Wyatt Earp

Wyatt Earp was a journeyman lawman, gambler, saloon owner, and sometime stagecoach guard who passed through a dozen frontier mining and cattle towns — Wichita, Dodge City, Deadwood, Tombstone — before he found the moment that defined him. In October 1881 he was working as a deputy U.S. marshal in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, where his brother Virgil was town marshal and a faction of cattle rustlers known as the Cowboys had been steadily escalating threats against the family. On October 26, after months of warnings, Wyatt, Virgil, their brother Morgan, and the consumptive dentist John "Doc" Holliday confronted five members of the Cowboys in a narrow lot off Fremont Street.

The fight near the O.K. Corral lasted roughly thirty seconds and left three of the Cowboys dead. The Earps and Holliday were charged with murder; a justice of the peace dismissed the case after a month-long hearing, ruling that the lawmen had acted within their authority. The Cowboys retaliated. Virgil was ambushed and crippled in December; Morgan was assassinated in March 1882 while shooting pool. Wyatt responded with what became known as the Earp Vendetta Ride — a federal-warrant-backed manhunt across Arizona that left four more men dead and ended with Wyatt, Holliday, and their posse riding out of the territory ahead of state warrants.

Earp lived another 47 years without ever being arrested for the killings. He drifted through Alaska gold rushes, Hollywood movie sets, and Los Angeles boarding houses, occasionally giving interviews that polished the legend without quite committing to facts. He died in 1929, his obituary a few paragraphs in the back pages. Within a generation he was the central figure in dozens of films and a Walter Brennan television series, the Tombstone gunfight stretched out and rewritten into the founding scene of the American Western. Eight family members are buried together in Colton, California; Wyatt is among them.