Back in San Francisco, Wyatt raced horses, but his reputation suffered irreparably when he refereed the Fitzsimmons vs. Sharkey boxing match and called a foul, which led many to believe he fixed the fight.

This changed only after his death when the extremely flattering biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal by Stuart N. Lake was published in 1931, becoming a bestseller and creating his reputation as a fearless lawman.

Wyatt had seven full siblings – James, Virgil, Martha, Morgan, Warren, Virginia, and Adelia – and an elder half-brother and half-sister, Newton and Mariah-Ann Earp, from his father's first marriage.

Their father was busy recruiting and drilling local companies, so Wyatt and his two younger brothers Morgan and Warren were left in charge of tending 80 acres (32 ha) of corn.

From 1866 to 1868, he drove cargo over 720 miles (1,160 km) on the wagon road from Wilmington through San Bernardino, then Las Vegas, Nevada, to Salt Lake City, Utah Territory.

[42]: 13 [41][33] In early 1874 Earp and Sally moved 500 miles (800 km) southwest to the growing cow town of Wichita where his brother James ran a brothel with his wife Nellie "Bessie" Ketchum.

[50] In late 1875 the Wichita Beacon published this story: On last Wednesday (December 8), policeman Earp found a stranger lying near the bridge in a drunken stupor.

McLaury angrily printed a response in the Cowboy-friendly Nuggett, calling Hurst "unmanly," "a coward, a vagabond, a rascal, and a malicious liar," and accusing him of stealing the mules himself.

[69]: 65  The sheriff's position was worth more than $40,000 (equivalent to $1,263,000 in 2023) per year, because he was also county assessor and tax collector, and the board of supervisors allowed him to keep ten percent of the amounts paid.

[82]: 179 Paul filed a lawsuit on November 19 contesting the election results, alleging that Shibell's Cowboy supporters Ike Clanton, Curly Bill Brocius, and Frank McLaury had conspired in ballot stuffing.

The amount of bullion that the stagecoach actually carried is questioned by modern researchers because it would have weighed about 1,600 pounds (730 kg); the value of silver at the time was $1 an ounce – a significant weight for a team of horses.

[119] The Earps and a posse tracked the men down and arrested Luther King, who confessed that he had been holding the reins while Bill Leonard, Harry "The Kid" Head, and Jim Crain robbed the stage.

He told the court that he had taken the extra step of obtaining a second copy of a telegram for Clanton from Wells Fargo, ensuring that the reward applied for capturing the killers dead or alive.

[122] Meanwhile, tensions increased between the Earps and the McLaurys when Cowboys robbed the passenger stage on the Sandy Bob Line in the Tombstone area on September 8, bound for nearby Bisbee, Arizona.

Wyatt returned Curly Bill's gunfire with his own shotgun, hitting him in the chest from about 50 feet (15m) away, causing him to fall into the water's edge of the spring and die.

[134] The coroner reports credited the Earp posse with killing Frank Stilwell, Curly Bill, Indian Charlie, and Johnny Barnes in their two-week-long ride.

In 1888 Earp gave an interview to California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, during which he claimed to have killed "over a dozen stage robbers, murderers, and cattle thieves" in his time as a lawman.

Seeking to avoid a confrontation with the deputized gunmen, and under pressure from Governor Glick and the Santa Fe Railroad, which conducted a lot of business in Dodge, the mayor and city council backed down.

[149]: 275–298 The Coeur d'Alene mining venture died out by 1887, so Earp and Josephine went to San Diego, California, where the railroad was about to arrive and a real estate boom was underway.

[69]: 171  From 1891 to 1897, the couple lived in at least four different locations in the city: 145 Ellis St., 720 McAllister St., 514A Seventh Ave., and 1004 Golden Gate Ave.[69] Josephine wrote in her memoir that she and Earp were married in 1892 by the captain of multi-millionaire Lucky Baldwin's yacht off the California coast.

[170] Earp was a last-minute choice as referee for a boxing match on December 2, 1896, which the promoters billed as the heavyweight championship of the world, when Bob Fitzsimmons was set to fight Tom Sharkey at the Mechanics' Pavilion in San Francisco.

[179] Fitzsimmons went to court to overturn Earp's decision,[149] and newspaper accounts and testimony over the next two weeks revealed a conspiracy among the boxing promoters to fix the fight's outcome.

Wyatt rubbed elbows with future novelist Rex Beach, writer Jack London, playwright Wilson Mizner, and boxing promoter Tex Rickard,[51] with whom Earp developed a long-lasting relationship.

On November 25, 1899, the Seattle Star described him as "a man of great reputation among the toughs and criminals, inasmuch as he formerly walked the streets of a rough frontier mining town with big pistols stuck in his belt, spurs on his boots, and a devil-may-care expression upon his official face".

Earp partnered with an established local gambler named Thomas Urguhart, and they opened the Union Club saloon and gambling operation in Seattle's Pioneer Square.

They were attempting to wrest control of mining claims for vast deposits of potash on the edge of Searles Lake that were held in receivership by the foreclosed California Trona Company.

"[221] In 1916 Earp went with his friend Jack London, whom he knew from Nome, to visit the set of former cowboy, sailor, and movie actor-turned-film director Raoul Walsh, who was shooting at the studio of Mutual Film conglomerate in Edendale, California.

Corral and his actions afterward in an interview with Stuart Lake, author of the 1931 largely fictionalized biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal: For my handling of the situation at Tombstone, I have no regrets.

I want to call your particular attention again to one fact, which writers of Tombstone incidents and history apparently have overlooked: with the deaths of the McLaurys, the Clantons, Stillwell, Florentino Cruz, Curly Bill, and the rest, organized, politically protected crime and depredations in Cochise County ceased.

With a Derby hat and a pair of tan shoes, he was a figure to catch a lady's eye ...[218]In 1926 writer Adela Rogers St. Johns met the elderly Earp for the first time.