How Hollywood Saved Wyatt Earp
On-Screen, He Was a Wild West Lawman. In Real Life, Earp Was a Horse Thief with a Gambling Problem.
In May 1883, after an absence of four years, Wyatt Earp returned to Dodge City, Kansas. He had spent most of the intervening years in Tombstone, Arizona, where he had briefly made national news for his participation in 1881 in what has become known as the “Gunfight at the OK Corral.” But the National Police Gazette, reporting on his return to Dodge, referred to the peripatetic Earp as neither a Kansan, nor an Arizonan, nor an Illinoisan (where he had been born 35 years before), but as “Wyatt Earp, of …
