Arizona who asked her to marry him. She asked Wyatt for a divorce, but Wyatt didn't believe in divorce and refused. She ran away with the gambler anyway, who later abandoned her in Arizona. Mattie resumed life as a prostitute and committed "suicide by opium poisoning" on July 3, 1888. Evasive about Tombstone history The facts about Josephine's life in the Arizona Territory and in Tombstone have been obscured by her legal and personal efforts to keep that period private. Josephine's own story offers a conflicting account of when she first reached Arizona. Her confusing recollection of events show how easily Josephine mixed fact and fiction. After Wyatt's death, Josephine collaborated with two of her husband's cousins, Mabel Earp Cason and her sister Vinolia Earp Ackerman, to document her life. The cousins recorded events in her later life, but they found Josephine evasive about the timing and nature of events during her time in the Arizona Territory and Tombstone. She would not even talk about the key events of 1881–82, their key years in Tombstone. The most she would say is that she returned to the Arizona Territory in 1881 and joined Johnny Behan in Tombstone. She said that she had believed Behan was planning to marry her, but he kept putting it off, and she grew disillusioned. Based on the story she told the Earp cousins, when correlated with other sources, Josephine may have left her parents’ home in San Francisco for Prescott, Arizona, as early as October 1874, when she was 13 or 14 years old, not 1879 as she told everyone later on. Cason says she and her sister "finally abandoned work on the manuscript because she [Josie] would not clear up the Tombstone sequence where it pertained to her and Wyatt." Hidden personal past In addition to Josephine's concealing Wyatt's past relationship with Blaylock, modern researchers think she may also have been concealing her own past as a "sporting lady" or prostitute. When Stuart Lake was researching his book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal he heard stories about Sadie's personal history. He didn't include them in the book, but he did write about them in letters during 1929. Bat Masterson, a friend of Wyatt Earp's who was in Tombstone from February to April 1881, described her to Stuart Lake as "an incredible beauty" and as the "belle of the honkytonks, the prettiest dame in three hundred or