In 1881, a 30-second gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona made Wyatt Earp a legend of the Wild West.
Earp was a gambler, a lawman, a fugitive, and later a showman who told his own legend for cash.
So who fired first at the OK Corral, and how did Hollywood turn a frontier opportunist into a symbol of American justice?
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I’m Alastair Budge, and today we are going to start a three-part mini-series called Tales from the Wild West.
[00:00:30] Instead of talking about the history of the Wild West, we’re going to learn about it through the stories of three famous historical characters.
[00:00:40] In this episode, part one, it’ll be Wyatt Earp: a man who, to quote his Wikipedia page, was at various points a Lawman, a buffalo hunter, a saloon keeper, a miner, a brothel keeper, and a boxing referee, which is a kind of resume you just don’t see nowadays.
[00:01:00] Next up it’ll be Bass Reeves: a man born into slavery who went on to become one of the most feared and successful lawmen in American history.
[00:01:11] And in part three, it’ll be Geronimo: the Native American leader whose life and surrender tell a very different story about the reality of life in the Wild West.
[00:01:23] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:29] It is the 26th of October, 1881. The time is around half past two in the afternoon.
[00:01:39] In a narrow vacant lot beside a photography studio in Tombstone, Arizona, eight men are standing close together. Close enough to touch.
[00:01:51] Some are pointing their guns. Others have not yet drawn their weapons.
[00:01:57] Thirty seconds later, it is over.
[00:02:01] One man has disappeared into a nearby photography studio. Three men are dead on the ground. Three others are wounded. One man, Wyatt Earp, is standing without a scratch.
[00:02:17] This is the story of the gunfight at the OK Corral, which has gone down as perhaps the most iconic scene in the history of the Wild West.
[00:02:29] If you have seen one of the film adaptations of it, like Tombstone or the Wyatt Earp film, the scene will be familiar.
[00:02:38] But even if you haven’t, you can probably picture something like it.
[00:02:44] A long dusty street. Two groups of men walking slowly toward each other in the afternoon heat. Flies buzzing around. The clink of spurs. A sheriff’s badge glinting in the sun.
[00:03:02] This is the Hollywood version. The real version was somewhat different, as we’ll come to discover.
[00:03:09] Now, before we get to the story of Wyatt Earp, we need some background.
[00:03:17] Let’s start with the phrase. The phrase “Wild West” probably conjures up a very specific image. Cattle. Saloons. Outlaws and sheriffs. Everyone looking like they wouldn’t say no to a hot bath.
[00:03:34] The Wild West, as historians generally use the term, refers to a specific period in American history: roughly from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the early 1890s, although some people have it starting earlier and finishing later.
[00:03:54] This was the period when the United States was expanding westward at a ferocious pace, pushing into territories that had been home to Native American peoples for centuries, and absorbing land that had until recently belonged to Mexico.
[00:04:14] What made it “wild”, from the perspective of the Americans arriving there, was the absence of established institutions. There were no courts. No reliable police forces. No prisons. No property registries.
[00:04:30] Nothing. It was, essentially, a free-for-all.
[00:04:34] Towns appeared almost overnight, and were typically built near to places where silver had been discovered [called silver strikes], or along cattle routes, or where new railway track had been laid.
[00:04:49] And the men who came to these places tended to be labourers, gamblers, former soldiers, and what we might call “drifters”: men who moved from place to place without settling anywhere.
[00:05:06] Wyatt Earp was one of them.
[00:05:09] He was born in 1848, in Monmouth, Illinois, a small town in the American Midwest. He was the fourth of five brothers, and the family moved often during his childhood: Illinois to Iowa to Missouri to California and back again.
[00:05:30] History remembers him as a legendary lawman, a man who stood up for good in the face of lawlessness, but the reality is a little more complicated.
[00:05:42] In his twenties, he worked as a buffalo hunter on the Kansas plains, when the vast herds that had roamed the great plains for centuries were being systematically slaughtered for their hides.
[00:05:56] Then, he drove stagecoaches: horse-drawn vehicles that carried passengers and mail across long distances before the railways reached everywhere. He was a taxi driver, essentially.
[00:06:10] In 1871, he was arrested on a charge of horse theft, which was a serious crime at the time, and for which execution wasn’t an uncommon sentence.
[00:06:22] Luckily for him, and for our story, he managed to escape from jail, and skipped town.
[00:06:30] And again, fortunately for our story, the 1870s was not a time of extensive background checks and synchronised criminal databases, so Earp was able to get various jobs as a lawman, a sort of police officer.
[00:06:46] First in Wichita and then in Dodge City, both in Kansas, where he served as a deputy marshal.
[00:06:54] So, he has had what we might call a “portfolio career” so far: buffalo hunter, stagecoach driver, horse thief, and now deputy marshal.
[00:07:06] He was also, it would appear, involved in prostitution, and was arrested several times for running a brothel.
[00:07:16] And, to complete the picture, he was a frequent gambler, spending much of his time in saloons and playing a card game called faro. He was actually quite good, he would later claim, and made more money through gambling than he did through his official job as a lawman.
[00:07:36] By 1879, he had made his way to a town called Tombstone, in Arizona, along with three of his five brothers.
[00:07:47] One brother, Virgil, was already there, and had taken up the position of town marshal, the local law enforcement chief.
[00:07:58] Virgil had not just arrived first; he had effectively sent for his brothers. As town marshal, he could appoint deputies, and he hired family.
[00:08:10] It was nepotism, essentially, but it was also practical: in a town with no reliable law enforcement, men who would take a bullet for you were worth more than qualified strangers.
