Myths About Wyatt Earp You Can Stop Believing

Get famous enough, your life and legend are no longer your own. Now you've entered the realm of mythmaking — and in the old west, nobody was mythologized quite as much as Wyatt Earp.

Of course, Earp wasn't the only outsized legend of the old west. And many of them actually made up their own legends.

Wild Bill Hickok, for instance, reportedly once entertained listeners with increasingly impossible feats of derring-do; when one newbie asked, "How did you escape, Bill?" Hickok smiled and said, quote, "I didn't. I died!"

Buffalo Bill Cody was pretty much a walking public relations firm, as he was constantly adding things to his autobiography, many of which were of questionable veracity. Jesse James would send newspapers his own press releases regarding the crimes he'd commit with his brother and their associates. And Bat Masterson, one of the more colorful characters to emerge from the American frontier, became a journalist later in his life; he crafted a series of profiles of other prominent Westerners, and even got his own TV show after his death.

And then there's Wyatt Earp: the lead officer in the O.K. Corral shootout, riding hard to clean up the West.

At least, that's the myth. Funny thing, though: much of that myth came about towards the end of his life when Earp became friends with a bunch of people in Hollywood — the best mythmakers of all time.

But what was the truth?

Watch this video for more myths about Wyatt Earp you can stop believing!

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