Johnny Behan - Relationship With Josephine Sadie Marcus

Relationship With Josephine Sadie Marcus

On September 28, 1874, Behan was nominated as Sheriff at the Democratic convention in Yavapai County.

Some accounts state that Sadie Marcus ran away from her parent's home in San Francisco in 1874 and was in Prescott The Prescott Miner reported on October 6, 1874 that “J.H. Behan left on an 'electioneering' tour toward Black Canyon, Wickenburg and other places” north and east of present-day Phoenix. and may have met Sadie Marcus during this trip. She and her friend Dora Hurst and other passengers on a stage coach had been forced to hole up in a ranch house near Cave Creek by Apache Indians who had escaped the Cave Creek reservation. Indian fighter Al Sieber was tracking the Apaches. Josephine said the famous Indian scout led them to safety. According to Josephine, she first met "John Harris" here, who she described as, "young and darkly handsome, with merry black eyes and an engaging smile." Behan was gone for 35 days campaigning for the Sheriff's office. She said “my heart was stirred by his attentions as would the heart of any girl (would) have been under such romantic circumstances. The affair was at least a diversion in my homesickness though I cannot say I was in love with him.” Behan returned on November 11 but lost the election.

In 1875, Behan's wife Victoria filed for divorce, complaining that Behan "at divers times and places openly and notoriously visited houses of ill-fame and prostitution at said town of Prescott." Victoria cited liaisons with several woman, but specifically mentioned a "Sadie or Sada Mansfield," a 14 year old "woman of prostitution and ill-fame" as correspondent in the divorce action. The divorce also cited Behan's threats of violence and unrelenting verbal abuse.

Behan and his wife were divorced in June 1875. Behan moved for a time to the northwest Arizona Territory where he served as the Mohave County Recorder in 1877, and then deputy sheriff of Mohave County in Gillet in 1879. He represented Mohave County at the Tenth Arizona Legislative Assembly which met beginning January 6, 1879 in Prescott. In November, 1879, Behan had a saloon in Tip Top, a then fast-growing silver mining town in central Arizona. Behan was counted in the 1880 census in Tip Top, Arizona as a saloon keeper. Nineteen year old Sadie Mansfield, whose occupation was given as "Courtesan", the same person that his former wife Victoria had named in their divorce five years earlier, was also living in Tip Top. Sadie Mansfield and Sadie Marcus also were both 19 years old, were born in New York, and their parents were from Prussia.

Sadie apparently returned to San Francisco for a period of time. She wrote that Johnny came for her in San Francisco and persuaded her parents to approve their engagement. Some modern researchers question the likelihood that her father, a Reform Jew, would approve her union with Behan, an unemployed office-seeker, 34, a Gentile, and a divorced father.

Behan said he could not leave his livery stable business for a wedding in San Francisco. She thought Johnny’s marriage proposal was a good excuse to leave home. She wrote, “life was dull for me in San Francisco. In spite of my bad experience of a few years ago the call to adventure still stirred my blood." They lived together as husband and wife.

Sometime during early 1881, Josephine arrived home to find Behan in bed with the wife of a friend of theirs, and she kicked Behan out of the home they had built with her father's money. One version of the story is that Sadie had taken Albert, who had a hearing impairment, to San Francisco for treatment. Upon their return, they arrived late in the evening and a day earlier than expected. They found Behan in bed with another woman.

It is not known how Marcus and Wyatt Earp began their relationship, but at some point in 1881 they began having a relationship. Similarly, it is not known when Earp and his current wife Mattie Blaylock ended their relationship. Tombstone diarist George W. Parsons never mentioned seeing Wyatt and Sadie together and neither did John Clum in his memoirs.

Behan was embarrassed by the public breakup. Most Tombstone residents thought that Marcus and Behan were legally married. Her breakup with Behan was publicized by the The Tombstone Epitaph. Earp had been in a common-law marriage with Mattie Blaylock since about 1873 and she was listed as his wife in the 1880 census.