Wyatt Earp, the gunfighter America only called a hero after he died

Wyatt Earp

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 19, 1848 Monmouth
Died	January 13, 1929 (80)
Occupation	Politician

When Wyatt Earp died in a rented bungalow in Los Angeles, many Americans who knew his name remembered him for a boxing match. Newspapers had spent three decades calling him a gambler, a stage robber and the referee who handed a heavyweight fight to the wrong man. The shootout in Tombstone that now defines him was, at the time, one ugly episode in a life that also included brothel arrests, a jailbreak, horse-theft charges, a fortune made in Alaskan saloons and a long, unglamorous search for gold in the California desert. The fearless frontier marshal that audiences have watched Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner play did not exist while Earp was alive. He was assembled afterwards, by a biographer, a widow who guarded every page, and a film industry that needed a model lawman and found one in a man who had spent his last years trying, and failing, to get Hollywood to tell his story.

That gap between the man and the character is what makes Earp worth reading about. He was brave, and the records show it. He was also opportunistic, litigious, often broke and frequently on the wrong side of a courtroom. Both versions are documented. The legend simply kept one and dropped the other.

A farm boy who wanted a war

Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was born on March 19, 1848, in Monmouth, Illinois, the fourth child of Nicholas Porter Earp and his second wife, Virginia Ann Cooksey. His father named him after his commanding officer in the Mexican–American War, Captain Wyatt Berry Stapp. Nicholas was a restless man. He set out for California with a group of about a hundred settlers, stopped when his daughter Martha fell ill, and bought a farm near Pella, Iowa, where the family stayed for more than a decade.

When the Civil War began, Wyatt’s older brothers Newton, James and Virgil enlisted in the Union Army in November 1861. Their father was busy recruiting and drilling local companies, so the thirteen-year-old Wyatt was left with his younger brothers Morgan and Warren to tend eighty acres of corn. He ran away several times to join up. Each time his father found him and brought him home. James came back from Missouri badly wounded in 1863. The boy who had wanted to fight never did, and years later a railroad brakeman would use exactly that against him.

In 1864 Nicholas organised a wagon train to San Bernardino, California. By 1865 Virgil was driving for Phineas Banning’s stagecoach line and his sixteen-year-old brother was helping him. Wyatt then spent two years as a teamster, hauling freight over the long wagon road from Wilmington through San Bernardino and Las Vegas to Salt Lake City. In 1868 he took work supplying the Union Pacific Railroad in Wyoming Territory. At the railhead he learned two things that would feed him for the rest of his life: gambling and boxing. He started refereeing fights there, decades before a fight would ruin his name.

The spiral nobody put in the films

The family moved back east to Lamar, Missouri, where Nicholas became the town constable. When his father resigned in November 1869, Wyatt was appointed to replace him. That same year he courted Urilla Sutherland, the daughter of a local hotel keeper, and on January 10, 1870, his father married them. Wyatt bought a lot on the edge of town and built a house. Within the year Urilla, pregnant with their first child, died of typhoid fever.

What followed is the part of the story that the screen versions leave out. In March 1871 Barton County sued him for failing to hand over license fees he had collected for local schools. A few weeks later he and two other men were charged with stealing two horses in Indian Territory. A resident also accused him of altering the figure on a court judgment and pocketing the difference. Arrested by a deputy US marshal, Earp did not wait for his hearing. He escaped through the roof of the jail and headed for Peoria, Illinois.

In Peoria the records turn blunt. In February 1872 police raided a brothel and arrested Wyatt and Morgan Earp with several women; the brothers were charged with keeping a house of ill fame. They were arrested again for the same offence in May, and in September Wyatt was picked up aboard the Beardstown Gunboat, a keelboat fitted out as a floating brothel. A young prostitute named Sally Heckell, arrested with him, called herself his wife. The local paper dismissed him as “the Peoria Bummer.” Years later Earp told his biographer that he had spent those seasons hunting buffalo on the plains. No evidence supports it, and historians have concluded that the buffalo story was invented to fill the gap.

