Was Wyatt Earp Actually a Villain?

The history books (and Hollywood) often describe the famous lawman, Wyatt Earp, as many things: brave, courageous, moral, law-abiding, and honorable. In the story of the “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” Earp is often portrayed as the hero, the good guy we all should be rooting for. In truth, Wyatt Earp was a much more complicated individual who, among other things, was arrested several times in his life for various offenses, involved in a few major scandals (sometimes on the “bad guy” side), and otherwise seemed to be an individual who balanced precariously on that line between a life as a criminal and a life as a lawman. Wyatt Earp was born on March 19, 1848 in Monmouth in western Illinois. The town had only been established seventeen years prior and was still very much a frontier town. Records are a bit scattered , but it seems the Earps had settled there prior to Wyatt’s birth and did what we now call “squatting” on someone else’s land. In 1865, the Earp family made one of their many relocations, this time to Southern California, but the 17 year old Wyatt did not join them. He instead wandered... This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout