As a description of where Earp—a professional gambler and occasional lawman—had spent the notable moments in his life before 1883, this made little sense. Earp was not a stranger to California; he lived on a rented farm in San Bernardino as a teen after his family had trekked there from Iowa in 1864. But he had left San Bernardino by 1868. If he returned to California before 1883, it was only for brief visits.

But as a prediction of where Earp would spend most of the last 55 years of his life, the tabloid’s identification of him as a Californian could not have been more accurate.

Not only would Earp live out his days in California, but two of the most important developments in his life happened there:

1.) His participation in 1896, as referee, in a reputedly fixed heavyweight championship prizefight in San Francisco that tarnished his reputation.

2.) His friendships with Hollywood filmmakers, beginning in the late 1910s, that restored his reputation. Though we think of Earp as an artifact of the Old West, he was much more a product of the New West. And of an urban, 20th-century media culture based in California.

When Earp first settled in California in 1887, he chose San Diego as his home, shortly after the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad extended a branch line to the city. In San Diego, Earp speculated in real estate, ran several gambling halls in the rough Stingaree district south of downtown, and promoted bare-knuckle prizefights and horse races both in San Diego and Tijuana.

By 1891, however, the real estate bubble in San Diego had burst, and Earp, virtually penniless, had relocated to San Francisco, where he trained racehorses. There, in 1896, his longtime association with gamblers—and his reputation in boxing and horse racing circles as a man willing to fix matches or races to win a bet—led to his 11th-hour selection as the referee of a heavyweight championship prizefight at the Mechanics’ Pavilion in San Francisco. In the eighth round, the champion and favorite, Robert Fitzsimmons, knocked the challenger, Tom Sharkey, to the mat and appeared to have won the bout. Yet Earp ruled that Fitzsimmons had struck Sharkey with a low blow, and awarded the fight and championship to the challenger. In the days after the fight, rumors circulated that Sharkey’s camp had paid Earp $2,500 to ensure his victory.

The Sharkey-Fitzsimmons controversy was the biggest gambling scandal in championship sports until the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series in 1919. It was unsurpassed in boxing until the infamous “long count” in the heavyweight championship fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey in 1927. Earp’s boxing decision may have inspired Ernest Hemingway to write the short story “Fifty Grand.”

And, not least of all, the fight vaulted Wyatt Earp into national prominence. Before the bout, the violence in Arizona in the early 1880s had been mostly forgotten. After the fight, newspapers printed and reprinted stories of the infamous gunfight in which Earp, two of his brothers, and his friend Doc Holliday killed three cowboys—and of the vigilante violence that followed, in which one of Earp’s brothers and two other cowboys were killed. The papers also circulated stories—some credible and some not—of Earp’s alleged misdeeds as a gambler and con man.

Stung by the criticism, Earp sought to remove himself from the public eye. He left California for a few years and ran a saloon in Nome, Alaska; he also made the rounds of mining camps in Nevada, dealing cards. But by 1911 he was back in California; the Los Angeles Police Department bunco squad arrested him that year for running a crooked card game. His reputation as a scoundrel seemed secure.

In 1914, while living in Los Angeles, Earp took a step toward repairing his image by visiting Paramount Studios—the first of what would be many visits to Hollywood. He charmed Raoul Walsh and Charlie Chaplin, regaling them with largely invented tales of his past. He established himself as an informal adviser on Westerns, and became a close friend of the most prominent Western film star of the 1910s and early 1920s, William S. Hart.

Hart encouraged Earp to collect his tales into a memoir that could provide the basis for a film script. Earp took to the task enthusiastically, starting over from scratch three times with new writing partners when results proved unsatisfying to him. In each new iteration of his life, he tweaked his account, editing out his missteps and embarrassments, neglecting to mention his 1911 arrest in Los Angeles and his arrests in the 1870s for horse theft and consorting with prostitutes.

He modeled the character he created in his memoir—tough and taciturn—on Hart’s screen persona. Earp cast himself as a lifelong proponent of law and order, an avenging angel of justice. His was a story of the redemptive power of violence. But Earp’s real story is about the redemptive power of the media.

Earp’s as-told-to biography was published in 1931, two years after his death; Frontier Marshal, the first film based on the book, was released in 1934. Screened and broadcast repeatedly, the film rooted Earp in American collective memory.

