Josie Marcus led a lascivious life before meeting Wyatt Earp when she was about twenty years old. During the 1870s, this fourteen year old Jewish girl from Brooklyn, New York became the sexual plaything of the leader of a gang of unemployed transcontinental railroad laborers in San Francisco. She ran away from home to Prescott, Arizona and became a prostitute in a Bordello. She also toured as a dancer in a traveling burlesque show and became known as the "The Bell of the Honkytonks" for her work as a courtesan in a Tombstone, Arizona saloon.