Wyatt Earp in Searchlight
You may have noticed the breakthrough stories that the Gold Beam brings you every spring, commented to your friends about them, and wondered, “How DO they figure all of this stuff out?” And you may have just read the title of this article and thought, “WAIT--Was Wyatt Earp, the famous western lawman and gambler, really in little ol’ Searchlight, Nevada?” Well, reader, you are in luck, because we are going to break the exclusive and only slightly stale news about the Wyatt Earp Searchlight connection RIGHT NOW, revealed for the first time since anyone alive can remember.
Wyatt Earp, legend of the Old West, former inhabitant of Dodge City and Deadwood, Marshal of Tombstone, friend of Doc Holliday, early Alaska pioneer, and subject of countless (and sometimes fanciful) biographies and silver screen depictions in every decade since the 1930s, was living in and around Searchlight from 1905 to 1907, exactly at the height of our local gold rush. Yes, Searchlight was having its salad days in the sun at that time, and was populated by a robust 1,500 gold-hungry souls (or 5,000 gold-hungry souls, depending which reports you want to believe) while Vegas was but a dusty blip of a watering hole to the north.
These people needed something to do with their free time and their wages, and that’s where Wyatt Earp came in. See, when he wasn’t standing up for justice with his fists and his sixguns, chasing the bad guys in a posse with his brothers and pals, and engaging in group gunfights and walking away unscathed, Wyatt was helping folks kill time and spend their money in boomtown saloons. And the saloons were also brothels. And casinos.
Across the pioneer west, Wyatt was known as a keen Faro dealer, poker player, angry drunk, saloon operator, claim jumper, owner of a floating brothel, and if accounts are true, a famous prize-fight fixer. Each of Earp’s three common law wives was known to be a madam of a house of ill repute, and during his Searchlight era, that wife would have been Josephine “Sadie” Marcus Earp. While we don’t hear a lot about Sadie in the news, Wyatt Earp seemed to never be out of the limelight, and every good deed and misdeed he did was reported on as he moved along from town to town, parting people from their money in creative ways.
In 1900-1903, immediately previous to his tenure in the Searchlight area, Wyatt and Sadie resided in Tonopah, Nevada, where he built a saloon called The Northerner with a partner, gambled and drank up a lot of coin, and according to the local paper “commenced to get himself unpopular”. By 1905, Earp, credited with killing 10 men, and by this time a distinguished gentleman of middle age, was residing in Searchlight, and prospecting for gold up and down the Colorado River. We know this because your Gold Beam editors found a news clipping from this era announcing the death of his brother Virgil, which mentioned Wyatt’s location in Searchlight at the time. This led to some prospecting of our own, and we dug up more confirming articles to bring you this juicy historical tidbit.
Wyatt Earp moved southward from Searchlight by 1907 and worked some claims near Parker, Arizona, and today a California town near there is weirdly named Earp in his honor. And what a code of honor he followed, we can TELL you. While the theme song of the ABC television show The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-1961) boasted him to be “brave, courageous and bold”, Wyatt Earp was also a repeat offender, arrested for (among other things) stealing horses, being drunk and disorderly, keeping houses of ill-fame, and murder at the OK Corral. And he broke out of jail in Arkansas. Just a few years after leaving Searchlight, he was arrested along with Death Valley Scotty for dealing a crooked Faro game in Los Angeles and trying to cheat people out of their money. While famous for his violent good deeds and his lucky escapes from gunfighting scrapes, there was also many a town that was happy to see the backside of this tumbling tumbleweed.
So, there you go, reader, now you know that Searchlight made the esteemed list of gold rush towns that caught the eye of the infamous gunman Wyatt Earp. And since there weren’t any follow up incidents reported in the local news, it looks like we got off pretty easy compared to some of those other folks.
The breaking news story of Wyatt Earp in Searchlight can be found in Issue #4 of the Gold Beam!