Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp

Wyatt Earp worked as a lawman, gambler, and saloon investor across a string of boomtowns — Dodge City, Deadwood, Tombstone — before the thirty-second gunfight near the O.K. Corral in October 1881 made him permanently famous. Alongside his brothers Virgil and Morgan and the tubercular gambler-gunfighter Doc Holliday, Earp confronted the Clanton-McLaury faction in a dispute rooted in territorial rivalry and personal grudges as much as law enforcement; three men died. The aftermath was messier than the legend: Morgan was later assassinated and Virgil maimed in retaliatory ambushes, and Wyatt led an unofficial, legally dubious "vendetta ride" hunting the men he held responsible, killing several before fleeing Arizona Territory altogether. He spent his later decades drifting through mining camps and, eventually, Los Angeles, where he consulted informally on early Western films and cultivated the more heroic version of his own legend that Hollywood would later cement.