The Birth of Wyatt Earp
The legendary figure of the Wild West was born on 19 March 1848.
A baby boy born on his family's farm in Monmouth, Illinois on March 19th, 1848, and burdened with the names Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp, was to be one of the legendary figures of the Wild West. He came of Scottish descent on his father's side and English on his mother's, and his two closest henchmen would be his brothers Virgil (1843-1906) and Morgan (1851- 82).
Six feet tall, with brown hair and ample walrus moustaches, the three Earps were formidable figures. Wyatt spent time as a buffalo hunter, stagecoach driver and gold prospector. In his twenties he was a lawman in various Kansas frontier towns, notably Dodge City, which he tamed in the 1870s. A crack shot with a fearless way with villains, and also a dedicated gambler, he made a name for himself in the wild and woolly cattle town, and in 1879 arrived in the notoriously lawless mining centre of Tombstone, Arizona, where brother Virgil was town marshal. Wyatt was presently appointed federal deputy marshal. He had a gambling concession in the Oriental Saloon and renewed his Dodge City friendship with the viciously cold- blooded tubercular gambler and gunman Doc Holliday (1852-87).
A feud between the Earps and a gang led by Ike Clanton culminated in the famous gunfight at the OK Corral on October 26th, 1881. With the three Earps and Doc Holliday on one side and the five Clantons on the other, it was the most celebrated encounter of its kind in the history of the West and has been frequently recorded by Hollywood on celluloid. It was all over in thirty seconds or less and a hail of bullets left three of the Clantons dead and the Earps accused by some Tombstone townspeople of murder. Virgil Earp was ambushed and wounded outside the Eagle Brewery Saloon in December and Morgan Earp was gunned down and killed in the following March - shot in the back in a Tombstone billiards parlour. Wyatt, who killed several suspects in revenge, left Tombstone for Colorado in 1883 to escape murder charges. In 1896 he refereed the controversial boxing bout between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey in San Francisco, which he awarded to Sharkey on a foul. He eventually settled in California and eked out a living gambling, saloon-keeping and dealing in real estate, while trying to interest Hollywood studios in his life-story. He died in Los Angeles at the age of eighty in 1929.
Stuart Lake's laudatory biography of 1931, He Carried a Six-Shooter, hailed Wyatt Earp as a heroic man of action in the Hollywood Western mould, a man who did what a man had to do to uphold the law and keep the peace, but revisionist historians have subsequently enjoyed picturing him as a murderous ruffian and unscrupulous card- sharp and conman. His true legacy is in the cinema, played by Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster and James Garner in films by directors of the stature of John Ford (who knew him personally) and John Sturges.