I See by the Papers...

Yes, Wyatt Earp was in Santa Rosa! His brother, Virgil Earp, was too! But, uh, not the ones you think - they were the nephews of the famous lawman and gunslinger. Yet it's also true their legendary uncle Wyatt passed through town at times.

On one of those occasions the Santa Rosa Democrat interviewed the famed man in 1889 and wrote, “Wyatt Earp is little given to talking about himself. And yet he has a reputation as wide as the continent — a fame made by deeds rather than words.” Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp (let's call him "Wyatt B." for short) may have been modest, but since his death in 1929 there have been hundreds of books, movies and TV shows about him, Tombstone Arizona and the iconic gunfight at the O.K. Corral. A simple Google search on his name currently returns almost eight million hits.

Just scratch the surface of that enormous canon of work and you'll find there's lots of misinformation - a common theme includes authors insisting other authors are lazy, liars, if not bonafide idiots - and one of those false claims is that he owned or managed a stable in Santa Rosa, which you'll even find that in his biographical Wikipedia entry. It's conceivable one of the nephews did so, although there's no evidence of that either. Here's what we know of Wyatt B. Earp in Santa Rosa from the newspapers of the time...

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott