I Married Wyatt Earp
Encyclopedia
The book I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus, first published by the University of Arizona Press
in 1976, was sold as a memoir
of Josephine Earp
, the widow of western
Deputy U.S. Marshal
Wyatt Earp
. It was regarded for many years as a factual account that shed considerable light on the life of Wyatt Earp and his brothers in Tombstone
, Arizona Territory
. It was cited in scholarly works, assigned as classroom work, and used as a source by filmmakers. Editor Glen Boyer said that the image on the cover of a semi-nude woman was of Josephine in her 20s, and copies of the image were sold at auction for up to $2,875.
Boyer had a long-term relationship with members of the Earp family. He claimed that he used two manuscripts written by Josephine Earp as the basis for the memoir. He said that he had acquired an account, allegedly composed by Josephine with the help of former Tombstone Mayor and The Tombstone Epitaph publisher John Clum, from Earp researcher Mrs. Charles A. Colyn. He also acquired a second manuscript written by Josephine with the assistance of two Earp cousins. Josephine fiercely protected details of her and Wyatt's early life, even threatening litigation to keep some details private, like the existence of Wyatt Earp's second wife, Mattie Blaylock
. Josephine was repeatedly vague about her and Wyatt's life in Tombstone, so much so that the Earp cousins gave up collaborating with her and publishers refused to publish the manuscript.
In 1994, other Western researchers identified discrepancies in the book and began to challenge the authenticity of the Clum manuscript. They also identified factual errors and inconsistencies in other books published by Boyer, leading to an increasing number of questions about the veracity of his work. The risque cover image was linked to a photogravure titled Kaloma and first published by a novelty company in 1914. A 1998 investigative article in the Phoenix New Times revealed that Boyer could not prove the Clum manuscript existed. The article also disclosed that the university press' editor encouraged Boyer to embellish the account. During the interview, Boyer said that he had a responsibility to protect the reputation of the Earp brothers, and that he "had a license to say any darned thing I please...[to] lie, cheat, and steal..." In 2000, the University Press withdrew the book from its catalog. Boyer found another publisher and retitled the book I Married Wyatt Earp with his name as the author.
, 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 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 Glen Boyer eventually acquired the rights to.
Boyer edited the manuscript, called the Cason Memoir or Cason Manuscript, and Earp historians agree on its validity. It is now housed in the Special Collections room of the University of Arizona Library. 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.
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. 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.
Josephine wanted to keep their tarnished history associated with Tombstone private and sanitize anything that could be seen negatively. Wyatts' cousins pressed her for details, for something about her personal life in Tombstone. She finally consented to share that upon returning to Arizona, she believed Johnny Behan was going to marry her, and was disappointed and disillusioned when he repeatedly delayed the wedding. In her version of events, she said years later that she lived with a lawyer while working as a housekeeper for Behan and his ten year old son, Albert. Boyer argues that she actually lived with Behan. Boyer warns readers of "her ‘little-old-lady’ attempts to tell only the decorous and proper." Interviewers said she was often "difficult" to interview.
Josephine was apparently sensitive to what others might think about Wyatt's overlapping relationship with both her and Wyatt's common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock
, who Wyatt was living with when Josephine and Wyatt began their relationship, among other things. Blaylock suffered from severe headaches and was addicted to laudanum
, an opiate-based pain reliever in common use at the time, and later committed suicide.
In addition to the manuscript prepared with the help of the Earp cousins, Boyer said he relied on a second manuscript, the so-called Clum manuscript. It contained details of their life in Tombstone that was missing from the story she wrote with the Earp cousins. Boyer claimed that the Clum manuscript had been written by The Tombstone Epitaph publisher John Clum
based on conversations with Josephine.
