Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

As Terfertiller's biography establishes, Earp's legend endures vividly in books and films, especially in John Ford's classic My Darling Clementine (1946), which is not burdened by the facts. Earp spent many more years as gambler and saloonman than as frontier marshal. The saga of the Earp brothers in Dodge City and Tombstone in the 1880s is a sleazy one, Terfertiller shows, as they operated on both sides of the law, enforcing order as maverick marshals. If there were profits to be made, principle became insignificant. One vendetta, the notorious O.K. Corral shootup, takes up much of the story. Yet there were few pistol duels, none of them cinematically romantic, and Earp, with his Sadie, would drift in search of income as far north as Nome, Alaska. Down on his luck, he lived into his 80s, dying in 1929 after decades of handouts from his wife's family. Although he had already become a legend in print, his gunslinger period was unrewarding, and his years after Tombstone proved to be even more so. Terfertiller, a former journalist for the San Francisco Examiner, is meticulous in his research, with the net effect of diminishing the Earp image. Photos. (Oct.)