I Married Wyatt Earp

Origins

After the death of Wyatt Earp, Josephine Marcus Earp tried to get her own life story published. She sought the assistance of Wyatt's cousins Mabel Earp Cason and Cason's sister Vinola Earp Ackerman. The cousins recorded events in Josephine's life and found Josephine was generous with details about her life after Tombstone, but could not remember events before and while she lived in the town. The Cason manuscript the Earp cousins produced had a serious limitation: it was missing the family's most compelling and interesting story, the time while Josephine and Wyatt lived in Tombstone. Cason and her sister pressured Josephine to supply as much information about her time in Tombstone as she readily recalled about the rest of her life, but Josie resisted. She was very protective of her and Wyatt's image. She finally revealed only a few details, including that she had returned to Arizona when Johnny Behan promised to marry her, but was disillusioned when he continually put off the wedding.

Josephine approached several publishers about the book, but backed out each time due to their insistence that she be completely open and forthcoming, rather than slanting her memories to her favor. Mable Earp Cason says she and her sister "finally abandoned work on the manuscript because she would not clear up the Tombstone sequence where it pertained to her and Wyatt." When Josephine could not find a publisher, she changed her mind and asked the cousins to burn their work, but Cason held back a copy, which amateur historian Glenn Boyer eventually acquired the rights to.

Boyer edited the manuscript, called the Cason Memoir or Cason Manuscript, and Earp historians agree on its validity. Boyer donated the original The Cason Manuscript to the University of Arizona, which is housed in a special collection and a second copy to the Ford County Historical Society. When Boyer presented the idea of publishing the manuscript to the University of Arizona, they insisted the book had to cover the period in Tombstone. Boyer produced a second, previously unknown and still unseen manuscript, that he said Josephine had worked on between 1929 and 1932 with the help of John Clum, a former editor of The Tombstone Epitaph newspaper. This became known as the "Clum manuscript."

Notability

The University of Arizona Press published the book in 1976 under the title I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus. The copyright was issued in her name and her name was given as the author. A book published by a university press usually must meet a high standard. When it is sold as non-fiction, academics consider the university's approval sacrosanct.

Boyer's book gained wide acceptance as a memoir written by Josephine and an accurate portrayal of her life with Wyatt Earp. The book was immensely popular for many years, capturing the imagination of people with an interest in western history, studied in classrooms, cited by scholars, and relied upon as factual by filmmakers. It became the university's fourth all-time best-selling book with 12 printings totaling more than 35,000 copies. It is the second-largest selling book about Wyatt Earp.

Boyer in turn received wide recognition as the foremost authority on Wyatt Earp. Following on the success of I Married Wyatt Earp, Boyer published over the next 30 years a stream of apparently well-researched and provocatively reasoned papers. He is responsible for the publication of Big Nose Kate's memoirs as well as the long-sought 'Flood Manuscript' written with Wyatt Earp's direct input.

For many years, the book was accepted as a legitimate historical document and was cited by important works on Tombstone like And Die in the West by Paula Mitchell Marks, Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait by Karen Holliday Tanner, and Richard Maxwell Brown's social history of frontier law, No Duty to Retreat (Oxford, 1991). The book was even adopted as required reading in history classes. University of New Mexico history professor Paul Hutton, who has served as executive director of the Western History Association, noted in 1998 that the University of Arizona had been selling the book for 23 years as an individual's memoir and an important historical document.

The book became a made-for-television movie in 1983 starring Marie Osmond and Bruce Boxleitner. Based in part on Boyer's work, the all-female musical I Married Wyatt Earp was written and performed beginning in 2006 at the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It was produced off-Broadway in 2011.

However, critics began to question Boyer's sources for the book in the 1990s. Stephen Cox, then director of the University of Arizona Press, told the Arizona Daily Star in July 1998 that he stood behind the authenticity of the book.

Kaloma cover image

Boyer published I Married Wyatt Earp with a picture on the cover of a woman wearing a sheer gauze peignoir, re-touched to conceal her breasts and nipples. He insisted that the picture of the partially nude woman was Josephine when she was young, and that Johnny Behan took the photo of her in Tombstone in 1880.

Value at auction

Once the image appeared on the cover of the book, and due to the book cover attribution, copies of the portrait of "Josephine Earp" began to sell for hundreds and later thousands of dollars. Citations in auction catalogs and from dealer sales, all after the 1976 publication of I Married Wyatt Earp, were regularly used for a number of years to "verify" that the image was Josie Earp. On December 6, 1996 the image, represented as a picture of Josephine Earp, was offered by H. C. A. Auctions in Burlington, North Carolina and sold for USD $2,750.

