gambled on the boats to and from Alaska. In November 1899, they left Alaska for a period and went to Seattle, Washington, with a plan to open a saloon and gambling room. On November 25, 1899, the Seattle Star reported Earp's arrival. Although gambling was illegal, the police were paid by John Considine, owner of the three largest gambling concessions, to look the other way. Considine tried to keep Earp from succeeding, and arranged for his establishment to be raided. The Earps returned briefly to San Francisco in April 1900, but they returned to Seattle before boarding the steamer SS Alliance. On June 14, 1900, Wyatt and Josephine were bound for Nome, Alaska. Wyatt and Josie returned to Los Angeles on December 13, 1901 and stayed at the Hollenbeck Hotel. They had an estimated $80,000, a relative fortune (equivalent to about $ today). In February 1902, they arrived in Tonopah, Nevada, known as the "Queen of the Silver Camps," where silver and gold had been discovered in 1900 and a boom was under way. He opened the Northern Saloon in Tonopah and served as a Deputy U.S. Marshal under Marshal J.F. Emmitt. Desert cottage After Tonopah's gold strike waned, Wyatt staked mining claims just outside Death Valley and elsewhere in the Mojave Desert. In 1906 he discovered several deposits of gold and copper near the Sonoran Desert town of Vidal, California on the Colorado River and filed more than 100 mining claims near the Whipple Mountains. Wyatt and Josie Earp summered in Los Angeles and lived in at least nine small Los Angeles rentals as early as 1885 and as late as 1929, mostly in the summer. They bought the only home they ever owned, a small cottage in Vidal, and lived there during the fall, winter and spring months of 1925 – 1928, while he worked his Happy Days mines in the Whipple Mountains a few miles north. Wyatt had some modest success with the gold mines and they lived on the slim proceeds of income from that and investments in Oakland and Kern County oil field. Josie's three nieces, daughters of her half-sister Rebecca and husband Aaron Wiener, would frequently visit the couple during the winter months at their desert camp. Life in Los Angeles In about 1923, Charles Welsh, a friend who Earp had known since his time in Dodge City in 1876, and a retired railroad