Wichita and Dodge City: the badge arrives

In 1874 Earp and Sally moved to the cattle town of Wichita, Kansas, where his brother James and James’s wife ran a brothel. Historian Gary L. Roberts has argued that Wyatt was more likely the house’s enforcer than its pimp. Wichita was the end of the trail for Texas cattle drives, which meant seasons of drunk, armed cowboys and an endless need for men who could handle them. In April 1875 Earp joined the city marshal’s office under Mike Meagher for a hundred dollars a month, and dealt faro on the side.

He was, by the local press, a good policeman. The Wichita Beacon reported how he found a stranger passed out near the bridge with about five hundred dollars on him, locked him up to sober and returned the money intact, adding that the integrity of the police force had never been seriously questioned. His Wichita career ended in April 1876 with a fistfight: a former marshal accused him of using his job to hire his brothers, Earp beat him, was fined thirty dollars, and the city council declined to rehire him.

He followed James to Dodge City, then becoming the busiest cow town in Kansas, and became an assistant marshal. There he met Mattie Blaylock, a former prostitute who would be his common-law wife for the next five years. He tried his luck in the gold rush at Deadwood over the winter of 1876, found every claim already taken, and made about five thousand dollars instead by hauling firewood into the camp. Back in Dodge he rejoined the police. Not every entry is heroic. A local paper recorded that his revolver slipped from its holster in a saloon and fired a round through his coat, and in 1878 he was fined a dollar for slapping a prostitute during an argument.

In late 1877 he received a temporary commission as a deputy US marshal to chase the outlaw Dave Rudabaugh, who had robbed a railroad construction camp, and followed him hundreds of miles into Texas. At Fort Griffin a saloon owner he had known for years suggested he ask a gambler who had played cards with Rudabaugh. The gambler was a dentist from Georgia named John Henry Holliday. Doc Holliday told him Rudabaugh had doubled back to Kansas. Months later, in Dodge City, a gang of cowboys cornered Earp inside the Long Branch Saloon with their guns drawn, and Holliday, playing cards at the back, put his pistol to their leader’s head until they disarmed. Earp credited him with saving his life. The friendship survived a bitter quarrel years later and lasted until Holliday died of tuberculosis in 1887.

That same summer Earp and Bat Masterson fired on a group of cowboys who had shot up the town, including three bullets into the Comique Theater that sent the comedian Eddie Foy diving to the stage. One rider, George Hoyt, fell wounded and died weeks later. Earp later described drawing a bead on him against the dawn sky, a cinematic detail that matches neither the timing nor the newspaper account.

Tombstone, silver and a sheriff’s job he never got

By 1879 Dodge City was settling down, and Virgil, now a lawman in Prescott, wrote to his brothers about a silver boomtown in the Arizona Territory called Tombstone. Wyatt resigned from the Dodge police in September and set out with Mattie, James and James’s wife. They reached Tombstone on December 1, 1879. Virgil had just been appointed deputy US marshal for the district. Wyatt had brought a wagon he planned to convert into a stagecoach, found two stage lines already running, and later said he made most of his Tombstone money as a professional gambler. The brothers filed mining claims, bought water rights and waited for the boom to pay.

In 1880 Wells Fargo hired him as a shotgun messenger guarding strongboxes on the stagecoaches. Then he was appointed deputy sheriff for the eastern part of Pima County, a post that looked like a path to real money, because the county sheriff also collected taxes and kept a percentage. On the night of October 28, 1880, Tombstone’s town marshal Fred White tried to disarm Curly Bill Brocius during a drunken shooting spree on Allen Street; Brocius’s pistol went off and White was mortally wounded. Earp, standing by a chimney being peppered with bullets, pistol-whipped Brocius to the ground and arrested him. A Wells Fargo agent who was there wrote that Earp’s voice stayed “even and quiet as usual.” Wyatt and Virgil then escorted Brocius to Tucson, possibly saving him from a lynching, and testified that the shooting was an accident. Brocius was freed and never forgave him for the beating.

The sheriff’s job went elsewhere. When Cochise County was carved out of Pima in 1881, Earp and a Democrat named Johnny Behan both wanted the new sheriff’s office. By Earp’s later testimony, Behan promised to make him undersheriff if he withdrew. Behan got the post and gave the undersheriff role to someone else, later admitting he had lied about the deal. Earp was left without a badge, working a quarter share of the faro concession at the Oriental Saloon, where he brought in his friends Bat Masterson and Luke Short to deal. Behan, meanwhile, had arrived in Tombstone with a young woman from San Francisco named Josephine Sarah Marcus. Within a year she had left him. Earp noticed her.