[00:08:25] James, the oldest of the four, who was quieter and more reserved than the others, he worked in a saloon.
[00:08:34] Another, Morgan, arrived around the same time as Wyatt.
[00:08:38] And Warren, the youngest, came later.
[00:08:42] Tombstone had struck silver in 1877, and by 1881 it was one of the most prosperous cities in the area, with a population of several thousand people. It had newspapers. An opera house. A telegraph office. It was pretty big by frontier standards.
[00:09:03] It also had a serious problem.
[00:09:06] The problem was the Cowboys.
[00:09:10] The Cowboys, which is what they were actually called, they were a loose network of cattle thieves and smugglers who operated out of the surrounding hills and valleys.
[00:09:21] They stole livestock in Mexico and sold it on the American side of the border.
[00:09:27] They robbed stagecoaches. They intimidated people. They were not organised in any formal sense, but they had numbers, and local political support.
[00:09:39] And as you might imagine, they hated the Earp brothers, and had a running feud that had been building for months.
[00:09:49] The tension was about money and power and political allegiance.
[00:09:55] The county sheriff, a man named Johnny Behan, was sympathetic to the Cowboys.
[00:10:01] He had grown up among ranching people and shared their wariness of the Earp brothers, who he saw as outsiders with their own agenda, which they were, really.
[00:10:13] Virgil Earp, as Tombstone’s town marshal, was not sympathetic to the Cowboys at all. And Wyatt Earp had ambitions to become county sheriff himself. In other words, he had his sights on Behan’s job.
[00:10:30] There was also a personal dimension. Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp had been involved with the same woman, Josephine Marcus, a theatre performer who had been briefly engaged to Behan before she broke it off.
[00:10:46] By the autumn of 1881, the feud between the Earps and the Cowboys had been simmering for long enough.
[00:10:56] On the morning of October 26th, Virgil Earp received word that several Cowboys were in town and visibly armed, which technically violated Tombstone’s ordinance, its local law, against carrying firearms within the city limits.
[00:11:16] Virgil assembled a small group: Wyatt, Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday, a gambler and gunfighter who was one of the most feared men on the frontier.
[00:11:29] The four of them walked toward the vacant lot where they had heard the Cowboys were.
[00:11:36] What happened next is disputed in almost every account.
[00:11:41] Who fired first? Was there a verbal warning? Were the Cowboys trying to surrender? Were the Cowboys even armed? Virgil Earp later said he told them to give up their weapons. The Cowboys’ side said no such offer was made.
[00:12:00] What everyone agrees on is this: it lasted roughly thirty seconds. On the Cowboys side, three were killed outright.
[00:12:10] On the other side, Virgil and Morgan Earp were both wounded. Doc Holliday was grazed. Wyatt walked away without injury.
[00:12:21] There were no celebrations among the town’s residents.
[00:12:25] The Earps and Holliday were charged with murder. There was a trial, which ultimately ruled in their favour, finding that Virgil had been acting in his capacity as town marshal and that the shootings were justified.
[00:12:42] But the community was divided.
[00:12:45] Half of Tombstone saw the Earps as law enforcers. The other half saw them as men who had used their badges to settle a private score.
[00:12:57] There were elements of truth to both arguments.
[00:13:01] Virgil Earp was the town marshal, and the Cowboys were breaking the rules about carrying weapons inside the town.
[00:13:09] But the Earps had spent months feuding with the Cowboys. And the badge gave them the authority to do something about it.
[00:13:19] And this shootout was just the start of a bitter tit-for-tat vendetta.
[00:13:27] Two months later, in December 1881, Virgil Earp was ambushed outside a saloon late at night. Shotgun blasts hit his left arm. He survived, but his arm was permanently disabled.
[00:13:43] Three months after that, in March 1882, Morgan Earp was shot through a window while playing billiards in a saloon. Two bullets hit him. He died within the hour, on the floor, in his brother Wyatt’s arms.
[00:14:01] And what followed was not due legal process, it was revenge, pure and simple.
[00:14:09] Wyatt Earp, with a small group of men that included Doc Holliday, Warren Earp, and several others, rode out in pursuit of the men they held responsible.
[00:14:21] Over the following three weeks, they hunted and killed at least four of them; at a railway station, in the hills, and at a water source.
[00:14:32] These were not arrests. There was no due process. No trial.
[00:14:38] This was the “Wild” West, but even here, this crossed a line.
[00:14:44] A warrant was issued for Wyatt Earp’s arrest on charges of murder. He fled Arizona Territory, rode north into Colorado and never returned to Arizona.
[00:14:57] He bounced from place to place, chasing the next opportunity.
[00:15:02] Colorado, then Texas. San Diego in the late 1880s, where he ran saloons and became a property speculator.
[00:15:11] He made good money, then lost most of it when the land boom collapsed.
[00:15:16] In 1896, he made the news after refereeing a heavyweight boxing championship fight in San Francisco. The bout ended controversially, with Earp awarding the match to the fighter who appeared to be losing, and the national newspapers accused him of fixing the result.
[00:15:36] Then came Alaska during the gold rush of 1897, where he ran a saloon and reportedly made the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s money. Then it was Nevada, still gambling.
[00:15:50] And finally Los Angeles.
[00:15:53] And it would be in Los Angeles that he would find himself remade, turned into something that he never was.
[00:16:02] Los Angeles, of course, is the home of Hollywood, which was, by the 1910s and 1920s, the centre of the American film industry.
