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

A new book, Brothers of the Gun, explores the unlikely friendship between a complicated lawman and a cursed gambler

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here’s a famous line from a John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Mark Lee Gardner is a leading historian of the old west whose new book, Brothers of the Gun: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and a Reckoning in Tombstone, concerns two major figures in such history. He doesn’t like Ford’s line.

“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.”