Thirty seconds on Fremont Street

Through 1881 the tension between the Earps and the loose band of rustlers and stage robbers known locally as the Cowboys grew steadily worse. There were stolen army mules, a stage robbery that killed a driver and a passenger, a secret deal in which Earp offered Ike Clanton and Frank McLaury the Wells Fargo reward money in exchange for betraying the robbers, and repeated threats against the brothers’ lives. Virgil, now Tombstone’s city marshal, was enforcing an ordinance against carrying firearms in town.

On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, he learned that armed Cowboys had gathered near the O.K. Corral. He deputised Wyatt and Doc Holliday and walked with them and Morgan toward Fremont Street. They found five men in a narrow vacant lot beside the corral’s rear entrance, only a few feet away. What happened next lasted about thirty seconds. Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne ran. Tom and Frank McLaury and nineteen-year-old Billy Clanton were killed. Virgil was shot through the calf, Morgan across the back, Holliday was grazed. Wyatt walked away without a scratch.

The fight was not the triumph it became in the cinema. Ike Clanton filed murder charges, and Justice Wells Spicer held a month-long preliminary hearing with about thirty witnesses. Sheriff Behan testified that the Cowboys had thrown up their hands and opened their coats to show they were unarmed when the Earp party fired. Wyatt read a long written statement insisting they had fired only when the Cowboys went for their guns. On November 30 Spicer ruled there was not enough evidence to send the case to trial and that the Earps had acted as officers of the law. They walked free, but half of Tombstone now regarded them as murderers.

The vendetta ride

The revenge came fast. On December 28 Virgil was ambushed on Allen Street and a shotgun blast shattered his left arm. Ike Clanton’s hat was found in the building the shots came from, but he produced witnesses who placed him elsewhere and was acquitted. Wyatt obtained an appointment as a deputy US marshal with authority to choose his own deputies, mortgaged his house to pay them and tried to resign when the criticism mounted. Then, on March 18, 1882, Morgan was shot through the glass door of a billiard parlour while playing a game. He died within the hour.

Wyatt concluded that the courts would not help him. The next day he formed a posse that included his brother Warren, Holliday and several gunmen paid five dollars a day. While escorting Virgil and his wife to the train in Tucson, they found Frank Stilwell, one of the men suspected in Morgan’s murder, in the rail yard; his body was discovered the next morning. Over the following two weeks the posse killed Florentino Cruz at a wood camp and, at Iron Springs in the Whetstone Mountains, stumbled on Curly Bill Brocius and his men. Brocius fired a shotgun at Wyatt and missed. Wyatt killed him with his own shotgun. It was the same man he had once saved from a lynch mob. Earp later described his coat hanging in shreds from the bullets that went through it without touching him.

Coroners credited the posse with four deaths. The ride ended with Earp and his men leaving Arizona as wanted men, with murder warrants from Tucson hanging over them. It is the part of his life that his admirers call justice and his critics call a killing spree carried out with a federal badge. Both descriptions fit the evidence, which is why the argument has never ended.

Josephine, and a second life on the move

Earp went to Colorado and then to San Francisco, where he reunited with Josephine Marcus. She began calling herself Josephine Earp, and they stayed together for forty-six years, although no record has ever been found of the wedding she later said took place aboard the yacht of the millionaire horseman Lucky Baldwin. Mattie Blaylock, who had waited for Wyatt in California, was left behind. She drifted back to Arizona and prostitution, and in 1888 she took her own life with opium. Josephine spent the rest of her life trying to keep Mattie’s name out of every book about her husband.

The couple followed booms for twenty years. In 1883 Earp rode to Dodge City with Masterson and other old friends to back Luke Short in a political fight over his saloon; the town backed down and the so-called Dodge City War ended without a shot. In 1884 they went to Eagle City, Idaho, and opened a saloon in a large tent. From 1887 they lived in San Diego during its property boom, where Earp owned several saloons and gambling halls and at the peak made as much as a thousand dollars a night. He bought and raced horses, judged races and refereed prize fights on both sides of the Mexican border. When the San Diego boom collapsed, they moved back to San Francisco.

