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

Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine. Photograph: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy

There’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.