(country western music) - In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Seattle was an open town.

Prostitution, dance halls, saloons, gambling, opium, and general wickedness, proliferated in the city's so-called Tenderloin District, below Yesler Way.

Tens of thousands of people flooded in with the discovery of gold in the Klondike.

It was the last great gold rush in North America, and while it appealed to a younger generation who'd missed previous ones, it also attracted old timers who wandered from boomtown to boomtown looking for a score.

The biggest name Seattle's Tenderloin drew?

The legendary Wyatt Earp.

(inquisitive music) The former lawman, gambler, and gun fighter was well known.

The O.K.

Corral was shorthand for a famous street fight in the silver mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, where Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday gunned down some bad guys in 1881.

But Earp's story is more complicated than a single shootout.

Many considered the Earps bad guys, that the confrontation in Tombstone was more of a gang war than a case of justice being served.

Earp was known as a sporting man, a gambler and saloon owner as well as a lawman.

He was best known in the late 90s for having refereed a heavyweight boxing match.

A fight he was accused of throwing by declaring the clear loser the winner.

It tarnished his reputation.

(dispirited guitar music) Wyatt seemed addicted to the thrills of frontier towns, and the Klondike offered him a familiar high stakes opportunity.

With his common law wife, Josephine, Earp headed to Alaska in the Yukon in 1897.

As Earp well knew, the real money wasn't panning for gold.

It was in mining the miners.

He and a partner opened a saloon and gambling parlor named the Dexter in Nome, Alaska, and it proved to be, well, a gold mine.

As miners spent, drank, and gambled away their finds.

Earp met a Seattle sporting man named Thomas Urguhart, and they hatched the idea of opening a gambling parlor in Seattle, too.

If it could work in Nome, why not in the populous gold rush hub on Puget Sound?

In November of 1899, it was announced that Earp was setting up a new gambling house, the Union Club, on Second Avenue between Yesler and Washington Streets, right in the heart of the vice district.

Gambling parlors were operating roulette wheels, slot machines, faro banks, blackjack tables, even so-called Chinese lotteries.

"Earp has lived on the frontier all his life," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, "and is said to have killed several men during his career.

Personally, he is good natured and does not talk much."

Good natured or not, the lanky mustachioed lawman was not welcomed by all.

"The clique of boss gamblers in Seattle is badly disgruntled over the threatened appearance of an ex-Arizona sheriff in the role of competitor," reported the Seattle Star.

The estimated profit his parlor could make right off the bat was 15,000 to $20,000 per month after expenses.

That would be more than $600,000 a month today.

To the existing local gambling clique, that competition would be money out of their pockets.

And those expenses?

They would include graft and protection payments.

Gambling was illegal in Seattle, as were prostitution, and saloons, and showbox theaters that allowed male and female patrons to mix.

The vice ecosystem flourished, because payments to the police, politicians, and judges helped ensure they could operate if they paid up.

And for the city, fines paid by gamblers were effectively a kind of tax revenue on gold rush prosperity.

Earp landed amid a turf war between gambling interests and a periodic police crackdown that shut parlors.

The crackdowns helped extort more money from operators while seeming to defend public morals.

John Considine, later a theater and vaudeville impresario, was the gambling big cheese when Earp arrived.

Earp refused pay to play.

"The new man refuses to put up," proclaimed the Star.

"You fellows are paying enough," Earp told the Considine-led gambling combine.

"Why should I add any money?"

The Union Club opened in late November of '99, but was shut down only a few months later, its gear confiscated by the police.

The only gun play on Wyatt's part was early when he knocked a man on the head with his revolver during an argument in a bar.

In contrast, a little more than a year after Wyatt left town, the gambling combines John Considine shot and killed Seattle's former police chief William Meredith in a shootout near the old Union Club.

The Tenderloin was a tombstone all its own.

Was Seattle too corrupt for Earp?

Was the risk just too much?

Wyatt quickly folded his hand and quietly went back to Nome in the spring of 1900 where his Dexter saloon was a money machine.

It said that when he and Josephine left Nome for good in 1901, they'd made the equivalent of $2 million.

Reports say they gambled most of it away.

Earp eventually settled in Los Angeles and hung out in the burgeoning film colony there.

He died in 1929, but shortly after, Hollywood films and TV made him an even bigger western legend.

The O.K.

Corral Saga grew larger than life, more fiction than fact.

And oddly, the story of Wyatt Earp getting run out of Seattle has yet to be made into a major motion picture.

- [Announcer 1] Hear more about this episode on the Mossback podcast.

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- [Announcer 2] Mossback's Northwest is made possible by the generous support of Port of Seattle.