[00:16:13] The dominant genre was the Western. Cowboys and sheriffs and open plains. Clear moral lines. The good man with the gun.
[00:16:24] Now, Earp had been thinking about fame and how it worked for a long time.
[00:16:30] A generation earlier, he’d seen how Wild West figures had become household names through dime novels, the cheap, sensational books sold for about ten cents.
[00:16:43] A man who got written up in the right way could become famous across the country, have his name outlast him. Earp had watched it happen to others and wanted it to happen to him.
[00:16:57] And now Hollywood was doing the same thing, albeit on a far larger scale.
[00:17:05] And importantly, Earp had something that almost nobody else on those film sets had: real-life experience.
[00:17:14] He was actually there. They were making movies about a period he had lived through.
[00:17:21] He became a regular visitor to Western sets, and got to know some of the biggest stars of the era, not just because he enjoyed it, but because he understood what Hollywood could do.
[00:17:35] These were the people who would decide whose story got told. He advised them on how to carry themselves, how to hold a pistol, how a real lawman moved. And all the while, he was making a case for himself as a quintessential hero of the Wild West.
[00:17:58] But he had a problem. The record as it existed was not the one he wanted told.
[00:18:06] In the newspapers of the Southwest, he had been reported as a murderer: a man who had used his badge to pursue a private vendetta and then fled justice.
[00:18:18] The boxing scandal had brought his name to a national audience, but for the wrong reasons.
[00:18:25] In other words, the name Wyatt Earp was associated with crime, match-fixing, and general skulduggery, dodgy dealing; he wanted to be remembered as a hero.
[00:18:39] So, he got to work trying to change the historical record.
[00:18:45] He tried first with a writer named John Flood, who spent years working on a manuscript about Earp’s life. Flood was reportedly a terrible writer, and the book was rejected by every publisher it was sent to.
[00:19:02] Then, in the last years of his life, Earp found a journalist named Stuart Lake.
[00:19:10] Lake was ambitious, a gifted writer, and willing to sit with the old man and take down everything he said. Earp talked. Lake listened and took notes. Between them, they worked for the definitive account: the one that would fix his reputation for good.
[00:19:32] Earp died on the 13th of January, 1929, before the book was finished.
[00:19:39] He was eighty years old. By this time, the gunfight at the OK Corral was almost fifty years in the past and barely remembered.
[00:19:50] But two years later, he and the gunfight would be brought back to life. Lake published his book: Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal.
[00:20:03] The Earp of this book, a book that was presented as an accurate biography, was not the gambling, drifting, horse-thieving, pimping, revenge-killing, complicated man of the historical record.
[00:20:18] He was a hero. A symbol. The embodiment of law and order in a lawless land.
[00:20:27] The book was a bestseller.
[00:20:29] It was adapted for film almost immediately, and the adaptations kept coming. John Ford’s My Darling Clementine in 1946. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957. And then, in 1993 and 1994, two major Hollywood films, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, brought the story to yet another generation.
[00:20:56] With each retelling, the thirty-second argument over a town firearms ordinance became a defining battle between civilisation and lawlessness.
[00:21:07] A drifting gambler with a chequered past became the man who tamed the West.
[00:21:13] So, to wrap things up, Wyatt Earp died in 1929 without ever clearing his name, without ever seeing his book published, without ever appearing on a cinema screen.
[00:21:26] Within a few years of his death, he was one of the most famous figures of the American West.
[00:21:33] The Wild West had found its hero. The only problem was that he’d never really existed.
[00:21:42] OK, then, that is it for today’s episode: the first part of our three-part mini-series on Tales from the Wild West.
[00:21:51] Next up, we’ll meet Bass Reeves: born into slavery, three thousand arrests to his name, but was almost forgotten to history.
[00:22:01] And in part three, we’ll look at the Wild West from an entirely different angle: through the story of the Apache leader Geronimo.
[00:22:10] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:15] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I’m Alastair Budge, and today we are going to start a three-part mini-series called Tales from the Wild West.
[00:00:30] Instead of talking about the history of the Wild West, we’re going to learn about it through the stories of three famous historical characters.
[00:00:40] In this episode, part one, it’ll be Wyatt Earp: a man who, to quote his Wikipedia page, was at various points a Lawman, a buffalo hunter, a saloon keeper, a miner, a brothel keeper, and a boxing referee, which is a kind of resume you just don’t see nowadays.
[00:01:00] Next up it’ll be Bass Reeves: a man born into slavery who went on to become one of the most feared and successful lawmen in American history.
[00:01:11] And in part three, it’ll be Geronimo: the Native American leader whose life and surrender tell a very different story about the reality of life in the Wild West.
[00:01:23] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:29] It is the 26th of October, 1881. The time is around half past two in the afternoon.
[00:01:39] In a narrow vacant lot beside a photography studio in Tombstone, Arizona, eight men are standing close together. Close enough to touch.
[00:01:51] Some are pointing their guns. Others have not yet drawn their weapons.
[00:01:57] Thirty seconds later, it is over.
[00:02:01] One man has disappeared into a nearby photography studio. Three men are dead on the ground. Three others are wounded. One man, Wyatt Earp, is standing without a scratch.
[00:02:17] This is the story of the gunfight at the OK Corral, which has gone down as perhaps the most iconic scene in the history of the Wild West.
[00:02:29] If you have seen one of the film adaptations of it, like Tombstone or the Wyatt Earp film, the scene will be familiar.
[00:02:38] But even if you haven’t, you can probably picture something like it.