Boyer wrote in the epilogue to the book, "The first Josephine Earp manuscript, the one prepared with the assistance of Parsons and Clum, had been made available to me earlier by Mrs. Charles A. Colyn, an Earp researcher, collector and genealogist of the first magnitude. Upon her death in 1973, this Earp relative by marriage bequeathed me her whole research collection to perpetuate. Without her generous assistance over the years, I would not have attempted to construct this book. The Cason manuscript alone simply lacked the necessary detail on Tombstone; it was essential to couple it with the earlier, more frank manuscript, before a complete narrative could be achieved" Boyer said he "merg[ed] the two manuscripts, which contained vastly different materials presented in widely different styles."
To bolster the authenticity of the book, Boyer pointed to affidavits and letters from the Cason family. In a September 21, 1983 statement, Earp cousin Jeanne Cason Laing wrote, “I believe the book edited by Mr. Boyer is bona fide
in its entirety and is remarkably accurate in its portrayal of Mrs. Earp’s character and personality.” She had not seen the so-called Clum manuscript and relied on Boyer's word as to its authenticity.
When questioned about the origins of the Clum manuscript during the early 1980s, Boyer changed his story to say that he did not receive the Clum manuscript from Colyn after all, instead it was given to him by one of Earp's nieces. When asked by a reporter in 1998 if the Clum manuscript was real, Boyer replied, "Why am I compelled to tell the truth about a manuscript like that that is worth a lot of money?" Boyer continues. "I may have it and I may not. That's none of your business." When asked if the Clum manuscript was a compilation of sources, he said, "You bet your ass." "The Clum manuscript is a generic term and I've said it over and over."
Student-reporter Ryan Gabrielson from the University of Arizona Wildcat interviewed Boyer. He told Gabrielson, "The Clum manuscript is a generic term." "This—in addition (to other source materials)—was supported by literally hundreds, maybe thousands of letters and documents." Boyer's varied descriptions of the manuscript, its origins, and its eventual disposition are "so contradictory that they aren't credible."
Jack Burrows, who wrote John Ringo, The Gunfighter Who Never Was, said, “How can he just take a stack of material and give it a name that has nothing to do with what’s included? You can take a cowpie and call it filet mignon, but somebody’s going to catch on during dinner. This is just gobbledygook.”
Mrs. Colyn wrote Glenn Boyer on December 9, 1965, as reprinted in The Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp, "I never had a real manuscript which could be called such." Boyer said that the Clum manuscript could be found in the University of Arizona archives but they could not produce it. Boyer finally admitted that he no longer had the Clum manuscript and could not locate it.
One inconsistency noted by other researchers is the account of Warren Earp
's death. Josephine allegedly wrote in I Married Wyatt Earp how Wyatt returned to Arizona to avenge Warren Earp
's July 6, 1900 killing. However, on June 29, 1900, the Nome Daily News reported that Wyatt had been arrested for "interfering with an officer while in the discharge of his duty ... Earp, upon reaching the barracks, asserted that his action had been misconstrued, and that he had intended to assist the deputy marshal." Other references to him in the newspaper placed him in Alaska for the next several weeks. There was no way for Wyatt to get to Arizona in the time available.
Boyer's Josephine cites an article from the Tombstone Weekly Nugget of March 19, 1881—an article that smeared Earp's friend Doc Holliday
by implicating him in a botched stagecoach robbery. "Doc's implication in this robbery through the propaganda of...the Nugget," she writes, "led straight to the Earps' shootout with the rustlers some six months later." But author Casey Tefertiller studied the Nugget microfiche and could not find a reference to Holliday. After further research, he suggested that Boyer had made a gaffe common to Earp researchers—he had lifted a confabulated version of the Nugget article from Billy Breakenridge's 1928 book, Helldorado: Bringing the Law to the Mesquite.
As the severity of Boyer's inventions became more widely known, Laura Cason, the granddaughter of Mable Earp Cason who helped author the Cason Manuscript, issued a statement that said, "Mr. Boyer now claims that I Married Wyatt Earp is creative non-fiction when he has always led our family to believe it as a true account and memoir of Josephine Earp." In February 2000, when the scandal over his work on the book became widely known, she formally asked Boyer to return the Cason manuscript. "We are saddened to learn that Mr. Boyer has seemingly manipulated Cason family members over the years in an apparent effort to provide authentication when questions arose."
