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 rev ...