![]() (And ads for Rainier beer).īut there’s nothing about Wyatt Earp or that ship. Juneau’s newspapers around that time are full of news about miners heading to Nome. He supposedly sailed two days later on the S.S. I had a date and the name of the steamship: the sign on the wall said he’d been disarmed on June 27, 1900. I thumbed through Juneau’s Daily Alaska Dispatch. There’s a trove of old newspapers on microfilm in the archives. It felt like a dead end, but journalist colleague James Brooks suggested I dig deeper in the state archives. There’s doubt he was even ever in Juneau. ![]() In the meantime, not only is it questionable the pistol belonged to Wyatt Earp. Marshal would want to accost and sort of run off a retired law officer.” He’s since written the national archives to see what might be on hand in Washington. “If that’s true, it’s really interesting. Marshals had a … firm discussion with Wyatt Earp when he arrived in town,” the archivist told me. It’s contained in the official history of the first 50 years of the Alaska State Troopers and references federal records discovered in the 1960s. The only written account of Wyatt Earp’s time in Juneau comes second-hand. “But documenting a shot stop on his way to Nome is a little more difficult.” “We have records that document him in Nome,” Jones said. I enlisted the help of Zachary Jones at the Alaska State Archives for help to confirm that. “I believe they sailed from Seattle and stopped in Unalaska and then continued on to Nome, that was the western water route and I don’t believe that they would have necessarily stopped in Juneau.” “I don’t believe that Wyatt and Josephine were in Juneau in June of 1900,” said New York-based author Ann Kirschner who’s written about Wyatt and Josephine Earp’s time in Alaska and published the 2013 book Lady at the OK Corral. There’s something else that doesn’t add up. “I’ve never seen it listed either as something that belonged to the museum or as a loan.” “I can’t rule anything out but I have been through the records pretty thoroughly over the last 30 years,” said Steve Henrikson, curator of collections. The Territorial Museum would later become the Alaska State Museum so that’s where I headed next. “And he would periodically pay off his bar tabs with stuff out of the Territorial Museum,” he continued, “and at one point he had a significant bar tab at the Red Dog Saloon and he paid that with that gun.”Īt least that’s what Forst was told when he bought the bar a decade ago. ![]() The story is that a museum employee – or at least someone with access to its treasures – had a bit of a drinking habit, Forst said. The pistol’s been a fixture behind the bar for decades, he said. The gun was part of what was then this Territorial Museum,” explained saloon owner Eric Forst. “So the story that I got… back in the early 1900s, early teens or ’20s. We agreed there’s got to be more to the story. “How did Wyatt Earp’s gun come to be on the wall of the Red Dog Saloon?” Brooks asked me on a recent afternoon. But I got to talking with Juneau newspaperman James Brooks. The gun went unclaimed in federal custody. His boat to Nome in the morning left earlier than the federal offices reopened. Given the man’s fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, federal marshals demanded, or so the story goes, that Wyatt Earp surrender his weapon while in town. Marshals when Wyatt Earp was changing steamships in Juneau. 3 revolver that to this day is a kitschy tourist attraction in a downtown bar.Īccording to the legend, the revolver was confiscated by U.S. And left something valuable behind: a Smith & Wesson No. Legend has it he briefly passed through the gold mining town of Juneau. That about when Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine traveled to Nome at the height of the gold rush to start a saloon. Ī decade after his death, the 1939 film Frontier Marshal was one of the earliest in a long line of films about his brutish style of justice.īy the turn of the century, he was already a celebrity of sorts. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. Every episode we help you find an answer. Curious Juneau stars you and your questions.
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