Setting History Straight
faces a Herculean challenge in confronting
Josephine Earp, who hooked up with Wyatt in
Tombstone and occupied his bed for the next
half century. A prolific and promiscuous
dissembler,
she littered the landscape with
her lies. She set about
concocting her past before she even had much
of one. She passed herself off as the
daughter of a prosperous German merchant
when she left San Francisco for the first
time in her mid-teens when her father was
actually a hard-working Polish baker of
modest means.
While Josie ostensibly
left home to tour with a production of HMS
Pinafore, she left the chorus line for a
brothel crib as soon the production got to
Prescott, Arizona.
She labored assiduously her entire life to
deny and distort this period, referring to
it obliquely as “the dark time,” but she
stayed with it. It was
in Prescott that she met and charmed Johnny
Behan, who all but inhabited brothels, and
he was sufficiently smitten to follow after
her when she returned to San Francisco still
in her teens.
Living at home again
held little appeal for Josie and when Johnny
Behan came by supposedly dangling a wedding
proposal, she took off with him. Whether
marriage was ever really in mind is
doubtful— Behan wasn’t the faithful husband
type — but she called herself his “fiancée”
once they got to Tombstone. When no marriage
materialized, her father scraped together
$700 for her to return home, but she gave it
to Behan to buy a house where they took up
residence.
“There was simply too much excitement in the
air to remain a child”
Josie is widely quoted in explaining why she
left home so young.
The
words put a charming and precocious
whitewash on her real deeds — turning tricks
as a teen under the name “Sadie”
— and leave out that she was generating most
of that excitement herself. She was one of
those young women savvy from the start of
her impact on men and instinctive in using
that effect.
By her own account
Josie matured physically early and could
have passed for being older. Virgil’s wife
Allie wrote of Josie that her “charms were
undeniable . . . Sadie was an attractive
woman with thick, dark hair, vivid black
eyes, and was well-endowed.” A girlfriend
called her looks “exotic” and joked “her
bosom came around a corner before the rest
of her did.” No less an astute judge of
character than
Bat Masterson called her the
“belle of the honkytonks, the prettiest dame
in three hundred or so of her kind.” Bat
left no doubt just what “her kind” was.
A
veteran prostitute by nineteen, Josie’s was
very much Wyatt’s “kind” of gal.
Once he became a bordello bouncer in his
early twenties, Wyatt only consorted with
“working girls.” This was certainly true of
Mattie Blayllock, the common-law wife he
brought with him to Tombstone; she continued
whoring during her first years as Mrs. Wyatt
Earp and killed herself with a drug overdose
after Wyatt dumped her for a younger, more
devious version in Josie.
By Michael Biehn and Jim Anderson