[00:02:44] A long dusty street. Two groups of men walking slowly toward each other in the afternoon heat. Flies buzzing around. The clink of spurs. A sheriff’s badge glinting in the sun.
[00:03:02] This is the Hollywood version. The real version was somewhat different, as we’ll come to discover.
[00:03:09] Now, before we get to the story of Wyatt Earp, we need some background.
[00:03:17] Let’s start with the phrase. The phrase “Wild West” probably conjures up a very specific image. Cattle. Saloons. Outlaws and sheriffs. Everyone looking like they wouldn’t say no to a hot bath.
[00:03:34] The Wild West, as historians generally use the term, refers to a specific period in American history: roughly from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the early 1890s, although some people have it starting earlier and finishing later.
[00:03:54] This was the period when the United States was expanding westward at a ferocious pace, pushing into territories that had been home to Native American peoples for centuries, and absorbing land that had until recently belonged to Mexico.
[00:04:14] What made it “wild”, from the perspective of the Americans arriving there, was the absence of established institutions. There were no courts. No reliable police forces. No prisons. No property registries.
[00:04:30] Nothing. It was, essentially, a free-for-all.
[00:04:34] Towns appeared almost overnight, and were typically built near to places where silver had been discovered [called silver strikes], or along cattle routes, or where new railway track had been laid.
[00:04:49] And the men who came to these places tended to be labourers, gamblers, former soldiers, and what we might call “drifters”: men who moved from place to place without settling anywhere.
[00:05:06] Wyatt Earp was one of them.
[00:05:09] He was born in 1848, in Monmouth, Illinois, a small town in the American Midwest. He was the fourth of five brothers, and the family moved often during his childhood: Illinois to Iowa to Missouri to California and back again.
[00:05:30] History remembers him as a legendary lawman, a man who stood up for good in the face of lawlessness, but the reality is a little more complicated.
[00:05:42] In his twenties, he worked as a buffalo hunter on the Kansas plains, when the vast herds that had roamed the great plains for centuries were being systematically slaughtered for their hides.
[00:05:56] Then, he drove stagecoaches: horse-drawn vehicles that carried passengers and mail across long distances before the railways reached everywhere. He was a taxi driver, essentially.
[00:06:10] In 1871, he was arrested on a charge of horse theft, which was a serious crime at the time, and for which execution wasn’t an uncommon sentence.
[00:06:22] Luckily for him, and for our story, he managed to escape from jail, and skipped town.
[00:06:30] And again, fortunately for our story, the 1870s was not a time of extensive background checks and synchronised criminal databases, so Earp was able to get various jobs as a lawman, a sort of police officer.
[00:06:46] First in Wichita and then in Dodge City, both in Kansas, where he served as a deputy marshal.
[00:06:54] So, he has had what we might call a “portfolio career” so far: buffalo hunter, stagecoach driver, horse thief, and now deputy marshal.
[00:07:06] He was also, it would appear, involved in prostitution, and was arrested several times for running a brothel.
[00:07:16] And, to complete the picture, he was a frequent gambler, spending much of his time in saloons and playing a card game called faro. He was actually quite good, he would later claim, and made more money through gambling than he did through his official job as a lawman.
[00:07:36] By 1879, he had made his way to a town called Tombstone, in Arizona, along with three of his five brothers.
[00:07:47] One brother, Virgil, was already there, and had taken up the position of town marshal, the local law enforcement chief.
[00:07:58] Virgil had not just arrived first; he had effectively sent for his brothers. As town marshal, he could appoint deputies, and he hired family.
[00:08:10] It was nepotism, essentially, but it was also practical: in a town with no reliable law enforcement, men who would take a bullet for you were worth more than qualified strangers.
[00:08:25] James, the oldest of the four, who was quieter and more reserved than the others, he worked in a saloon.
[00:08:34] Another, Morgan, arrived around the same time as Wyatt.
[00:08:38] And Warren, the youngest, came later.
[00:08:42] Tombstone had struck silver in 1877, and by 1881 it was one of the most prosperous cities in the area, with a population of several thousand people. It had newspapers. An opera house. A telegraph office. It was pretty big by frontier standards.
[00:09:03] It also had a serious problem.
[00:09:06] The problem was the Cowboys.
[00:09:10] The Cowboys, which is what they were actually called, they were a loose network of cattle thieves and smugglers who operated out of the surrounding hills and valleys.
[00:09:21] They stole livestock in Mexico and sold it on the American side of the border.
[00:09:27] They robbed stagecoaches. They intimidated people. They were not organised in any formal sense, but they had numbers, and local political support.
[00:09:39] And as you might imagine, they hated the Earp brothers, and had a running feud that had been building for months.
[00:09:49] The tension was about money and power and political allegiance.
[00:09:55] The county sheriff, a man named Johnny Behan, was sympathetic to the Cowboys.
[00:10:01] He had grown up among ranching people and shared their wariness of the Earp brothers, who he saw as outsiders with their own agenda, which they were, really.
[00:10:13] Virgil Earp, as Tombstone’s town marshal, was not sympathetic to the Cowboys at all. And Wyatt Earp had ambitions to become county sheriff himself. In other words, he had his sights on Behan’s job.
[00:10:30] There was also a personal dimension. Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp had been involved with the same woman, Josephine Marcus, a theatre performer who had been briefly engaged to Behan before she broke it off.
[00:10:46] By the autumn of 1881, the feud between the Earps and the Cowboys had been simmering for long enough.
