It was Colma, not Boot Hill, for Wyatt Earp

Earp had many Bay Area links. He lived in San Francisco’s Richmond District, according to an 1896 San Francisco Directory. This was about the time he frequented a saloon in Redwood City located below the Alhambra Theater. A photo of Earp standing next to the bar hangs on the wall at Martins West gastropub, a popular spot that occupies the site today.

Earp had many callings, including gambler, real estate owner and boxing referee. It is, however, his fabled ability with a pistol that made him a legendary lawman. On Oct. 26, 1881, he blazed away in Tombstone in a confrontation with a gang known as the “cowboys.” Three men, all cowboys, died in the gunfight that actually took place in an adjacent lot. The showdown has been the subject of several movies, most notably John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine,” a 1946 offering in which Henry Fonda portrayed Earp. Burt Lancaster and Kevin Costner played him in later movies.

What brought Earp to Redwood City, a long way from Tombstone? Legend has it that he was in town to see his wife perform in a play in 1896 at the 1,500-seat Alhambra, then the biggest showplace between San Francisco and San Jose.

That account is disputed by Mary Doria Russell, author of a new book entitled “Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral,” which weaves a fictional story around the wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus.

“Josie was long past performing” as a dancer by the time the couple lived in Northern California, she said. Marcus would have been in her mid-30s when Earp visited the Alhambra. “Middle age was not nearly as kind to her as it was to Wyatt,” Russell said. “Let’s just say she would not have been light on her feet.”

Whatever his reason for being in Redwood City, Earp looked as if he was having a good time when the picture was taken in the Alhambra Bar on Main Street, which was literally then the main street of the growing city. The story goes that the photo was snapped in 1896 on the night of the Alhambra Theater’s debut.

The building is historic in its own right. It was the last work of architect Arthur Page Brown, whose earlier structures included the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Brown died at his Burlingame home in 1896 following an accident involving a runaway horse.

The Alhambra Theater, faced with growing competition from the new movie medium, went out of business and sold the building to the Masonic Order in 1921.

The building has had narrow escapes. Its facade had to be replaced after the 1906 earthquake. In 2001, it was gutted by fire and was thought to be a total loss, but it was saved and today houses Martins West and some offices on the top floor. No one seems to know what happened to the wooden bar Earp stood next to. It wasn’t there when the building changed hands in the 1990s. If you know, tell the “Rear View Mirror.”