In the fall of 1898, Virgil Earp received a letter at his ranch from a 36-year-old Portland woman, Mrs. Levi Law. She had recently read an account of the 1881 street fight in Tombstone, and the newspaper article had also told of Virgil’s whereabouts. In the letter, Mrs. Law asked if he was the same Virgil Earp who had married Ellen Rysdam in Pella, Iowa, in 1861. If so, she informed him, then she was his daughter, Nellie Jane.

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The news greatly excited Virgil Earp, and Allie, too. Virgil corresponded with his long-lost daughter, and she had intended to visit him in Arizona Territory that winter, before a sudden attack of pneumonia laid her low. Instead, Virgil went with Allie to meet her in Portland, Ore., in April 1899. Ellen, Virgil’s first wife, was also at the Portland station to greet them. He is now enjoying a very pleasant visit with her and his two grandchildren at her home, which is near that of Mrs. Eaton, in North Portland, the Oregonian reported on April 22, 1899. He will remain for several days more, before he starts on his journey home. Years have taken away the pain the meeting between the former husband and wife would once have caused, and the little visit has been a most happy one for all. The following winter, Nellie Jane visited Virgil and Allie in the Kirkland Valley.

On July 6, 1900, Johnny Boyett killed Warren Earp in a saloon in Willcox, Arizona Territory (see August 1998 Wild West), and at least one paper reported that Wyatt Earp was the last of the Earp brothers. Nellie Jane Law told the Oregonian of the mistake. There are three brothers and a sister living, the newspaper quoted Nellie Jane in a July 21, 1900 article. Wyatt Earp is in Nome City; Jim Earp is in San Francisco; and Virgil Earp, my father, is living in Kirkland, Ariz., where I saw him last winter. Their sister, Mrs. Adelia Edwards, is living in Redlands, Cal. While I was visiting my father last Winter, he told me that he had a letter from Warren that he intended to return to Arizona from San Francisco. My father said then, ‘If Warren ever dies he will be shot. He is too hasty, quick-tempered and too ready to pick a quarrel. Besides he will not let bygones be bygones, and on that account, I expect that he will meet a violent death.’ Virgil almost certainly did not track down Boyett to avenge Warren’s death.

Virgil Earp was nominated as the Republican candidate for sheriff of Yavapai County in 1900, but he soon withdrew. It is uncertain why he bowed out. The Earps spent time in both Arizona and California during the next few years.

Virgil might have spent his remaining days in Colton if not for the anti-saloon sentiment in the little California city. On June 29, 1904, he was one of four men to petition the city trustees to repeal the liquor ordinance that limited the number of saloons to one. They are, according to the Los Angeles Daily Times, Virgil Earp, of the notorious Earp boys, William Smith, a man named Teushman and John Button. The church workers have protests out against any changes in the ordinance which will either lower the license or make it possible for more saloons. The trustees voted on July 6 to repeal the ordinance and to grant one more high-priced liquor license. But they granted the license to barkeeper T.J. Tuschman (or Teushman). Left out in the cold, Virgil and Allie struck out for Goldfield, Nev., a new gold-mining camp not far from Tonopah, where brother Wyatt had run a saloon called The Northern and had served briefly as a U.S. deputy marshal.

Virgil found no new riches in Goldfield, but he did give in to the old law-enforcement urge. On January 26, 1905, he became a deputy sheriff in Esmeralda County. Goldfield, as mining towns went, wasn’t too wild, and Virgil was soon slowed down by pneumonia. It was hard to enforce the law from bed. Nine months later, on October 19, 1905, Virgil died. His remains were brought to Portland at the request of Nellie Jane (last name now Bohn; Louis D. Bohn was her second husband). Funeral services over the remains of Virgil Earp were held yesterday afternoon at Finley’s undertaking rooms and many of his friends paid their respects to the remains of the pioneer, the Oregonian reported on October 30. Virgil Earp was known as one of the most daring and adventurous of Western pioneers and he was known from North to South on the Pacific Coast as one of the great-hearted men who helped to build the West.

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