[00:10:56] On the morning of October 26th, Virgil Earp received word that several Cowboys were in town and visibly armed, which technically violated Tombstone’s ordinance, its local law, against carrying firearms within the city limits.
[00:11:16] Virgil assembled a small group: Wyatt, Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday, a gambler and gunfighter who was one of the most feared men on the frontier.
[00:11:29] The four of them walked toward the vacant lot where they had heard the Cowboys were.
[00:11:36] What happened next is disputed in almost every account.
[00:11:41] Who fired first? Was there a verbal warning? Were the Cowboys trying to surrender? Were the Cowboys even armed? Virgil Earp later said he told them to give up their weapons. The Cowboys’ side said no such offer was made.
[00:12:00] What everyone agrees on is this: it lasted roughly thirty seconds. On the Cowboys side, three were killed outright.
[00:12:10] On the other side, Virgil and Morgan Earp were both wounded. Doc Holliday was grazed. Wyatt walked away without injury.
[00:12:21] There were no celebrations among the town’s residents.
[00:12:25] The Earps and Holliday were charged with murder. There was a trial, which ultimately ruled in their favour, finding that Virgil had been acting in his capacity as town marshal and that the shootings were justified.
[00:12:42] But the community was divided.
[00:12:45] Half of Tombstone saw the Earps as law enforcers. The other half saw them as men who had used their badges to settle a private score.
[00:12:57] There were elements of truth to both arguments.
[00:13:01] Virgil Earp was the town marshal, and the Cowboys were breaking the rules about carrying weapons inside the town.
[00:13:09] But the Earps had spent months feuding with the Cowboys. And the badge gave them the authority to do something about it.
[00:13:19] And this shootout was just the start of a bitter tit-for-tat vendetta.
[00:13:27] Two months later, in December 1881, Virgil Earp was ambushed outside a saloon late at night. Shotgun blasts hit his left arm. He survived, but his arm was permanently disabled.
[00:13:43] Three months after that, in March 1882, Morgan Earp was shot through a window while playing billiards in a saloon. Two bullets hit him. He died within the hour, on the floor, in his brother Wyatt’s arms.
[00:14:01] And what followed was not due legal process, it was revenge, pure and simple.
[00:14:09] Wyatt Earp, with a small group of men that included Doc Holliday, Warren Earp, and several others, rode out in pursuit of the men they held responsible.
[00:14:21] Over the following three weeks, they hunted and killed at least four of them; at a railway station, in the hills, and at a water source.
[00:14:32] These were not arrests. There was no due process. No trial.
[00:14:38] This was the “Wild” West, but even here, this crossed a line.
[00:14:44] A warrant was issued for Wyatt Earp’s arrest on charges of murder. He fled Arizona Territory, rode north into Colorado and never returned to Arizona.
[00:14:57] He bounced from place to place, chasing the next opportunity.
[00:15:02] Colorado, then Texas. San Diego in the late 1880s, where he ran saloons and became a property speculator.
[00:15:11] He made good money, then lost most of it when the land boom collapsed.
[00:15:16] In 1896, he made the news after refereeing a heavyweight boxing championship fight in San Francisco. The bout ended controversially, with Earp awarding the match to the fighter who appeared to be losing, and the national newspapers accused him of fixing the result.
[00:15:36] Then came Alaska during the gold rush of 1897, where he ran a saloon and reportedly made the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s money. Then it was Nevada, still gambling.
[00:15:50] And finally Los Angeles.
[00:15:53] And it would be in Los Angeles that he would find himself remade, turned into something that he never was.
[00:16:02] Los Angeles, of course, is the home of Hollywood, which was, by the 1910s and 1920s, the centre of the American film industry.
[00:16:13] The dominant genre was the Western. Cowboys and sheriffs and open plains. Clear moral lines. The good man with the gun.
[00:16:24] Now, Earp had been thinking about fame and how it worked for a long time.
[00:16:30] A generation earlier, he’d seen how Wild West figures had become household names through dime novels, the cheap, sensational books sold for about ten cents.
[00:16:43] A man who got written up in the right way could become famous across the country, have his name outlast him. Earp had watched it happen to others and wanted it to happen to him.
[00:16:57] And now Hollywood was doing the same thing, albeit on a far larger scale.
[00:17:05] And importantly, Earp had something that almost nobody else on those film sets had: real-life experience.
[00:17:14] He was actually there. They were making movies about a period he had lived through.
[00:17:21] He became a regular visitor to Western sets, and got to know some of the biggest stars of the era, not just because he enjoyed it, but because he understood what Hollywood could do.
[00:17:35] These were the people who would decide whose story got told. He advised them on how to carry themselves, how to hold a pistol, how a real lawman moved. And all the while, he was making a case for himself as a quintessential hero of the Wild West.
[00:17:58] But he had a problem. The record as it existed was not the one he wanted told.
[00:18:06] In the newspapers of the Southwest, he had been reported as a murderer: a man who had used his badge to pursue a private vendetta and then fled justice.
[00:18:18] The boxing scandal had brought his name to a national audience, but for the wrong reasons.
[00:18:25] In other words, the name Wyatt Earp was associated with crime, match-fixing, and general skulduggery, dodgy dealing; he wanted to be remembered as a hero.
[00:18:39] So, he got to work trying to change the historical record.
[00:18:45] He tried first with a writer named John Flood, who spent years working on a manuscript about Earp’s life. Flood was reportedly a terrible writer, and the book was rejected by every publisher it was sent to.
[00:19:02] Then, in the last years of his life, Earp found a journalist named Stuart Lake.
[00:19:10] Lake was ambitious, a gifted writer, and willing to sit with the old man and take down everything he said. Earp talked. Lake listened and took notes. Between them, they worked for the definitive account: the one that would fix his reputation for good.
[00:19:32] Earp died on the 13th of January, 1929, before the book was finished.
[00:19:39] He was eighty years old. By this time, the gunfight at the OK Corral was almost fifty years in the past and barely remembered.
[00:19:50] But two years later, he and the gunfight would be brought back to life. Lake published his book: Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal.
[00:20:03] The Earp of this book, a book that was presented as an accurate biography, was not the gambling, drifting, horse-thieving, pimping, revenge-killing, complicated man of the historical record.
[00:20:18] He was a hero. A symbol. The embodiment of law and order in a lawless land.
[00:20:27] The book was a bestseller.
[00:20:29] It was adapted for film almost immediately, and the adaptations kept coming. John Ford’s My Darling Clementine in 1946. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957. And then, in 1993 and 1994, two major Hollywood films, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, brought the story to yet another generation.
[00:20:56] With each retelling, the thirty-second argument over a town firearms ordinance became a defining battle between civilisation and lawlessness.
[00:21:07] A drifting gambler with a chequered past became the man who tamed the West.
[00:21:13] So, to wrap things up, Wyatt Earp died in 1929 without ever clearing his name, without ever seeing his book published, without ever appearing on a cinema screen.
[00:21:26] Within a few years of his death, he was one of the most famous figures of the American West.
[00:21:33] The Wild West had found its hero. The only problem was that he’d never really existed.
[00:21:42] OK, then, that is it for today’s episode: the first part of our three-part mini-series on Tales from the Wild West.
[00:21:51] Next up, we’ll meet Bass Reeves: born into slavery, three thousand arrests to his name, but was almost forgotten to history.
[00:22:01] And in part three, we’ll look at the Wild West from an entirely different angle: through the story of the Apache leader Geronimo.
[00:22:10] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:15] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I’m Alastair Budge, and today we are going to start a three-part mini-series called Tales from the Wild West.
[00:00:30] Instead of talking about the history of the Wild West, we’re going to learn about it through the stories of three famous historical characters.
[00:00:40] In this episode, part one, it’ll be Wyatt Earp: a man who, to quote his Wikipedia page, was at various points a Lawman, a buffalo hunter, a saloon keeper, a miner, a brothel keeper, and a boxing referee, which is a kind of resume you just don’t see nowadays.
[00:01:00] Next up it’ll be Bass Reeves: a man born into slavery who went on to become one of the most feared and successful lawmen in American history.
[00:01:11] And in part three, it’ll be Geronimo: the Native American leader whose life and surrender tell a very different story about the reality of life in the Wild West.
[00:01:23] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:29] It is the 26th of October, 1881. The time is around half past two in the afternoon.
[00:01:39] In a narrow vacant lot beside a photography studio in Tombstone, Arizona, eight men are standing close together. Close enough to touch.
[00:01:51] Some are pointing their guns. Others have not yet drawn their weapons.
[00:01:57] Thirty seconds later, it is over.
[00:02:01] One man has disappeared into a nearby photography studio. Three men are dead on the ground. Three others are wounded. One man, Wyatt Earp, is standing without a scratch.
[00:02:17] This is the story of the gunfight at the OK Corral, which has gone down as perhaps the most iconic scene in the history of the Wild West.
[00:02:29] If you have seen one of the film adaptations of it, like Tombstone or the Wyatt Earp film, the scene will be familiar.
[00:02:38] But even if you haven’t, you can probably picture something like it.
[00:02:44] A long dusty street. Two groups of men walking slowly toward each other in the afternoon heat. Flies buzzing around. The clink of spurs. A sheriff’s badge glinting in the sun.
[00:03:02] This is the Hollywood version. The real version was somewhat different, as we’ll come to discover.
[00:03:09] Now, before we get to the story of Wyatt Earp, we need some background.
[00:03:17] Let’s start with the phrase. The phrase “Wild West” probably conjures up a very specific image. Cattle. Saloons. Outlaws and sheriffs. Everyone looking like they wouldn’t say no to a hot bath.
[00:03:34] The Wild West, as historians generally use the term, refers to a specific period in American history: roughly from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the early 1890s, although some people have it starting earlier and finishing later.
[00:03:54] This was the period when the United States was expanding westward at a ferocious pace, pushing into territories that had been home to Native American peoples for centuries, and absorbing land that had until recently belonged to Mexico.
[00:04:14] What made it “wild”, from the perspective of the Americans arriving there, was the absence of established institutions. There were no courts. No reliable police forces. No prisons. No property registries.
[00:04:30] Nothing. It was, essentially, a free-for-all.
[00:04:34] Towns appeared almost overnight, and were typically built near to places where silver had been discovered [called silver strikes], or along cattle routes, or where new railway track had been laid.
[00:04:49] And the men who came to these places tended to be labourers, gamblers, former soldiers, and what we might call “drifters”: men who moved from place to place without settling anywhere.
[00:05:06] Wyatt Earp was one of them.
[00:05:09] He was born in 1848, in Monmouth, Illinois, a small town in the American Midwest. He was the fourth of five brothers, and the family moved often during his childhood: Illinois to Iowa to Missouri to California and back again.
[00:05:30] History remembers him as a legendary lawman, a man who stood up for good in the face of lawlessness, but the reality is a little more complicated.
[00:05:42] In his twenties, he worked as a buffalo hunter on the Kansas plains, when the vast herds that had roamed the great plains for centuries were being systematically slaughtered for their hides.
