Before he was the stoic lawman of Hollywood Westerns, Wyatt Earp climbed through a jail roof to escape horse theft charges, was arrested repeatedly in Peoria brothels, and was branded the Peoria Bummer by the local press. This episode uses census records and legal documents to rebuild the contradictory life behind the myth.

We trace his Civil War-era insecurity, the death of his wife Urilla, his cow-town years in Wichita and Dodge City, the alliance with Doc Holliday, the Tombstone turf war with the Cowboys, the cramped 30-second gunfight near the O.K. Corral, the Vendetta Ride, and four decades of boomtown wandering with Josephine, including an $80,000 Nome saloon fortune and a boxing scandal. It ends with Stuart Lake’s 1931 biography that scrubbed him clean.

• The 1869 shooting sparked by the insult California boy and what it revealed about his temper
• How badge-wearing, faro dealing, and saloon enforcement were parallel gigs in a transactional frontier economy
• Why the Tombstone conflict looked more like a business and political rivalry than cops versus robbers
• The Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight of 1896 and why Earp was better known for it than for Tombstone when he died in 1929
• Josephine’s legal threats and editorial control that erased Mattie Blaylock and the Peoria years from the authorized record