Before he died, Earp had given a draft to Stuart N. Lake, a little-known San Diego writer, to be “professionalized” and a few years after Wyatt’s death Lake published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931) as an “authorized autobiography.” Josie, furious with Lake’s alleged misrepresentations – including an allegation that she had been a prostitute in Tombstone – later wrote I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Earp, the accuracy of which has long been questioned.
Josie buried her husband’s ashes in her family plot at a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California. As she later wrote: “Wyatt’s family were almost all gone and we had no children. My only home was where my parents rest. So I took Wyatt’s ashes to San Francisco.” Thus, though Earp was not Jewish, his burial site ended up surrounded by gravestones adorned with Magen Davids and menorahs. When Josie died in 1944, she was buried next to her husband.
