades after her death, it’s hard to say exactly where the facts end and the fiction begins.

Wyatt Earp’s wife may well have been the wildest woman in the West, yet we’re still not entirely sure of her true identity. Known by several different names over the course of her long life, Josephine is most famous as the wife of Wyatt Earp, one of the central figures in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But from her early years in Arizona to her time camping out in the Sonoran Desert, she had plenty of adventures of her own. Who really was Josephine?

Was she, as she claimed, an innocent girl who ran away from home to work as a dancer, finding love and excitement along the way? Or did she actually live a far more salacious life than she ever admitted? And what was the truth about her relationship with the man whose name is synonymous with the Wild West? Unlike her later years, the early life of the future Mrs. Earp is actually fairly well documented, with few disputing the basic facts.

Born Josephine Sarah Marcus in either 1860 or 1861 in New York City, she was the daughter of Prussian immigrants who had arrived in the United States some years earlier. In New York, the Marcus family struggled to make ends meet. When they heard about new opportunities in the booming city of San Francisco, they decided to relocate.

When Josephine was seven, she boarded a ship with her parents and siblings and made the long, arduous journey to the West Coast. But San Francisco was not the paradise it had promised to be. The city was still reeling from an October 1868 earthquake and was a shadow of its former self.

Despite this unexpected situation, the Marcus family eventually settled into their new home. It’s at this point that Josephine’s own version of events begins to diverge from the historical record. After Wyatt’s death in 1929, two of his relatives attempted to record the famous couple’s story, creating a document later known as the “Cason manuscript.”

That manuscript would partially inspire the 1976 book *I Married Wyatt Earp.* According to these allegedly firsthand sources, Josephine’s father found success in San Francisco’s mercantile trade and became a prosperous member of California society. Census data, however, suggests the family remained in poverty for some time.

And that’s far from the only discrepancy in this convoluted tale. Whatever the truth, it seems clear that Josephine developed a love of theater from an early age. According to her, the family paid for lessons at a local performing arts school, where she learned ballroom dancing and the Highland fling.

Soon, though, she grew restless with life in San Francisco. What happened next is again a matter of debate. If Josephine’s later testimony is to be believed, she ran away from home at 18 to join a touring theater troupe led by dancer Pauline Markham.

She supposedly took a role in a production of the popular hit *Pinafore*, traveling first through California before winding up in Tombstone, Arizona. According to Josephine, the troupe arrived in Tombstone on December 1, 1879. She wasn’t the only future Wild West legend to come to town around that time.

That same month, the frontier community welcomed three new residents: Wyatt Earp and his brothers Virgil and James. Some years earlier, Wyatt had worked as a lawman in Wichita, Kansas, before moving west to Dodge City. There, he served as assistant city marshal and quickly gained a reputation as the go-to man for tracking down fugitives.

Of course, that also meant Wyatt often found trouble wherever he went. Not long after his arrival in Tombstone, he ran afoul of a group of outlaws known as the Cochise County Cowboys. While Wyatt was busy making enemies, Josephine was encountering complications of her own.

According to her, she met her first husband, Johnny Behan, on the road to Tombstone. The two allegedly ended up in the same ranch house while taking shelter from renegade Yuma Apaches. It wasn’t love at first sight, but the deputy sheriff certainly made an impression on the young woman.

Josephine later wrote that Johnny was “young and darkly handsome, with merry black eyes and an engaging smile.” The attraction appears to have been mutual. She admitted, “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.”

But not everyone agrees that Josephine met Johnny as an innocent 18‑year‑old damsel in distress. There is substantial evidence suggesting she actually traveled to Arizona at just 14, and that she worked as a prostitute under the name “Sadie Mansfield.” Records indicate that both Sadie and Josephine shared a birthday, and other personal details line up as well.

On top of that, both were documented traveling to Arizona with a maid named Julia. And if that weren’t enough, both young women ended up in Tombstone at roughly the same time. Did Josephine later try to erase details of a past in sex work by omitting any reference to “Sadie” from her memoirs?

We may never know for sure. What we do know is that she returned to San Francisco in 1880, apparently weary of life on the road. Yet before long, her craving for adventure resurfaced. Around this time, Josephine claimed that Johnny, now divorced, tracked her down and persuaded her to return to Arizona with him.

Once they were back in Tombstone, however, he soon went back to his womanizing ways. There is also evidence suggesting that “Sadie”—or at least her professional life—may have made a reappearance. Records indicate that Josephine regularly sent money gifts to her family in San Francisco, which should have been impossible on the couple’s modest income.

Did returning to Tombstone also mean returning to life as a working girl, or was there some other mysterious source of wealth? Whatever the truth, Josephine and Johnny’s relationship quickly deteriorated. In 1881, after allegedly catching him in bed with another woman, she threw him out.

It’s around this time most historians believe Wyatt entered her life. As with so much of their story, though, the facts of their early relationship are murky. Both Wyatt and Josephine refused to discuss how their romance began for the rest of their lives, and perhaps for good reason.

