page_title: Josephine Earp
section_title: Desert cottage
hierarchical_section_title: Josephine Earp / Life after Tombstone / Desert cottage
caption_attribution_description: English: Wyatt and Josephine Earp in their mining camp near Vidal California. They owned a number of mining claims that they worked during the fall, winter, and spring of each year.
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: After Tonopah's gold strike waned, Wyatt staked mining claims just outside Death Valley and elsewhere in the Mojave Desert. In 1906 he discovered several deposits of gold and copper near the Sonoran Desert town of Vidal, California on the Colorado River and filed more than 100 mining claims near the Whipple Mountains. Wyatt and Josie Earp summered in Los Angeles and lived in at least nine small Los Angeles rentals as early as 1885 and as late as 1929, mostly in the summer. They bought the only home they ever owned, a small cottage in Vidal, and lived there during the fall, winter and spring months of 1925 – 1928, while he worked his Happy Days mines in the Whipple Mountains a few miles north. Wyatt had some modest success with the gold mines and they lived on the slim proceeds of income from that and investments in Oakland and Kern County oil field. Josie's three nieces, daughters of her half-sister Rebecca and husband Aaron Wiener, would frequently visit the couple during the winter months at their desert camp.
caption: Wyatt and Josephine Earp in their ramada near their mining claim outside Vidal, California: This is the only confirmed picture of the two of them together.[97]
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