Once the image appeared on the cover of the book, and largely due to the book cover attribution, copies of the portrait of "Josephine Earp" began to sell for hundreds and later thousands of dollars. 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.
However, the first known version of the photograph of the beautiful young woman boldly posed for the camera in 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 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.
Most of the early Kaloma images seen to date are photogravures, high-quality reproductions that have been produced since the 1850s, with a surge in popularity between 1890 and 1920. The image was 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.
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 copyright date was the year the picture was taken, Josephine Earp was born in 1861 and would have been 53 in 1914. Casey Terfertiller's Wyatt Earp shows 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 is very plump. This contrasts the 1914 photo of "Josie" where she is young and thin.
On November 26, 1997, Dave McKenna of ABC Novelty Company, the successor to the original company, wrote "I will confirm that this photo was copyrighted under the A B C 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 the his company, "Historical Research Associates" operated out of his home in Rodeo, New Mexico.
Vanilla Fudge, a late 60s and early 70s rock band even featured the nude woman on one of their rock posters. One of the great rock poster designers of the time, Alton Kelley with Family Dog Productions in Haight Ashbury, made Kaloma the centerpiece of his classic concert poster for Vanilla Fudge and The Charles Lloyd Quartet at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco September 29-October 1, 1976.
." "The idea was to write a novel in the style of a memoir as if somebody was actually telling the story, in this case Ted Ten Eyck," Palmquist says. In a 1977 letter to Earp researcher Robert Mullin, Boyer told a very different story about Ten Eyck. Boyer wrote that he had received a new manuscript from Earp family members, "allegedly by one Teodore [sic] Ten Eyck, a name I can find nowhere else in Earpiana." Boyer claimed that the manuscript was "clearly authentic" and that it contained "fascinating revelations (if they are true) and would make an ace movie."
Written in the form of a "non-fiction novel
," according to the book's foreword, Boyer said he invented the false name Ten Eyck to protect the newsman's family, who asked that he not be identified. However, Boyer's description of Ten Eyck varied widely as critics grew more specific in their questions, challenging his work.
Boyer said the book was the memoirs of a journalist who was present in Tombstone while the Earps were lawmen. In the book, Ten Eyck said he worked for the New York Herald in 1881, but his name is not found in any of the paper's 1881-82 editions. While positioned by Boyer as a non-fiction novel, it contains errors that cannot be resolved if the author is a real person. Ten Eyck identified Budd Philpot's hometown as "Halistoga", which Boyer identified as a misprint. In a footnote, he noted that the town's actual name was "Calistoga". In the original story from The Tombstone Epitaph, Philpot's home is "Calistoga", although the 'C' is very faint. In 1951, Douglas Martin reprinted editions of the newspaper from that period, in which the indistinct 'C' is turned into 'H'. Boyer said Ten Eyck died in 1946, causing researchers to wonder how he could replicate this error before it had been made.
One critic described Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta, as "a book so bizarre it stands as emblematic of all that is troublesome in Earp literature."
Jeanne Cason Laing, the woman who, years earlier, had given Boyer the Cason manuscript, was troubled by assertions that Ten Eyck was with Josephine when she died. She says Boyer tried to convince her that Ten Eyck was real and that Laing had known him. "Vendetta is full of lies. It's not like [Josephine] at all," she says. Author Steven Lubet says the book "cannot be relied upon for Wyatt's veracity, or anything else."
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 removed the book from their catalog. Boyer claimed he decided to drop publication because he was disappointed with the university's handling of movie rights. Boyer found a small publisher in Hawaii, shortened the title to I Married Wyatt Earp, and shifted authorship to his own name.
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."
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, 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."
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
in 1976, was sold as a memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
of Josephine Earp
Josephine Earp
Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp was an American part time actress and dancer who was best known as the wife of famed Old West lawman and gambler Wyatt Earp. Known as "Sadie" to the public in 1881, she met Wyatt in the frontier boom town Tombstone, Arizona Territory when she was living with Cochise...