Ever since, Earp’s adventures have been decontextualized through time and repetition. The manipulations started with Earp but continue to this day because of the work of generations of actors and filmmakers. Earp’s stories are now open to manipulation by all; they have become part of our collective memory’s invented tradition. Ironically, the media culture that Earp so resented after 1896 because it foisted on him an unwanted celebrity became, after his death, the engine of his ongoing redemption.

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Arpaio’s attempt to link himself to Earp may seem desperate, but it’s not surprising. Arpaio is a master of symbolic politics, manipulating Western iconography to present himself as a lawman who, like Wyatt Earp, would impose his version of justice at all costs. The power of sheriffs, particularly in the parts of the Western United States where they are elected officials, is inextricably tied up in the concept of a popular justice that is not bound by anything so mundane as the law.

Like Arpaio, Earp was an Arizona man. He was deputy sheriff of Pima County in the last half of 1880; served episodically as a deputy on the Tombstone city police force in 1881 (when he was in the famous “gunfight at the O.K. Corral”); and was commissioned as a deputy U.S. marshal in early 1882. Like Arpaio, who has published two books touting himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” Earp learned how to use the media to his advantage. He spent most of his last two decades in Los Angeles, becoming a fixture at Hollywood studios and telling exaggerated tales of his exploits.

Earp demonstrated his willingness to place justice above the law particularly starkly in 1882, when he led a posse through southern Arizona in search of the men who had murdered his brother. The posse captured two men and summarily executed them. One of the men killed, Florentine Cruz, was probably the wrong guy. Accused of murder, Earp fled Arizona.

Earp’s role as a rogue marshal–a vigilante with a badge–became a crucial part of his status in American popular culture. It’s of course ironic that a vigilante killer and accused murderer would become a symbol of rectitude, but Earp’s story appealed to Americans who, like him, saw justice not in fickle courtrooms but in the character of stalwarts who were willing to break the law–even to commit murder.

Earp was a central figure in movies in the first half of the 20th century, a period when roughly a third of all Hollywood films were Westerns. A 1930 novel of the Wyatt Earp story by W.R. Burnett (best known for the gangster drama Little Caesar) became, in 1932, the film Law and Order, starring Walter Huston. The publication in 1931 of an adoring Earp biography became, three years later, the film Frontier Marshal.

At a time when the leaders of organized criminal syndicates were at the height of their power and celebrity, these early-1930s versions Earp cast him as a kind of Eliot Ness, an example for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s battle against organized crime. During the early years of the Cold War, Earp became a symbol of resistance to communism. The anti-communist Earp reached its apogee in a 1953 remake of Law and Order, starring Ronald Reagan as the lawman. Reagan’s lawman confronts a corrupt gang that controls a small town through terror and intimidation. (The gang’s leader has a metal hand; he literally rules with an iron fist.)

Film has rooted Wyatt Earp in American collective memory, and almost anyone, including retired Phoenix insurance agents and county sheriffs, can tap into it. (Recall when President George W. Bush vowed to get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” in 2001.) In sum, sheriffs like Arpaio derive their power not from careful enforcement of the law but from disdain for it. This style of sheriff politics can be entertaining–but it has real consequences.

In 1993, in a demonstration of his resolve not to release prisoners because of overcrowding, Arpaio constructed an outdoor annex to his county jail that has come to be known as ‘Tent City.” Over the past 19 years, nearly half a million people, many of whom were merely awaiting trail, have been confined in the tents, even when summer temperatures have reached the triple digits. In 2010, when the state of Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070 mandating identification checks of suspected illegal immigrants, Arpaio announced a new “Section 1070” in Tent City to accommodate the additional anticipated arrivals. In December 2011, the civil rights division of the Justice Department charged Sheriff Arpaio with unfairly targeting Latinos.

Sadly, this is all to be expected. County sheriffs are among the few law enforcement officers in the industrialized world who are elected to office. The mixture of law enforcement and local politics has bred a type of popular justice that carries an enormous potential for demagoguery and the abuse of power–and, potentially, many a latter-day Florentine Cruz.

Andrew Isenberg is a professor of history at Temple University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Wyatt Earp.

*Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

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