Josephine Earp - Early Life

Early Life

Josephine went by the name of Sadie most of her adult life, except to her common-law husband Wyatt, who referred to her as Josie. She was the second of three children born to German-Jewish immigrants Carl-Hyman Marcuse (later Henry Marcus) and Sophie Lewis in Brooklyn, New York in 1861. When they married, Lewis was 8 years older than her husband and a widow with a 3-year-old daughter named Rebecca. Sadie had an older brother Nathan (born August 12, 1857) and younger sister Henrietta (born July 10, 1864). When Josephine was 11, her father was lured by the opportunity afforded in the growing city of San Francisco. They traveled via ship to Panama and caught a second ship to San Francisco, arriving while the city was recovering from the disastrous earthquake of October 21, 1868. Her parents joined the Reformed Temple and her father found work as a baker.

By 1870, San Francisco's population had boomed to 149,473 and housing was in short supply. Apartment buildings were crowded and large homes were converted into rooming houses. The city was riding on the coattails of the still expanding economic boom caused by the extraction of silver from the Comstock Lode. Lots of money flowed from Nevada through San Francisco, and for a while the Marcus family prospered. Later that year, her half-sister Rebecca Levy married Aaron Wiener, an insurance salesman and a native of Prussia, like her parents.

Henry Marcus made enough money to send Josephine and her sister Hattie to music and dance classes at the McCarthy Dancing Academy, a family-owned business that taught music and dance to both children and adults. In I Married Wyatt Earp, Boyer quotes Josephine, "Hattie and I attended the McCarthy Dancing Academy for children on Howard Street (Polk and Pacific). Eugenia and Lottie McCarthy taught us to dance the Highland Fling, the Sailor's Hornpipe, and ballroom dancing." Josephine claimed that she matured early. “There was far too much excitement in the air to remain a child.” As a girl, Josephine's favorite activity was going to the shows in town. She apparently resented how she was treated 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.” She described the harsh discipline meted out, including the “sting of rattan" and “being slapped for tardiness”.