, the widow of western
American Old West
The American Old West, or the Wild West, comprises the history, geography, people, lore, and cultural expression of life in the Western United States, most often referring to the latter half of the 19th century, between the American Civil War and the end of the century...
Deputy U.S. Marshal
United States Marshals Service
The United States Marshals Service is a United States federal law enforcement agency within the United States Department of Justice . The office of U.S. Marshal is the oldest federal law enforcement office in the United States; it was created by the Judiciary Act of 1789...
Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was an American gambler, investor, and law enforcement officer who served in several Western frontier towns. He was also at different times a farmer, teamster, bouncer, saloon-keeper, miner and boxing referee. However, he was never a drover or cowboy. He is most well known...
. It was regarded for many years as a factual account that shed considerable light on the life of Wyatt Earp and his brothers in Tombstone
Tombstone, Arizona
Tombstone is a city in Cochise County, Arizona, United States, founded in 1879 by Ed Schieffelin in what was then Pima County, Arizona Territory. It was one of the last wide-open frontier boomtowns in the American Old West. From about 1877 to 1890, the town's mines produced USD $40 to $85 million...
, Arizona Territory
Arizona Territory
The Territory of Arizona was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from February 24, 1863 until February 14, 1912, when it was admitted to the Union as the 48th state....
. It was cited in scholarly works, assigned as classroom work, and used as a source by filmmakers. Editor Glen Boyer said that the image on the cover of a semi-nude woman was of Josephine in her 20s, and copies of the image were sold at auction for up to $2,875.
Boyer had a long-term relationship with members of the Earp family. He claimed that he used two manuscripts written by Josephine Earp as the basis for the memoir. He said that he had acquired an account, allegedly composed by Josephine with the help of former Tombstone Mayor and The Tombstone Epitaph publisher John Clum, from Earp researcher Mrs. Charles A. Colyn. He also acquired a second manuscript written by Josephine with the assistance of two Earp cousins. Josephine fiercely protected details of her and Wyatt's early life, even threatening litigation to keep some details private, like the existence of Wyatt Earp's second wife, Mattie Blaylock
Mattie Blaylock
Celia Ann "Mattie" Blaylock was a prostitute who became the romantic companion and common-law wife of Old West lawman and gambler Wyatt Earp for about 8 years...
. Josephine was repeatedly vague about her and Wyatt's life in Tombstone, so much so that the Earp cousins gave up collaborating with her and publishers refused to publish the manuscript.
In 1994, other Western researchers identified discrepancies in the book and began to challenge the authenticity of the Clum manuscript. They also identified factual errors and inconsistencies in other books published by Boyer, leading to an increasing number of questions about the veracity of his work. The risque cover image was linked to a photogravure titled Kaloma and first published by a novelty company in 1914. A 1998 investigative article in the Phoenix New Times revealed that Boyer could not prove the Clum manuscript existed. The article also disclosed that the university press' editor encouraged Boyer to embellish the account. During the interview, Boyer said that he had a responsibility to protect the reputation of the Earp brothers, and that he "had a license to say any darned thing I please...[to] lie, cheat, and steal..." In 2000, the University Press withdrew the book from its catalog. Boyer found another publisher and retitled the book I Married Wyatt Earp with his name as the author.
Origins
After the death of Wyatt EarpWyatt Earp
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was an American gambler, investor, and law enforcement officer who served in several Western frontier towns. He was also at different times a farmer, teamster, bouncer, saloon-keeper, miner and boxing referee. However, he was never a drover or cowboy. He is most well known...
, Josephine Marcus Earp
Josephine Earp
Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp was an American part time actress and dancer who was best known as the wife of famed Old West lawman and gambler Wyatt Earp. Known as "Sadie" to the public in 1881, she met Wyatt in the frontier boom town Tombstone, Arizona Territory when she was living with Cochise...