Don Ackerman wrote Maine Antique Digest in April 1997 questioning the authenticity of the image sold at auction. Bob Raynor of the magazine acknowledged that H. C. A., after researching the image, had represented it as being Josie Earp. He noted that “Both Sotheby's and Swann Galleries identified and sold the photo image in 1996, both auctions prior to the December HCA auction.” Raynor stated, “Please note that the image was used as a dust cover of the book I Married Wyatt Earp, published by University of Arizona Press, 1976. Additionally, the image was used in another book, Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta, published by Talei, and also in Pioneer Jews, Houghton Mifflin, 1984. In all instances the image was identified as Josephine Earp.” However, all these sources postdate and rely on Boyer's use of the image on the cover of the book. On April 8, 1998, Sotheby's sold another copy of the image for $2,875.

Known origin

However, the first known published image of the photograph of the beautiful young woman boldly posing for the camera wearing a sheer gauze peignoir was circulated in 1914. Labeled "Kaloma," it was originally produced as an art print. The risqué image was popular and sold well. At the bottom right of the uncropped, original image is printed, "COPYRIGHT 1914-P N CO." The image was copyrighted and circulated by the Pastime Novelty Company of 1313 Broadway, New York, New York. The image was used in the same year on the cover of Kaloma, Valse Hesitante (Hesitation Waltz), composed by Gire Goulineaux and published by the Cosmopolitan Music Publishing Company in New York City. It was used as a pin-up image during World War I.

Most of the early Kaloma images seen to date are photogravures, a type of high-quality reproduction that has been produced since the 1850s, with a surge in popularity between 1890 and 1920. A photogravure is made from an engraving plate on a printing press, making them much less costly than actual photographs. Photogravures were often printed with title and publication data below the image and were commonly used to create many copies of high quality illustrations for books, postcards and art magazines.

The image regained popularity in the 1960s. One of the great rock poster designers of the time, Alton Kelley with Family Dog Productions in Haight Ashbury, made the image of the semi-nude woman as the centerpiece of his classic concert poster for Vanilla Fudge and The Charles Lloyd Quartet when they appeared at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco September 29-October 1, 1976.

Links to Josephine Earp

No evidence has been found that links the picture to Josephine before Boyer's book was published in 1976, and no primary sources have been found that link the photo to Josephine's time in Tombstone. Many individuals share similar facial features and faces on people who look radically different can look similar when viewed from certain angles. Because of this, most museum staff, knowledgeable researchers and collectors require provenance or a documented history for an image to support physical similarities that might exist. Experts will rarely offer even a tentative identification of new or unique images of famous people based solely on similarities shared with other known images.

An analysis of the photograph shows that the fashion and hair style of the young woman are not from the 1880s time frame, but from the early 20th Century. If the 1914 copyright date is the year the picture was taken, Josephine Earp would have been 53 in 1914. Casey Terfertiller's book Wyatt Earp The Life Behind the Legend contains a picture of an elderly Josephine Marcus Earp on page 225. The photo is from the Robert G. McCubbin Collection and has been verified as authentic. The date of the photograph is estimated at about 1921. Josephine is elderly and very plump. This contrasts sharply with the alleged 1914 photo of a very young, thin and buxom "Josie".

On November 26, 1997, Dave McKenna of ABC Novelty Company, the successor to the original company that produced the image, wrote "I will confirm that this photo was copyrighted under the ABC name in 1914. In our warehouse we have a thousand similar photos of nude woman that we used and still use. My understanding is that the photographs were taken in New York or Boston."

Boyer responded to criticism of the validity of the image by offering to sell proof in a booklet available from his company, "Historical Research Associates" operated out of his home in Rodeo, New Mexico. When asked directly about the authenticity of the image in 2009, he replied, "Actually the publisher made the decision for the cover. My take? If it's not her, it ought to be."

Effects on publication

Boyer responded to criticism saying he had an artistic license. His credibility was questioned, while his unwillingness or inability to provide researchers with evidence led the University to re-assess the book.

University withdraws book

In an interview in 1999, the university's current president Peter Likins described the book as having a "fictional format." Although Likens admitted he had not read the book, he said the book states that it isn't a first-person account but a blend of secondary sources. The epilogue says that it is a memoir based on Josephine Earp own writing. Likins characterized the disagreements about the book's authenticity as a squabble between non-academic authors hoping to promote different interpretations of Western history. It might take years, Likins said, for scholars to decide which version of Earp events was correct. During his investigation of Boyer's work, reporter Tony Ortega found that "the University of Arizona Press not only knew his sources were suspect, but they encouraged him to embellish." Marshall Townsend, Director of the University of Arizona Press when Boyer's book was published, actively discouraged two editors from questioning Boyer, and repeatedly encouraged him to put "more of yourself" into the book.

