Josephine Earp

Josephine Earp was an American performer and the long-term partner and wife of frontier lawman Wyatt Earp. Her life connected theatrical travel, boomtown Arizona and the later management of Wyatt Earp’s public memory, although surviving accounts of her early years are often contradictory.

Josephine's early life is difficult to reconstruct because later autobiographical accounts were selective and sometimes contradictory. She was living in Arizona Territory by the early 1880s and formed a long partnership with Wyatt Earp, accompanying him through mining and business ventures in several western states and Alaska. After Wyatt's death she worked to protect his reputation and shape the public memory of their life together.

Hourly History’s Josephine Earp makes Josephine the subject rather than treating her simply as an appendage to Wyatt Earp. The biography follows her movement to Arizona, her relationship with Earp during and after the Tombstone years, and the couple’s later travels and ventures in the West and California. It also addresses the difficulty of reconstructing her life because Josephine guarded private information and actively helped shape the heroic public memory that developed around Wyatt.