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 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
Johnny Behan
John Harris Behan was from April, 1881 to November, 1882 sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona Territory. Behan was appointed the first sheriff of the newly-created county in February, 1881. The mining boomtown of Tombstone was the new county seat and Behan's headquarters...
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 Glen Boyer eventually acquired the rights to.
Boyer edited the manuscript, called the Cason Memoir or Cason Manuscript, and Earp historians agree on its validity. It is now housed in the Special Collections room of the University of Arizona Library. 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
John Clum
John Philip Clum was an Indian agent for the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in the Arizona Territory. He implemented a limited form of self-government on the reservation that was so successful that other reservations were closed and their residents moved to San Carlos. Clum later became the...
, a former editor of The Tombstone Epitaph newspaper.
Notability
The University of Arizona PressUniversity of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
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. 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
Big Nose Kate
Mary Katherine Horony Cummings , known as Big Nose Kate, was the Hungarian-born long-time companion and common-law wife of fabled gambler and gunfighter Doc Holliday in the American Old West....
'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
Marie Osmond
Olive Marie Osmond is an American singer, actress, doll designer, and a member of the show business family The Osmonds. Although she was never part of her family's singing group, she gained success as a solo country music artist in the 1970s and 1980s...
and Bruce Boxleitner
Bruce Boxleitner
Bruce William Boxleitner is an American actor, and science fiction and suspense writer. He is known for his leading roles in the television series How the West Was Won, Bring 'Em Back Alive, Scarecrow and Mrs. King , and Babylon 5...
. 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
Off-Broadway
Off-Broadway theater is a term for a professional venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, and for a specific production of a play, musical or revue that appears in such a venue, and which adheres to related trade union and other contracts...
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.
Book sources
According to an interview with Boyer in 2009, when he turned 85, his family had a long-standing relationship with the Earps. His father was a janitor in a saloon owned by Josie and Wyatt in Nome, Alaska. The son of Wyatt's good friend George Miller, Bill Miller, married Wyatt's sister Adelia Earp Edwards. He said Bill and Estelle became a second set of parents to him.Cason and Clum manuscripts
When the Earp cousins attempted to write about Josephine's life in Tombstone, she was evasive. Even when Wyatt was alive, she and her husband were very protective of her "past". Author Stuart N. Lake interviewed Earp a few times before his death, and began writing his biography. Sadie corresponded with Lake, and he insisted she attempted to influence what he wrote and hamper him in every way possible, including consulting lawyers. Sadie claimed she was striving to protect Wyatt Earp’s legacy. She successfully avoided getting any mention of her in Stuart Lake's book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, and there is reason to believe that Lake avoided including her because she threatened legal action. As an unmarried woman in frontier Tombstone, an actress and a dancer, vastly outnumbered by men, she undoubtedly was regarded by some as a prostitute.Josephine wanted to keep their tarnished history associated with Tombstone private and sanitize anything that could be seen negatively. Wyatts' cousins pressed her for details, for something about her personal life in Tombstone. She finally consented to share that upon returning to Arizona, she believed Johnny Behan was going to marry her, and was disappointed and disillusioned when he repeatedly delayed the wedding. In her version of events, she said years later that she lived with a lawyer while working as a housekeeper for Behan and his ten year old son, Albert. Boyer argues that she actually lived with Behan. Boyer warns readers of "her ‘little-old-lady’ attempts to tell only the decorous and proper." Interviewers said she was often "difficult" to interview.
Josephine was apparently sensitive to what others might think about Wyatt's overlapping relationship with both her and Wyatt's common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock
Mattie Blaylock
Celia Ann "Mattie" Blaylock was a prostitute who became the romantic companion and common-law wife of Old West lawman and gambler Wyatt Earp for about 8 years...
, who Wyatt was living with when Josephine and Wyatt began their relationship, among other things. Blaylock suffered from severe headaches and was addicted to laudanum
Laudanum
Laudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
, an opiate-based pain reliever in common use at the time, and later committed suicide.
