Wyatt Earp
American
1848 – 1929
Wyatt Earp, the famed lawman and gambler of Dodge City and Tombstone, joined the Nome stampede in 1899 and ran the Dexter Saloon, one of the boomtown's grandest establishments, leaving Alaska two years later a wealthy man.
Biography
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was born on March 19, 1848, in Monmouth, Illinois. He drifted through the boomtowns of the post-Civil War West as a teamster, buffalo hunter, gambler, and peace officer, serving as a policeman in Wichita and assistant marshal in Dodge City. In Tombstone, Arizona Territory, on October 26, 1881, he stood with his brothers Virgil and Morgan and Doc Holliday in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the thirty-second shootout that made his name and has been argued over ever since.
Earp spent the following decades chasing mining and gambling opportunities across the West. In 1899 he and his wife Josephine joined the rush to Nome, Alaska, where with partner Charles E. Hoxie he built the Dexter Saloon, often described as the city's first two-story building and its most imposing drinking establishment. Catering to thousands of thirsty stampeders proved far more reliable than mining; when the couple sailed south in 1901, Earp reportedly took with him a profit estimated at around $80,000.
He followed the boom to Tonopah and Goldfield, Nevada, then settled into a quieter life of prospecting claims in the Mojave Desert and wintering in Los Angeles, where he befriended early Hollywood figures. He died there on January 13, 1929. The Nome years are a reminder that the frontier lawman was, above all, a lifelong follower of gold rushes.