One ot the things I have noticed is that my Samsung TV give me 'The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp' on one of the free western channels.
A Desilu production, it portrays Wyatt as an all around great guy.
It came out at about the same time the Warner Brothers TV westerns did. Going only by memory the Warner Brothers westerns I remember were Cheyenne, Maverick, Bronco and Sugarfoot. There were a few others also.
Anyway, back to Wyatt Earp, all around good citizen and nice guy according to the show. Wyatt is probably remembered in real life as a participent at the gunfight at the OK corral which lasted about 30 seconds.
If you do any digging into the real history of Wyatt and his brothers you will find a bunch of somewhat unscrupulous characters. They were pretty much gamblers, opportunists and hired thugs.
People tend not to realize that the Old West wasn't as wholesome a place as the tube portrays it. For example, Wyatt's wife ran a brothel while for a while Wyatt was some kind of policeman.
In general the people were pretty pragmatic. If thuggishness reared its head in town the quick fix was for the city fathers to hire a bigger thug. Usually there was a stipend that went with it but they permitted 'their thug' to do a little side work, things like running a faro game or maybe a little silent ownership in a whore house.
The Official opening of 'Gunsmoke' face to face pistol duel is pretty much a fantasy cooked up by people like dime novelist Ned Buntline. Generally disagreements of the sort were settled by things like someone standing in an alley shooting his antagonist in the back, things along these lines.
As for the Gunfight at the OK Corral? It was a thirty second melee of a gunfight that left three cowboys opposing the Earps dead and two Earp brothers and Doc Holliday wounded. Wyatt escaped unscathed. It was not a drawn out affair as others would lead you to believe.
So why was Wyatt the hero of a TV series?
Probably because not only did he supply Ned Buntline with some of the basis for his writing but also later on in life when he lived in California he worked for a bit in the fledgling movie industry.
Desilu Productions had him seen as a good, wholesome upstanding character as Jack Warner did with all of the heroes of the westerns of the 50s and 60s.
Actually it was pretty wholesome entertainement unlike a lot of the crap we have today even though most of it was total bull$hit.
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