In addition to the manuscript prepared with the help of the Earp cousins, Boyer said he relied on a second manuscript, the so-called Clum manuscript. It contained details of their life in Tombstone that was missing from the story she wrote with the Earp cousins. Boyer claimed that the Clum manuscript had been written by The Tombstone Epitaph publisher John Clum
John Clum
John Philip Clum was an Indian agent for the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in the Arizona Territory. He implemented a limited form of self-government on the reservation that was so successful that other reservations were closed and their residents moved to San Carlos. Clum later became the...
based on conversations with Josephine.
Boyer wrote in the epilogue to the book, "The first Josephine Earp manuscript, the one prepared with the assistance of Parsons and Clum, had been made available to me earlier by Mrs. Charles A. Colyn, an Earp researcher, collector and genealogist of the first magnitude. Upon her death in 1973, this Earp relative by marriage bequeathed me her whole research collection to perpetuate. Without her generous assistance over the years, I would not have attempted to construct this book. The Cason manuscript alone simply lacked the necessary detail on Tombstone; it was essential to couple it with the earlier, more frank manuscript, before a complete narrative could be achieved" Boyer said he "merg[ed] the two manuscripts, which contained vastly different materials presented in widely different styles."
To bolster the authenticity of the book, Boyer pointed to affidavits and letters from the Cason family. In a September 21, 1983 statement, Earp cousin Jeanne Cason Laing wrote, “I believe the book edited by Mr. Boyer is bona fide
Good faith
In philosophy, the concept of Good faith—Latin bona fides “good faith”, bona fide “in good faith”—denotes sincere, honest intention or belief, regardless of the outcome of an action; the opposed concepts are bad faith, mala fides and perfidy...
in its entirety and is remarkably accurate in its portrayal of Mrs. Earp’s character and personality.” She had not seen the so-called Clum manuscript and relied on Boyer's word as to its authenticity.
When questioned about the origins of the Clum manuscript during the early 1980s, Boyer changed his story to say that he did not receive the Clum manuscript from Colyn after all, instead it was given to him by one of Earp's nieces. When asked by a reporter in 1998 if the Clum manuscript was real, Boyer replied, "Why am I compelled to tell the truth about a manuscript like that that is worth a lot of money?" Boyer continues. "I may have it and I may not. That's none of your business." When asked if the Clum manuscript was a compilation of sources, he said, "You bet your ass." "The Clum manuscript is a generic term and I've said it over and over."
Student-reporter Ryan Gabrielson from the University of Arizona Wildcat interviewed Boyer. He told Gabrielson, "The Clum manuscript is a generic term." "This—in addition (to other source materials)—was supported by literally hundreds, maybe thousands of letters and documents." Boyer's varied descriptions of the manuscript, its origins, and its eventual disposition are "so contradictory that they aren't credible."
Jack Burrows, who wrote John Ringo, The Gunfighter Who Never Was, said, “How can he just take a stack of material and give it a name that has nothing to do with what’s included? You can take a cowpie and call it filet mignon, but somebody’s going to catch on during dinner. This is just gobbledygook.”
Mrs. Colyn wrote Glenn Boyer on December 9, 1965, as reprinted in The Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp, "I never had a real manuscript which could be called such." Boyer said that the Clum manuscript could be found in the University of Arizona archives but they could not produce it. Boyer finally admitted that he no longer had the Clum manuscript and could not locate it.
Errors noted
The Clum manuscript was apparently Boyer's name for a collection of notes, newspaper accounts, memorabilia, and the recollections of relatives that he had acquired over many years. Using these as a basis, he wrote his synthesized version of Marcus' life in Tombstone as if the words were Josephine's. Boyer also made several errors in the process.One inconsistency noted by other researchers is the account of Warren Earp
Warren Earp
Baxter Warren Earp was the youngest brother of Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil, James, and Newton Earp. He was not present during the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. After Virgil was maimed in an ambush, he joined Wyatt and was in town when Morgan was assassinated. He helped Wyatt in the hunt for the outlaw...
