HE'S portrayed as the man who cleaned up Tombstone, but 80 years after Wild West legend Wyatt Earp's death, an onslaught of critical reappraisals of his life by academics and folk historians may demolish the famed lawman's reputation forever.

Hollywood portrayals of Earp's life focus on the gunfight at the OK Corral where most people think he, his brothers and their posse heroically shot down a gang of dangerous, cowboy outlaws.

But two new books and a magazine published in Tombstone, the frontier town where the shoot-out took place, claim that it was Earp who was the aggressor. They will also allege that he was a corrupt cop and "cold-blooded murderer", whose crimes included working as a pimp and stagecoach robbery.

Janice Hendricks, editor of the Tombstone Times, has published a long series of anti-Earp articles. A collection of lead writer Joyce Aros's work from the "underground magazine" has recently been published under the title In Defence of the Outlaws.

Hendricks said: "The movies made Wyatt Earp a hero but if you talk to the old-timers here, who still tell the stories their grandfather told, they don't have a good word to say about him.

"People that have lived here most of their life deal with Wyatt Earp because of the tourist mentality, but they prefer not to discuss him and regard him as a thug. We want to open people's eyes to the fact that Wyatt Earp was not the man people thought he was."

The "cowboy apologists", as they are known, want America to re-examine the gunfight at the OK Corral, the most famous shoot-out in Western history, and exonerate the dead ranchers, who they claim were not outlaws.

A clear and unequivocal explanation of events has never really been reached. At 3pm on Wednesday, October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp, with Doc Holliday and his brothers Morgan and Virgil, who was town marshall, went to disarm a gang of cowboys who were disobeying town rules by openly carrying weapons.

There is some debate over who took the first shot, but after 30 frenzied seconds during which approximately 30 bullets were fired, three cowboys, Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton lay dead.

A preliminary hearing, which was organised to decide whether Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp could be tried for murder, found that there was not enough evidence to indict the men, who were not officially lawmen at the time of the shootout but were hurriedly deputised by Virgil Earp.

Morgan Earp was then shot in revenge for the killings, sparking the famous vendetta ride, in which Wyatt and his posse went out for revenge.

Steve Gatto, a Tombstone historian who has written several books on the old west, will be publishing his analysis of the gunfight at the OK Corral later this year. The iconoclastic book will also carry allegations that Wyatt Earp was a pimp at a "house of ill-fame" in Peoria.

He said: "My book will say that Clanton and the McLaurys were shot down at the OK Corral as they were trying to surrender, or at least not trying to put up a fight. It will also state that Wyatt Earp and his brother misrepresented what happened at the OK Corral. He was a cold-blooded murderer and should have been bound over and indicted. The deaths were an injustice."

Regardless of any negative re-examinations of the gunfight, there is a vocal pro-Earp camp in America which is critical of Tombstone locals and what some call their "Uncle Ned history", whereby every resident there has a relative that knows what really happened at the OK Corral.

Allen Barra, a journalist who has worked for the Village Voice in New York, has published a book called Inventing Wyatt Earp. He believes the killings were justified and claims all of the testimonies that laid the blame on Earp came from biased, unreliable witnesses.

Barra said: "Wyatt Earp was not a nice person, but none of the people we were talking about at that time would have been considered nice people' by today's standards. Nor in fact would you want a nice person to be a law officer in that particular period. It was a dirty, dangerous job and somebody had to do it."

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