Click for printable version
Click to send to a friend

Frontier lawman Wyatt Earp posed for this portrait photo in 1881. In August, Goldfield residents welcomed a man claiming to be Wyatt Earp's grandson. But historians say the lawman had no children. Photo by Associated Press

Sunday, September 08, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Historians: Man claiming Earp relation a fraud

Experts say Goldfield taken by impostor

RENO -- Goldfield residents eagerly welcomed Wyatt Earp's grandson to the little mining town's 100th anniversary celebration, making him an honorary sheriff's deputy at a courthouse ceremony.

Town leaders and Nevada's lieutenant governor posed for photographs with him. Locals listened intently as he talked about the famous lawman, who owned a saloon in nearby Tonopah in 1902, and Earp's brother, Virgil, a sheriff's deputy in Goldfield in the early 1900s.

But there was just one catch: Historians say Wyatt Earp had no children, and the man is an impostor.

"Are you sure he's not Wyatt Earp's grandson?" asked Virginia Ridgeway of Goldfield, a town of about 300 midway between Las Vegas and Reno. "I'm still wondering because he was very convincing. If he was an impostor, he was fun."

But historians question the man's story and say he bolted the Aug. 23 event after they confronted him.

The man, who goes by the name Wyatt Earp, told everyone that his father, Nicholas Porter Earp, was born on an Indian reservation near Nome, Alaska, in 1919.

He claimed Wyatt and his wife, Josie, sought to keep the birth a secret because there was a $2,000 bounty out on the gunslinger's head and they wanted to protect their son.

There was no birth certificate because the birth took place on an Indian reservation, the man said. Earp would have been 70 and Josie 58 at the time.

"I'm very skeptical. He's going to have to show how he got there without Wyatt having any kids," said Ben Traywick of Tombstone, Ariz., author of "Wyatt's Earp's Thirteen Dead Men."

"Absolutely, he's a con man," added Michael Curcio of Genoa, who plays Earp in gun shows and has studied his past. "If you're going to do a fraud, you ought to get your history right."

Earp and Doc Holliday became the focus of many movies and television shows after they took part in the West's most famous gun fight, at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone in 1881.

Wyatt Earp of Phoenix, a distant cousin of the gunslinger, said he has received nine phone calls about the man in the past year or so. The man also has turned up in California, Arizona and Alaska.

"This man is either ethically challenged or he lives in an altered reality," Earp said. "The gentleman is a good Barnum and Bailey."

Contacted by phone at a Las Vegas motel, the 60-year-old man insisted he was the grandson of Wyatt Earp and has the documents to prove it.

But he declined to show proof, saying it would "steal the thunder" from a book he plans to write.

He also said he would not consent to give blood for DNA tests to verify his claims. And he declined to divulge details of his own birth.

"I know who I am and I don't have to go around proving it," he said.