[00:05:56] Then, he drove stagecoaches: horse-drawn vehicles that carried passengers and mail across long distances before the railways reached everywhere. He was a taxi driver, essentially.
[00:06:10] In 1871, he was arrested on a charge of horse theft, which was a serious crime at the time, and for which execution wasn’t an uncommon sentence.
[00:06:22] Luckily for him, and for our story, he managed to escape from jail, and skipped town.
[00:06:30] And again, fortunately for our story, the 1870s was not a time of extensive background checks and synchronised criminal databases, so Earp was able to get various jobs as a lawman, a sort of police officer.
[00:06:46] First in Wichita and then in Dodge City, both in Kansas, where he served as a deputy marshal.
[00:06:54] So, he has had what we might call a “portfolio career” so far: buffalo hunter, stagecoach driver, horse thief, and now deputy marshal.
[00:07:06] He was also, it would appear, involved in prostitution, and was arrested several times for running a brothel.
[00:07:16] And, to complete the picture, he was a frequent gambler, spending much of his time in saloons and playing a card game called faro. He was actually quite good, he would later claim, and made more money through gambling than he did through his official job as a lawman.
[00:07:36] By 1879, he had made his way to a town called Tombstone, in Arizona, along with three of his five brothers.
[00:07:47] One brother, Virgil, was already there, and had taken up the position of town marshal, the local law enforcement chief.
[00:07:58] Virgil had not just arrived first; he had effectively sent for his brothers. As town marshal, he could appoint deputies, and he hired family.
[00:08:10] It was nepotism, essentially, but it was also practical: in a town with no reliable law enforcement, men who would take a bullet for you were worth more than qualified strangers.
[00:08:25] James, the oldest of the four, who was quieter and more reserved than the others, he worked in a saloon.
[00:08:34] Another, Morgan, arrived around the same time as Wyatt.
[00:08:38] And Warren, the youngest, came later.
[00:08:42] Tombstone had struck silver in 1877, and by 1881 it was one of the most prosperous cities in the area, with a population of several thousand people. It had newspapers. An opera house. A telegraph office. It was pretty big by frontier standards.
[00:09:03] It also had a serious problem.
[00:09:06] The problem was the Cowboys.
[00:09:10] The Cowboys, which is what they were actually called, they were a loose network of cattle thieves and smugglers who operated out of the surrounding hills and valleys.
[00:09:21] They stole livestock in Mexico and sold it on the American side of the border.
[00:09:27] They robbed stagecoaches. They intimidated people. They were not organised in any formal sense, but they had numbers, and local political support.
[00:09:39] And as you might imagine, they hated the Earp brothers, and had a running feud that had been building for months.
[00:09:49] The tension was about money and power and political allegiance.
[00:09:55] The county sheriff, a man named Johnny Behan, was sympathetic to the Cowboys.
[00:10:01] He had grown up among ranching people and shared their wariness of the Earp brothers, who he saw as outsiders with their own agenda, which they were, really.
[00:10:13] Virgil Earp, as Tombstone’s town marshal, was not sympathetic to the Cowboys at all. And Wyatt Earp had ambitions to become county sheriff himself. In other words, he had his sights on Behan’s job.
[00:10:30] There was also a personal dimension. Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp had been involved with the same woman, Josephine Marcus, a theatre performer who had been briefly engaged to Behan before she broke it off.
[00:10:46] By the autumn of 1881, the feud between the Earps and the Cowboys had been simmering for long enough.
[00:10:56] On the morning of October 26th, Virgil Earp received word that several Cowboys were in town and visibly armed, which technically violated Tombstone’s ordinance, its local law, against carrying firearms within the city limits.
[00:11:16] Virgil assembled a small group: Wyatt, Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday, a gambler and gunfighter who was one of the most feared men on the frontier.
[00:11:29] The four of them walked toward the vacant lot where they had heard the Cowboys were.
[00:11:36] What happened next is disputed in almost every account.
[00:11:41] Who fired first? Was there a verbal warning? Were the Cowboys trying to surrender? Were the Cowboys even armed? Virgil Earp later said he told them to give up their weapons. The Cowboys’ side said no such offer was made.
[00:12:00] What everyone agrees on is this: it lasted roughly thirty seconds. On the Cowboys side, three were killed outright.
[00:12:10] On the other side, Virgil and Morgan Earp were both wounded. Doc Holliday was grazed. Wyatt walked away without injury.
[00:12:21] There were no celebrations among the town’s residents.
[00:12:25] The Earps and Holliday were charged with murder. There was a trial, which ultimately ruled in their favour, finding that Virgil had been acting in his capacity as town marshal and that the shootings were justified.
[00:12:42] But the community was divided.
[00:12:45] Half of Tombstone saw the Earps as law enforcers. The other half saw them as men who had used their badges to settle a private score.
[00:12:57] There were elements of truth to both arguments.
[00:13:01] Virgil Earp was the town marshal, and the Cowboys were breaking the rules about carrying weapons inside the town.
[00:13:09] But the Earps had spent months feuding with the Cowboys. And the badge gave them the authority to do something about it.
[00:13:19] And this shootout was just the start of a bitter tit-for-tat vendetta.
[00:13:27] Two months later, in December 1881, Virgil Earp was ambushed outside a saloon late at night. Shotgun blasts hit his left arm. He survived, but his arm was permanently disabled.
[00:13:43] Three months after that, in March 1882, Morgan Earp was shot through a window while playing billiards in a saloon. Two bullets hit him. He died within the hour, on the floor, in his brother Wyatt’s arms.
