page_title: Wyatt Earp
section_title: Life in Los Angeles
hierarchical_section_title: Wyatt Earp / Life after Tombstone / Life in Los Angeles
caption_attribution_description: English: Wyatt and Josephine Earp in their mining camp near Vidal California. They owned a number of mining claims that they worked during the fall, winter, and spring of each year.
context_page_description: Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was an Old West lawman and gambler in Cochise County, Arizona Territory, and a deputy marshal in Tombstone. He worked in a wide variety of trades throughout his life and took part in the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, during which lawmen killed three outlaw Cochise County Cowboys. He is often erroneously regarded as the central figure in the shootout, although his brother Virgil was the Tombstone City and Deputy U.S. Marshal that day, and had far more experience in combat as a sheriff, constable, marshal, and soldier.
  Earp was at different times a professional gambler, teamster, and buffalo hunter. Over his lifetime, he owned several saloons, maintained a brothel, mined for silver and gold, and refereed boxing matches. He spent his early life in Pella, Iowa. In 1870, he married Urilla Sutherland, who contracted typhoid fever and died in childbirth. During the next two years, Earp was arrested for stealing a horse, escaped from jail, and was sued twice. He was arrested and fined three times in 1872 for "keeping and being found in a house of ill-fame".
context_section_description: In 1910, when he was 62, the Los Angeles Police Department hired Wyatt and former Los Angeles detective Arthur Moore King at $10.00 per day to carry out various tasks "outside the law" such as retrieving criminals from Mexico, which he did very capably. This led to Wyatt's final armed confrontation. In October 1910, he was asked by former Los Angeles Police Commissioner H. L. Lewis to head up a posse to protect surveyors of the American Trona Company who were attempting to wrest control of mining claims for vast deposits of potash on the edge of Searles Lake held in receivership by the foreclosed California Trona Company. Wyatt and the group he guarded were regarded as claim jumpers and were confronted by armed representatives of the other company. King wrote, "it was the nerviest thing he had ever seen". With guns pulled, Wyatt came out of his tent with a Winchester rifle, firing a round at the feet of Federal Receiver Stafford W. Austin. "Back off or I'll blow you apart, or my name is not Wyatt Earp". The owners summoned the U.S. marshal, who arrested Earp and 27 others, served them with a summons for contempt of court, and sent them home. Earp's actions did not resolve the dispute, which eventually escalated into the "Potash Wars" of the Mojave Desert.
  On July 23, 1911, Earp was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with attempting to fleece J. Y. Peterson, a realty broker, in a fake faro game. Since money had not changed hands, the charge against Earp was reduced to vagrancy and he was released on $500 bail.
  The Earps bought a small cottage in Vidal, the only home they ever owned. Beginning in 1911 and until Wyatt's health began to fail in 1928, Wyatt and Sadie Earp summered in Los Angeles and spent the rest of the year in the desert working their claims. The "Happy Days" mine was located in the Whipple Mountains a few miles north of Vidal. Wyatt had some modest success with the Happy Days gold mine, and they lived on the slim proceeds of income from that and oil wells in Oakland and Kern County.
  In about 1923, Charles Welsh, a retired railroad engineer and friend that Earp had known since Dodge City, frequently invited the Earps to visit his family in San Bernardino.
  When the Welsh family moved to Los Angeles, the Earps accepted an invitation to stay with them for a while in their top-floor apartment until the Earps found a place to rent. After Earp and Sadie moved into a bungalow nearby, Charlie Welsh's daughter, Grace Spolidora, recalled that Sadie, who had never had many domestic skills, did very little housekeeping or cooking for Wyatt. She and her sister Alma were concerned about the care Sadie gave Wyatt. Though he was at times very ill, she still did not cook for him. Spolidora, her sisters, and her mother brought in meals.
caption: Wyatt and Josephine Earp in their mining camp near Vidal, California: This is the only confirmed picture of the two of them together.[197]
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