The fight that made him famous for the wrong reason

On December 2, 1896, Earp was a last-minute choice to referee the heavyweight bout between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey at the Mechanics’ Pavilion in San Francisco. Before the fight a police captain took a large revolver off him in the ring, and that night he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. Fitzsimmons dominated. In the eighth round Sharkey went down clutching his groin, Earp ruled a low blow that nobody else seemed to have seen, and awarded him the fight. The crowd of about fifteen thousand erupted.

Fitzsimmons went to court, and for two weeks newspapers across the country printed stories of a fix, of bets placed on Sharkey, and of the Earps as former stage robbers. Cartoonists caricatured him coast to coast. A judge finally ruled that prizefighting was illegal in San Francisco and the courts would not name a winner. Years later a doctor admitted he had been paid to make Sharkey look fouled, but by then the damage was permanent. Until that night Earp had been a regional name in Arizona and California. After it, America knew who he was, and what it knew was a crooked referee.

Nome: mining the miners

In 1897 the Earps headed north for the Klondike gold rush. Wyatt briefly served as a marshal in Wrangell, Alaska, for about ten days, and they spent a winter in a rented cabin at Rampart on the Yukon River. In 1899 his friend Tex Rickard, the future boxing promoter, persuaded him to move to Nome. There, with a partner named Charles Hoxie, he built the Dexter Saloon, the town’s first two-storey wooden building and its most lavish bar, with private clubrooms upstairs. The writer Jack London, the future novelist Rex Beach and the playwright Wilson Mizner passed through. Earp described his business model in three words: mining the miners.

When the couple left Alaska in late 1901 they carried an estimated eighty thousand dollars, a small fortune. It did not last. Josephine gambled heavily, and the next decade was spent chasing silver in Tonopah, Nevada, where Earp opened another saloon, and then prospecting in the Mojave. In 1906 he found gold and copper deposits in the Whipple Mountains near Vidal, California, and filed dozens of claims. The small cottage they bought in Vidal was the only home they ever owned. For the rest of his life they spent winters working the Happy Days mine in the desert and summers in cheap rentals in Los Angeles.

The old habits followed him. In 1910, at sixty-two, he was hired informally by the Los Angeles police for jobs “outside the law,” and the same year he led an armed guard for one side in a mining dispute at Searles Lake, firing a rifle round at the feet of a federal receiver before US marshals arrested him and more than two dozen others. In 1911 he was arrested again in Los Angeles, accused of trying to swindle a realty broker in a rigged faro game. Because no money had changed hands, the charge was reduced to vagrancy.

Hollywood, and the story he could not get told

Los Angeles in those years was becoming the capital of the western film, and Earp drifted onto its sets. He visited the director Allan Dwan during the shooting of The Half-Breed with Douglas Fairbanks. He dined with the director Raoul Walsh and Jack London, and Charlie Chaplin, then the highest-paid entertainer in the world, stopped by the table to meet him. He became close friends with the two biggest cowboy stars of the silent era, William S. Hart and Tom Mix. John Ford, who worked as a prop man in those years, later said he gave Earp a chair and coffee and listened to him describe the gunfight, and that he staged the shootout in My Darling Clementine from that memory. John Wayne told the actor Hugh O’Brian that he built his screen lawman’s walk and manner partly on the old man he had met on those sets.

None of that translated into the film Earp wanted. His only appearance on screen during his lifetime was as a minor character, played by Bert Lindley, in Hart’s Wild Bill Hickok in 1923. He wrote to Hart asking for help, saying a film would “do much toward setting me right before a public which has always been fed lies about me.” Hart told him to find a writer first. Earp’s friend John Flood, a mining engineer, spent Sunday afternoons in the Earps’ kitchen drafting an authorised biography while Josephine interrupted to insist that everything be kept clean. Publishers rejected the manuscript as stilted and unreadable.

