Every account is slightly different': who were the real Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday?

"Every historian uses it, they just beat it to death, Gardner says cheerfully, by video from Bozeman, Montana. And it's really not true. I wrote a narrative. I want people to be immersed in the time, but I just get so tired of that line. The legend is legend. It never becomes fact. People can repeat the legend but it doesn't make it fact. It's just a catchy thing that people have caught on to for decades now. And you'll notice that I did not use it. I referred to it, but I did not use it."

"In Tombstone, Arizona, on 26 October 1881, Earp and Holliday were involved in a shootout that came to be known as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. With Earp's brothers, the pair confronted the Cowboys, gang members wanted for robbery and rustling. In less than a minute, three Cowboys were dead and Holliday was wounded, as were Virgil and Morgan Earp. It was one of countless frontier scraps between lawmen and outlaws and yet it entered legend, not least thanks to classic movies including My Darling Clementine, made by Ford in 1946 and starring Henry Fonda as Earp and Victor Mature as Holliday, and Gunfight at the OK Corral, directed by John Sturges in 1957, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the leading roles."

Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday formed an unlikely but lasting friendship marked by contrasting characters: Earp as a complicated, upstanding lawman and Holliday as a reckless gambler afflicted with tuberculosis. On October 26, 1881, the pair and the Earp brothers confronted the Cowboys in Tombstone, Arizona, in a brief shootout known as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that left three Cowboys dead and several participants wounded. The episode became part of American legend and was amplified by classic films, while historical records preserve verifiable facts separate from repeated mythmaking.

Read at www.theguardian.com