The book I Married Wyatt Earp (1967), based on a manuscript allegedly written in part by her, describes events she witnessed in Arizona that occurred before 1879, the year she claimed at other times to have first arrived in Tombstone.

There is some evidence that she lived from 1874 to 1876 in Prescott and Tip Top, Arizona Territory under the assumed name of Sadie Mansfield, who was a prostitute, before becoming ill and returning to San Francisco.

Josephine and Wyatt moved throughout their life, from one boomtown to another, until they finally bought a cottage in the Sonoran Desert town of Vidal, California, on the Colorado River, where they spent the cooler seasons.

"[2] She apparently resented treatment by her teachers in the San Francisco schools, describing them as "inconsistent of a tolerant and gay populous acting as merciless and self-righteous as a New England village in bringing up its children."

[12] Waters' work was later found to be critically flawed, "based upon prevarications, character assassinations, and the psychological battleground that was the brilliant, narcissistic mind of its author.

Bat Masterson, a friend of Wyatt Earp's who was in Tombstone from February to April 1881,[29]: 41 [30] described her to Stuart Lake as "an incredible beauty"[31] and as the "belle of the honkytonks, the prettiest dame in three hundred or so of her kind.

"[38] She said that at the age of 18, she ran away with two friends, Dora Hirsch, daughter of her music teacher, and a girl named Agnes, who had a role in Pauline Markham troupe's production of H.M.S.

"[26]: 42 In the Cason manuscript, which was in part the basis for the book I Married Wyatt Earp, Josephine says she and her friend Dora joined the Pauline Markham Theater Company in 1879, when it visited San Francisco on its Western tour.

The Markham troupe is documented as leaving San Francisco on board the Southern Pacific Railroad, not a ship nor a stagecoach, in October 1879 for Casa Grande, Arizona, the end of the line.

[26]: 11  In November 1874, a woman named Sadie Mansfield took a stagecoach from San Francisco to Prescott along with several prostitutes working for Madame Hattie Wells.

[citation needed] Josephine told others that when she and her friend Dora arrived in Arizona she learned that "some renegade Yuma-Apaches had escaped from the reservation to which they had been consigned and had returned to their old haunts on the war-path."

Josephine first met John "Johnny" Harris Behan at the ranch house, whom she described as, "young and darkly handsome, with merry black eyes and an engaging smile.

[2] Later that same month, on October 24, 1874, the Arizona Miner reported, "Al Zieber, Sergeant Stauffer and a mixed command of white and red soldiers are in the hills of Verde looking for some erring Apaches, whom they will be apt to find."

She took the unusual step of asserting in her divorce petition that Behan "at divers times and places openly and notoriously visited houses of ill-fame and prostitution at said town of Prescott.

The Weekly Journal-Miner reported in October 1879 that Behan was planning on opening a business in the silver mining boom town of Tip Top in central Arizona.

Both made a stagecoach journey from San Francisco to Prescott, Arizona Territory; both traveled with a black woman named Julia; both were sexual partners with Behan; both were 19 years old, born in New York City, and had parents from Germany.

[27]: 117 [61] In Josephine's version of her life story, she left San Francisco to join Behan to Tombstone in October 1880,[62] and was hoping he would fulfill his promises to marry her.

[32] At the time, her parents, her sister Henrietta, and her brother Nathan were all living in a lower-class neighborhood south of Market Street in San Francisco with their daughter, her husband, their four children, and a boarder.

[66] A letter written by former New Mexico Territory Governor Miguel Otero appears to indicate that Earp had strong feelings for Josephine shortly after leaving Tombstone in April 1882.

[69] In June 1881, Sadie sent a postal money order to her mother using the name Josephine Behan,[43] and Wyatt Earp was still living with his common-law wife Mattie Blaylock.

[42]: p275-198 [77] After the Coeur d'Alene mining venture died out, Earp and Josie briefly went to El Paso, Texas before moving in 1887 to San Diego where the railroad was about to arrive and a real estate boom was underway.

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[63] near the Whipple Mountains.

[63] 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.

[99] Wyatt had some modest success with the gold mines[100] and they lived on the slim proceeds of income from that and investments in Oakland and Kern County oil field.

[101][102] 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.

[106] During an investigation of the boxing match by a panel appointed by San Francisco Mayor Washington Bartlett, they learned Josephine Earp was a "degenerate horseplayer" and that she frequently took loans out against her jewelry.

[71] Eager to escape the controversy over the boxing match dogging him, Earp gave up managing race horses in San Francisco and on December 20, 1896, he and Josie left for Yuma, Arizona.

When Wyatt died in 1929, Josephine Earp had his body cremated and secretly buried him in the Marcus family plot in the Jewish Hills of Eternity Memorial Park in Colma, California.

[112][115] In their later years Josephine worked hard to eliminate any mention that she had been Johnny Behan's mistress or of Wyatt's previous common law marriage to the prostitute Mattie Blaylock.

[17] Josephine finally changed her mind and asked Wyatt's cousins to burn their work, but Cason held back a copy, to which Glenn Boyer eventually acquired the rights,[116][117] and is now in the custody of the Ford County Historical Society in Dodge City.