Who Wyatt Was

I’m staying in a neighborhood that Wyatt Earp once ran a brothel in.  This I learned from the “Welcome to San Diego” magazine my hotel left in my room, which I took to the bathroom to acquaint myself.  I didn’t quite remember who Wyatt was.  Last night I accompanied a friend returning a Ford Mustang to the San Diego airport.  He gunned the eight cylinder engine between one light and the next.  If felt powerful, but wholly in appropriate.  Who needs such power in suburbia?  (Yes.  I’m loathe to define much of San Diego as “urban.” )  As we drove around my friend who hails from Australia, asked me where things were happening, here in San Diego on a Sunday night.  I told him to manage his expectations.  Whatever neon we were seeing at Seven Eleven, was probably the apogee of nightlife.  Later, the Uber driver who took us home, corroborated this assessment.  Would that I had been here in the late nineteenth century during the San Diego Real Estate boom, when Wyatt Earp had his gambling halls here, in the very Gaslamp neighborhood my Westin towers up above. 

Was Wyatt Earp a good guy or a bad guy?  I started out my modest online search colored by the notion that the guy was a gambler, a drifter from boom town to boom town, who had clearly manned gambling halls and whorehouses.  Once I dug in I realized that Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp got his claim to fame initially as a lawman.  He was a deputy U.S. Marshall in Tombstone Arizona where she shot down three outlaw cowboys at the O.K. Corral.  Whatever else came before or after this event, and there appear to have been many questionable and outright scandalous events, he is defined this way: as a frontier Marshall.

There is a remarkable amount of information about the man, there on Wiki.  And it is clear that those thirty seconds there at that shoot out made his reputation.  Before and after he’d made his way and continued on from boomtown to town, establishing brothels, and gambling dens, gambling, loosing unsustainably and then moving on.  Interestingly he perhaps uniquely spanned the old west and the new west.  In the latter 1920s he was consulted by a number of Hollywood movie houses looking to make authentic gunslinger movies.  He died in Los Angeles, at the age of 80, in 1929.

Outside my hotel window I can see the San Diego harbor.  The last time I was here for another company’s sales event we all boarded an enormous tour boat and saw what there was to see of the shoreline.  As I recall many of the people I spoke with were concerned for their jobs at that time.  I’ll have to check the schedule to see if a cruise is part of our itinerary this time and if the staff are largely feeling safe her in San Diego.  I note that at least one trip into a restaurant in Earp’s old Gaslamp stomping grounds is laid out in my future.