Author Andrew Albanese wrote that "historians agree that the press has put its integrity on the line by allowing Boyer's bogus Tombstone account to enter the mainstream of Western history under the imprimatur of a scholarly press." In 1999, the University of Arizona Press director said they would reissue the book with a redesigned cover and alter the cover copy to make it clearer that the author was Glenn Boyer and not Josephine Earp. Hutton said that the university's decision to claim that the book is partly fiction after 23 years "is essentially foisting a fraud upon the public."

When confronted with allegations that his book was a hoax, Boyer said he had been misunderstood. "My work is beginning to be recognized by all but a few fanatics and their puppets as a classic example of the newly recognized genre 'creative non-fiction.'" Boyer compared his work to Pulitzer Prize winning author Edmund Morris, who wrote Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Professor Donna Lee Brien wrote that in his "confused defence" Boyer failed to differentiate between his actions, collecting and blending primary source documents with his own fictionalized accounts, and Morris’s very "experimental biography which transparently acknowledged his inclusion of clearly recognisably fictional passages into traditionally sourced and referenced text." She noted that "...as soon as Boyer invented source manuscripts, fabricated elements of the story and presented his own speculations as historical fact, he was not writing creative nonfiction but historical fiction—that is, fiction based on historical events."

In early 2000 the University refused to comment about the book and referred all questions to university lawyers. On January 29, 2000, Boyer posted a note on Amazon.com that he intended to take back the rights to the book. In March the University of Arizona Press announced they had released all rights to the book, removed the book from their catalog, and returned unsold copies to Boyer. Boyer claimed he decided to drop publication because he was disappointed with the university's handling of movie rights. Boyer found a small non-academic publisher, shortened the title to I Married Wyatt Earp, and shifted authorship to his own name.

Boyer response

Boyer has admitted that the book is "100 percent Boyer." He said that he is uninterested in what others think of the accuracy of what he has written. "This is an artistic effort. I don't have to adhere to the kind of jacket that these people are putting on me. I am not a historian. I'm a storyteller." Boyer said the book was not really a first-person account, that he had interpreted Wyatt Earp in Josephine's voice, and admitted that he couldn't produce any documents to vindicate his methods.

Boyer admitted that two other books he had written, An Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday (Reminder Press, 1966), and Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone Vendetta, (Talie, 1993) were not based on the documents he claimed to have used. He followed the last book with a fourteen-part series in True West magazine titled Wyatt Earp, Legendary American. Boyer responded to continuing questions about his sources and allegations of fraud, claiming that because of his close connection to the Earp family, he "had a license to say any darned thing I please for the purpose of protecting the reputation of the Earp Boys, which I committed myself to do. I can lie, cheat, and steal, and figuratively ambush, antagonize, poison wells, and all of the others [sic] things that go with a first class Vendetta, even a figurative one."

Impact on Old West research

Professor of Western history Gary Roberts wrote that Earp researchers are burdened with discriminating between Boyer fact and Boyer fiction. "By passing off his opinions and interpretations as primary sources, he has poisoned the record in a way that may take decades to clear." Boyer's work is so enmeshed into the literature that if it is discredited virtually everything written since I Married Wyatt Earp was published is suspect to the extent that its conclusions are based on material drawn from Boyer.

The book has become an example of how supposedly factual works can trip up the public, researchers, and librarians. It was described by the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology in 2006 as a "creative exercise" and hoax. Other authors agreed that the book cannot be relied on.

Glenn Boyer's contributions to Wyatt Earp studies were widely regarded, but doubts raised by Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta seriously damaged his credibility. Author Gary Roberts, a Western historian, noted, “History is what’s suffered the most. It’s all kind of tragic really.” Allen Barra, author of Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends, believes that I Married Wyatt Earp is now recognized by Earp researchers as a hoax. Casey Tefertiller, a long-time critic of Boyer and the author of Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend, agreed. "This may be the most remarkable literary hoax in American history. It has been believed and accepted as the words of Josephine Earp for twenty-three years now." Tefertiller's book was one of the very few that didn't use any of Boyer's work as a source. Boyer commented, "Writing about Earp and failing to mention me and my work is something like writing about Catholicism and neglecting to mention the Pope."