THIS WAS NEVADA: Phillip I. Earl

      Although Wyatt and Virgil Earp are best remembered for their association with Tombstone, Ariz., and the shootout at the OK Corral, both men spent time in Nevada. Virgil died of pneumonia in Goldfield in 1905.
      Wyatt spent a few days in Carson City in March 1897 at the time of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons heavyweight championship fight. Later, in 1902, he and his wife settled in Tonopah where he ran the Northern Saloon, worked as a freighter and was employed as a guard by the Tonopah Mining Co. He also served a brief term as a Deputy U.S. Marshal for the Ninth Circuit Court. In August 1902, the couple moved to California. But over the next several years they prospected and lived briefly in several Nevada camps, and Wyatt had mining interests in the Bullfrog Mining District in 1905.
      Virgil and his wife Allie showed up in Goldfield sometime in the fall of 1904. For a time he served as a deputy sheriff for Esmeralda County. He also worked as a special officer at the National Club and had several mining claims in Bullfrog. In the fall of 1905, he fell ill with pneumonia and died at the Miners' Union Hospital on Oct. 19.
      Over the years, many Nevadans have come to believe that Virgil Earp is buried in Goldfield. Not so. He is buried in Riverview Cemetery, Portland, Ore., the home of his daughter Nellie Jane Earp Law. Nellie was born at Pella, Iowa, on Jan. 7, 1862. Virgil was away in the Civil War at that time and his wife, Ellen, was informed that he had been killed in action. Believing herself to be a widow, Ellen and Nellie moved to Oregon in 1864.
      Virgil had meanwhile returned from the war. Learning that Ellen had left, he decided to leave matters as they were and to get on with his own life. He married Alvia "Allie" Sullivan in 1872 and the two remained together until his death.
      Nellie Jane married Levi Law in January 1880, becoming the mother of two daughters and a son. Ellen had talked to Nellie about her father from time to time as the girl was growing up and Nellie traced him to Prescott, Ariz., in 1898 and began a correspondence. Nellie came down with a serious case of pneumonia and Virgil and Allie came to Portland to be at her bedside in April 1899. The reunion with Nellie and her children and with Ellen was a happy one and Nellie and Virgil continued their correspondence.
      Ellen died two years later and Allie wired Nellie of her father's death in 1905. Nellie asked her son-in-law Alex Bernard to go to Goldfield and accompany Virgil's remains to Portland. The family had a plot at Riverview and it was there that Virgil Earp was laid to rest.
      Phillip I. Earl is curator of history for the Nevada Historical Society.