When they first met, Wyatt was still married to a woman named Mattie Blaylock. Although he eventually left Mattie, she is said to have resented him until the end of her days. While there’s no solid evidence that Josephine and Wyatt openly socialized during this period, we do know that Wyatt shared a workspace with Behan at Tombstone’s Crystal Palace Saloon.

That makes it very likely the three crossed paths. Many believe they were entangled in a love triangle that helped fuel tensions leading up to the legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral. For years, hostility had simmered between the Earp brothers—Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt—and a gang of outlaws called the Cowboys.

The Cowboys included Ike and Billy Clanton, Billy Claiborne, and Frank and Tom McLaury. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, a short but brutal shootout erupted between the two groups in the streets of Tombstone. Although the Earps survived, Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton were killed.

The violence didn’t end there. Five months later, Morgan Earp was shot and killed through the window of a saloon, likely by a Cowboy seeking revenge. Two days after that, Wyatt—recently appointed Deputy U.S. Marshal—tracked down the man he believed responsible.

On March 20, 1882, in Tucson, Arizona, Wyatt shot and killed Frank Stilwell. In response, local authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. The man who took up the cause? None other than Johnny Behan, who set off in pursuit of the fugitive lawman.

If Johnny was still in love with Josephine and Wyatt had become her new partner, this might explain Behan’s eagerness to hunt him down. But if personal revenge was his motive, he never got to carry it out. Eventually, the tensions born of the O.K. Corral gunfight began to fade as the Earps left Tombstone behind.

What happened to Josephine immediately afterward is, like much else in her story, unclear. According to some accounts, she returned to San Francisco to reunite with her family. But archival records suggest another possibility. “Sadie Mansfield” appears to have made several trips between California and Tombstone in the weeks following Stilwell’s death.

Around this time, Mattie was sent to stay with Wyatt’s family in San Bernardino, California, supposedly for her own safety. The plan, at least officially, was for Wyatt to send for his wife once the danger passed. He never did.

Instead, Mattie became a sex worker in Pinal, Arizona, where she took her own life in July 1888. In July 1882, meanwhile, Wyatt traveled to San Francisco, where he reunited with his alleged lover, Josephine. From that point on, the pair made little effort to hide their relationship.

Soon after Wyatt’s arrival, Josephine began calling herself “Mrs. Earp,” and reports suggest the couple married in 1883. Later in life, Josephine would claim they didn’t officially wed until 1892. Given that Mattie was alive until 1888, this later date may have been an attempt to hide the adulterous origins of their relationship.

Most historians agree that Josephine left San Francisco with Wyatt in 1883 and headed to Gunnison, Colorado. For the next two decades, they bounced from town to town, chasing gold and silver strikes across the West. But life with Wyatt was far from idyllic.

Josephine seems to have developed a serious gambling habit. She frequently lost large sums and at times sold her jewelry to fund it. After several mining ventures failed—and others met with mixed success—Wyatt finally struck it rich in the Sonoran Desert.

Josephine followed him to Vidal, California, where the couple traded noisy boomtowns for the isolation of a desert camp. By this point, the events of Tombstone had begun to take on a life of their own. Since 1883, Buffalo Bill Cody had been touring with his Wild West show, romanticizing frontier life across the country.

As the myth of the West grew, journalists clamored for more details about the Earps and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But not everyone wanted the full truth told. Josephine became fiercely protective of her and Wyatt’s shared legacy.

She worked hard to suppress certain details about what really happened in Tombstone. Was she embarrassed by the overlap between their relationship and their earlier entanglements with Mattie and Johnny? Or was she trying to reshape Wyatt into a cleaner, more heroic figure than he really was?

Whatever her reasoning, Josephine successfully forced several publications to withdraw or alter stories about the couple. Meanwhile, Wyatt rubbed shoulders with Hollywood figures such as John Wayne and director John Ford, adding his own spin to the emerging legend of the West.

So it’s hardly surprising that the truth is difficult to pin down. When Wyatt died in 1929, Josephine continued to mythologize her role in his life. According to some accounts, she spent his final years gambling away their money while he slowly wasted away in bed.

When it came time to bury him, she allegedly didn’t even attend the funeral. Josephine herself, however, claimed she was too grief-stricken to go. Whatever her true feelings, she wasn’t too distraught to profit from his death.

Soon afterward, she began negotiating with writer Stuart Lake for a share of the proceeds from his biography, *Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal.* Published in 1931, the book became an instant hit and earned her a tidy sum. But Josephine still wasn’t done trying to control the narrative.

Toward the end of her life, she collaborated on the Cason manuscript, laying the foundations for many of the myths that would surround her in years to come. Even then, she refused to elaborate on the early years of her relationship with Wyatt or her time in Tombstone.

So was Josephine also “Sadie Mansfield,” a working girl involved in a series of illicit affairs? Or was she who she later claimed to be—an innocent young woman drawn into the wonder and romance of the Wild West? Although she was married to one of America’s greatest folk heroes, the whole truth of their story will probably never be known.