[00:14:01] And what followed was not due legal process, it was revenge, pure and simple.
[00:14:09] Wyatt Earp, with a small group of men that included Doc Holliday, Warren Earp, and several others, rode out in pursuit of the men they held responsible.
[00:14:21] Over the following three weeks, they hunted and killed at least four of them; at a railway station, in the hills, and at a water source.
[00:14:32] These were not arrests. There was no due process. No trial.
[00:14:38] This was the “Wild” West, but even here, this crossed a line.
[00:14:44] A warrant was issued for Wyatt Earp’s arrest on charges of murder. He fled Arizona Territory, rode north into Colorado and never returned to Arizona.
[00:14:57] He bounced from place to place, chasing the next opportunity.
[00:15:02] Colorado, then Texas. San Diego in the late 1880s, where he ran saloons and became a property speculator.
[00:15:11] He made good money, then lost most of it when the land boom collapsed.
[00:15:16] In 1896, he made the news after refereeing a heavyweight boxing championship fight in San Francisco. The bout ended controversially, with Earp awarding the match to the fighter who appeared to be losing, and the national newspapers accused him of fixing the result.
[00:15:36] Then came Alaska during the gold rush of 1897, where he ran a saloon and reportedly made the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s money. Then it was Nevada, still gambling.
[00:15:50] And finally Los Angeles.
[00:15:53] And it would be in Los Angeles that he would find himself remade, turned into something that he never was.
[00:16:02] Los Angeles, of course, is the home of Hollywood, which was, by the 1910s and 1920s, the centre of the American film industry.
[00:16:13] The dominant genre was the Western. Cowboys and sheriffs and open plains. Clear moral lines. The good man with the gun.
[00:16:24] Now, Earp had been thinking about fame and how it worked for a long time.
[00:16:30] A generation earlier, he’d seen how Wild West figures had become household names through dime novels, the cheap, sensational books sold for about ten cents.
[00:16:43] A man who got written up in the right way could become famous across the country, have his name outlast him. Earp had watched it happen to others and wanted it to happen to him.
[00:16:57] And now Hollywood was doing the same thing, albeit on a far larger scale.
[00:17:05] And importantly, Earp had something that almost nobody else on those film sets had: real-life experience.
[00:17:14] He was actually there. They were making movies about a period he had lived through.
[00:17:21] He became a regular visitor to Western sets, and got to know some of the biggest stars of the era, not just because he enjoyed it, but because he understood what Hollywood could do.
[00:17:35] These were the people who would decide whose story got told. He advised them on how to carry themselves, how to hold a pistol, how a real lawman moved. And all the while, he was making a case for himself as a quintessential hero of the Wild West.
[00:17:58] But he had a problem. The record as it existed was not the one he wanted told.
[00:18:06] In the newspapers of the Southwest, he had been reported as a murderer: a man who had used his badge to pursue a private vendetta and then fled justice.
[00:18:18] The boxing scandal had brought his name to a national audience, but for the wrong reasons.
[00:18:25] In other words, the name Wyatt Earp was associated with crime, match-fixing, and general skulduggery, dodgy dealing; he wanted to be remembered as a hero.
[00:18:39] So, he got to work trying to change the historical record.
[00:18:45] He tried first with a writer named John Flood, who spent years working on a manuscript about Earp’s life. Flood was reportedly a terrible writer, and the book was rejected by every publisher it was sent to.
[00:19:02] Then, in the last years of his life, Earp found a journalist named Stuart Lake.
[00:19:10] Lake was ambitious, a gifted writer, and willing to sit with the old man and take down everything he said. Earp talked. Lake listened and took notes. Between them, they worked for the definitive account: the one that would fix his reputation for good.
[00:19:32] Earp died on the 13th of January, 1929, before the book was finished.
[00:19:39] He was eighty years old. By this time, the gunfight at the OK Corral was almost fifty years in the past and barely remembered.
[00:19:50] But two years later, he and the gunfight would be brought back to life. Lake published his book: Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal.
[00:20:03] The Earp of this book, a book that was presented as an accurate biography, was not the gambling, drifting, horse-thieving, pimping, revenge-killing, complicated man of the historical record.
[00:20:18] He was a hero. A symbol. The embodiment of law and order in a lawless land.
[00:20:27] The book was a bestseller.
[00:20:29] It was adapted for film almost immediately, and the adaptations kept coming. John Ford’s My Darling Clementine in 1946. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957. And then, in 1993 and 1994, two major Hollywood films, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, brought the story to yet another generation.
[00:20:56] With each retelling, the thirty-second argument over a town firearms ordinance became a defining battle between civilisation and lawlessness.
[00:21:07] A drifting gambler with a chequered past became the man who tamed the West.
[00:21:13] So, to wrap things up, Wyatt Earp died in 1929 without ever clearing his name, without ever seeing his book published, without ever appearing on a cinema screen.
[00:21:26] Within a few years of his death, he was one of the most famous figures of the American West.
[00:21:33] The Wild West had found its hero. The only problem was that he’d never really existed.
[00:21:42] OK, then, that is it for today’s episode: the first part of our three-part mini-series on Tales from the Wild West.
[00:21:51] Next up, we’ll meet Bass Reeves: born into slavery, three thousand arrests to his name, but was almost forgotten to history.
[00:22:01] And in part three, we’ll look at the Wild West from an entirely different angle: through the story of the Apache leader Geronimo.
[00:22:10] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:15] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