's death. Josephine allegedly wrote in I Married Wyatt Earp how Wyatt returned to Arizona to avenge Warren Earp
Warren Earp
Baxter Warren Earp was the youngest brother of Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil, James, and Newton Earp. He was not present during the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. After Virgil was maimed in an ambush, he joined Wyatt and was in town when Morgan was assassinated. He helped Wyatt in the hunt for the outlaw...
's July 6, 1900 killing. However, on June 29, 1900, the Nome Daily News reported that Wyatt had been arrested for "interfering with an officer while in the discharge of his duty ... Earp, upon reaching the barracks, asserted that his action had been misconstrued, and that he had intended to assist the deputy marshal." Other references to him in the newspaper placed him in Alaska for the next several weeks. There was no way for Wyatt to get to Arizona in the time available.
Boyer's Josephine cites an article from the Tombstone Weekly Nugget of March 19, 1881—an article that smeared Earp's friend Doc Holliday
Doc Holliday
John Henry "Doc" Holliday was an American gambler, gunfighter and dentist of the American Old West, who is usually remembered for his friendship with Wyatt Earp and his involvement in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral...
by implicating him in a botched stagecoach robbery. "Doc's implication in this robbery through the propaganda of...the Nugget," she writes, "led straight to the Earps' shootout with the rustlers some six months later." But author Casey Tefertiller studied the Nugget microfiche and could not find a reference to Holliday. After further research, he suggested that Boyer had made a gaffe common to Earp researchers—he had lifted a confabulated version of the Nugget article from Billy Breakenridge's 1928 book, Helldorado: Bringing the Law to the Mesquite.
As the severity of Boyer's inventions became more widely known, Laura Cason, the granddaughter of Mable Earp Cason who helped author the Cason Manuscript, issued a statement that said, "Mr. Boyer now claims that I Married Wyatt Earp is creative non-fiction when he has always led our family to believe it as a true account and memoir of Josephine Earp." In February 2000, when the scandal over his work on the book became widely known, she formally asked Boyer to return the Cason manuscript. "We are saddened to learn that Mr. Boyer has seemingly manipulated Cason family members over the years in an apparent effort to provide authentication when questions arose."
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. 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. 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.Once the image appeared on the cover of the book, and largely due to the book cover attribution, copies of the portrait of "Josephine Earp" began to sell for hundreds and later thousands of dollars. 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
Sotheby's
Sotheby's is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation.-History:The oldest auction house in operation is the Stockholms Auktionsverk founded in 1674, the second oldest is Göteborgs Auktionsverk founded in 1681 and third oldest being founded in 1731, all Swedish...
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.
However, the first known version of the photograph of the beautiful young woman boldly posed for the camera in 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 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.
Most of the early Kaloma images seen to date are photogravures, high-quality reproductions that have been produced since the 1850s, with a surge in popularity between 1890 and 1920. The image was 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.
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
Provenance
Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...
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 copyright date was the year the picture was taken, Josephine Earp was born in 1861 and would have been 53 in 1914. Casey Terfertiller's Wyatt Earp shows 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 is very plump. This contrasts the 1914 photo of "Josie" where she is young and thin.
On November 26, 1997, Dave McKenna of ABC Novelty Company, the successor to the original company, wrote "I will confirm that this photo was copyrighted under the A B C 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 the his company, "Historical Research Associates" operated out of his home in Rodeo, New Mexico.
Vanilla Fudge, a late 60s and early 70s rock band even featured the nude woman on one of their rock posters. One of the great rock poster designers of the time, Alton Kelley with Family Dog Productions in Haight Ashbury, made Kaloma the centerpiece of his classic concert poster for Vanilla Fudge and The Charles Lloyd Quartet at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco September 29-October 1, 1976.
Other invented sources
Researchers have uncovered a pattern in Boyer's publications of inventing not only sources but fictional individuals who supply insight and perspective into real events and people. Jack Burrows wrote that Boyer "has published three different memoirs telling how Wyatt Earp killed Ringo, all giving different stories." Boyers justified the three different stories as representing three different person's perspectives. The Phoenix New Times reported in a lengthy investigative article that "Fiction appears to infuse much of his historical writings."An Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday
Boyer's first book, An Illustrated History of Doc Holliday, was first published in 1966. Boyer wrote ten years later that he purposefully attempted to mislead others. Bogus photos of 'Perry Mallon,' 'Johnny Tyler,' and Doc's cousin 'Mattie Holliday' were inserted into a fabricated story about Doc and Wyatt killing Mallon and Tyler in Colorado. The picture of Mattie Holliday was a photograph of Boyer's father's cousin. Boyer was also criticized for planting allegedly bogus letters that he said came from descendants of a Texas friend of Doc's called "Peanut," a pseudonym for an anonymous and unknown individual.Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta
Bob Palmquist, an attorney and avid Earp researcher, worked with Boyer for several years. In an interview with the Phoenix New Times, he said that he read a portion of Boyer's manuscript for Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta in 1977. "And at that time he [Boyer] was saying it was a novel in the style of George McDonald Frasers The Flashman PapersHarry Paget Flashman
Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC KCB KCIE is a fictional character created by George MacDonald Fraser , but based on the character "Flashman" in Tom Brown's Schooldays , a semi-autobiographical work by Thomas Hughes ....
." "The idea was to write a novel in the style of a memoir as if somebody was actually telling the story, in this case Ted Ten Eyck," Palmquist says. In a 1977 letter to Earp researcher Robert Mullin, Boyer told a very different story about Ten Eyck. Boyer wrote that he had received a new manuscript from Earp family members, "allegedly by one Teodore [sic] Ten Eyck, a name I can find nowhere else in Earpiana." Boyer claimed that the manuscript was "clearly authentic" and that it contained "fascinating revelations (if they are true) and would make an ace movie."
Written in the form of a "non-fiction novel
Non-fiction novel
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events narrated woven together with fictitious allegations and using the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely-defined and flexible genre...
," according to the book's foreword, Boyer said he invented the false name Ten Eyck to protect the newsman's family, who asked that he not be identified. However, Boyer's description of Ten Eyck varied widely as critics grew more specific in their questions, challenging his work.
Boyer said the book was the memoirs of a journalist who was present in Tombstone while the Earps were lawmen. In the book, Ten Eyck said he worked for the New York Herald in 1881, but his name is not found in any of the paper's 1881-82 editions. While positioned by Boyer as a non-fiction novel, it contains errors that cannot be resolved if the author is a real person. Ten Eyck identified Budd Philpot's hometown as "Halistoga", which Boyer identified as a misprint. In a footnote, he noted that the town's actual name was "Calistoga". In the original story from The Tombstone Epitaph, Philpot's home is "Calistoga", although the 'C' is very faint. In 1951, Douglas Martin reprinted editions of the newspaper from that period, in which the indistinct 'C' is turned into 'H'. Boyer said Ten Eyck died in 1946, causing researchers to wonder how he could replicate this error before it had been made.
One critic described Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta, as "a book so bizarre it stands as emblematic of all that is troublesome in Earp literature."
Jeanne Cason Laing, the woman who, years earlier, had given Boyer the Cason manuscript, was troubled by assertions that Ten Eyck was with Josephine when she died. She says Boyer tried to convince her that Ten Eyck was real and that Laing had known him. "Vendetta is full of lies. It's not like [Josephine] at all," she says. Author Steven Lubet says the book "cannot be relied upon for Wyatt's veracity, or anything else."
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," referring to the book's epilogue which describes the book as a memoir based on the writings of Josephine Earp herself. 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." 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
Non-fiction novel
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events narrated woven together with fictitious allegations and using the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely-defined and flexible genre...
.'" Boyer compared his work to Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
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 removed the book from their catalog. Boyer claimed he decided to drop publication because he was disappointed with the university's handling of movie rights. Boyer found a small publisher in Hawaii, 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, 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."