page_title: Josephine Earp
section_title: Nevada to Alaska to Nevada
hierarchical_section_title: Josephine Earp / Life after Tombstone / Nevada to Alaska to Nevada
caption_attribution_description: English: Wyatt Earp's Northern Saloon, in Tonopah, Nevada. The woman on the left is thought to be Josephine Earp.
context_page_description: Josephine Sarah "Sadie" Earp was the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp, a famed Old West lawman and gambler. She met Wyatt in 1881 in the frontier boom town of Tombstone, Arizona Territory, when she was living with Johnny Behan, sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona.
  Josephine was born in New York to a Prussian Jewish family; her father was a baker. They moved to San Francisco, where Josephine attended dance school as a girl. When her father had difficulty finding work, the family moved in with her older sister and brother-in-law in a working-class tenement. Josephine ran away, possibly as early as age 14, and traveled to Arizona, where she said she went looking for "adventure". Much of her life from about 1874 to 1882 when she lived in the Arizona Territory is uncertain; she worked hard to keep this period of her life private, even threatening legal action against writers and movie producers. She may have arrived in Prescott, Arizona as early as 1874. In a book supposedly about her life, I Married Wyatt Earp, she describes events in Arizona that she witnessed that occurred before 1879, the year she previously claimed to have first arrived in Tombstone.
context_section_description: 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. Josephine got pregnant at the same time, and she thought she could persuade Earp from heading to Alaska. He was in agreement, but Josephine, who was 37, miscarried soon after. They finally boarded the steamship Rosalie on September 21.
  They boarded the steamship Rosalie  for Nome, Alaska on September 21. 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.
  In November 1899, they left Alaska for a period and went to Seattle, Washington, with a plan to open a saloon and gambling room. On November 25, 1899, the Seattle Star reported Earp's arrival. 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.
  Wyatt and Josie returned to Los Angeles on December 13, 1901 and stayed at the Hollenbeck Hotel. They had an estimated $80,000, a relative fortune (equivalent to about $2,460,000 today). 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.
caption: Wyatt Earp's Northern Saloon, Tonopah, 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.
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