The last Earp standing

Wyatt Earp died on January 13, 1929, at the age of eighty, in a small rented bungalow on West 17th Street in Los Angeles. He was the last of the Earp brothers and the last surviving participant of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. He left no children. At his funeral in a Congregational church on Wilshire Boulevard, William S. Hart and Tom Mix were among the pallbearers, along with John Clum, the former Tombstone mayor who had edited the Tombstone Epitaph, and Wilson Mizner from the Nome days. Newspapers reported that Mix wept. Josephine did not attend.

She had his body cremated and buried the ashes quietly in her family’s plot at the Hills of Eternity, a Jewish cemetery in Colma, near San Francisco, where she was laid beside him in 1944. The location stayed a family secret for years. In 1957 grave robbers dug into the plot looking for the urn and, failing to find it, stole the headstone. It was later recovered at a flea market. The grave is now the most visited in the cemetery.

How a biographer built the lawman

Earp’s rehabilitation began two years after his death. Stuart N. Lake, a journalist who had interviewed him in his final months, published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal in 1931. It was a bestseller and a work of heavy embellishment that presented Earp as a flawless marshal, and it was largely silent about Peoria, Wichita’s brothels, the horse-theft charge, Mattie Blaylock and the Sharkey fight. Josephine pressed Lake to keep her own past and Mattie’s existence out of the book, threatening legal action. She did the same with Hollywood: the first film version, in 1934, was made to rename its hero, and when 20th Century Fox remade it as Frontier Marshal in 1939 with Randolph Scott, she sued and settled for five thousand dollars.

After that the character belonged to the movies. John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, with Henry Fonda in 1946, turned Earp into a quiet, decent marshal. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp ran on American television from 1955 to 1961, with Hugh O’Brian in the role and scripts partly written by Lake. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957, with Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as Holliday, fixed the image of the heroic lawman and quietly turned the word cowboy, which in Tombstone had meant outlaw, into a synonym for the good guy. By the late 1950s the real Earp was already fading behind his actors.

Revision followed. In the 1950s researchers uncovered Mattie Blaylock, and the saintly marshal began to crack. James Garner played a darker Earp obsessed with revenge in Hour of the Gun in 1967. The 1990s produced two rival epics within months of each other: Tombstone, with Kurt Russell as Earp and Val Kilmer’s much-quoted Doc Holliday, and Lawrence Kasdan‘s three-hour Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner, which tried to include the young wife who died, the horse-theft arrest and the darker years. Netflix returned to the story in 2024 with Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War, a six-part docudrama narrated by Ed Harris, with Tim Fellingham as Earp, built around the feud with Ike Clanton.

What the record actually supports

The honest version of Wyatt Earp is less tidy than either the hero or the villain. The newspapers of his own time praised his coolness under fire and his honesty as a Wichita policeman. The same newspapers recorded his arrests for pimping, his jail escape and his fine for slapping a woman. The O.K. Corral hearing cleared him; the vendetta ride that followed made him a fugitive. He was never wounded in any of his gunfights, which only added to the myth, and he spent most of his adult life not as a lawman at all but as a gambler, saloon owner, horse trader and prospector who took a badge whenever one was available and useful.

His own contribution to the legend is harder to measure. He did embellish, as the buffalo hunts and the Hoyt shooting show, and he worked hard in old age to have his side told. But the man who wrote to William S. Hart about being “fed lies” was not asking to become a saint. The saint came from Lake’s typewriter, Josephine’s editing and the studios’ need for a clean hero. Grace Spolidora, a family friend who knew the couple in their final years, put it directly in a 1990 interview: Josephine wanted him to look like a church-going saint, and Wyatt did not want that at all.

Traces of him survive in unexpected places. A desert post office near his mining claims was renamed Earp, California, the year after he died. The polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth named his Antarctic expedition ship the Wyatt Earp. A sketch of the gunfight that Earp annotated for John Flood in 1926 sold at auction in 2010 for 380,000 dollars, and a revolver attributed to him, with a disputed provenance, fetched 225,000 dollars in 2014. Tombstone still stages Wyatt Earp Days every Memorial Day weekend, with residents in 1880s dress walking the same Allen Street where Fred White was shot. The argument over what Earp was, peace officer or armed opportunist, has outlived everyone who knew him, and the surviving evidence is not going to settle it.

Tags: Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, American history, Doc Holliday, Josephine Marcus, O.K. Corral

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