Glenn Boyer kept the name of the iconic lawman Wyatt Earp alive but has been accused of muddying the Earp research field. Though other projects have preoccupied him of late, the controversial octogenarian has not lost his grit and again speaks with Wild West about his main man. This article originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Wild West magazine.

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“Wyatt Earp is a dirty word!” snarls Glenn Boyer of the iconic lawman about whom he has written so much. The quote is not his, he explains, but was spoken by an Earp relative tired of the endless postmortems on his famous relative. Boyer himself has spent decades researching and cataloging the comings and goings of Earp, authoring dozens of books, pamphlets and articles about the West’s most famous lawman and his sphere of acquaintances in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, and elsewhere. Boyer’s most noted Earp works are a trilogy—Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp (1967), I Married Wyatt Earp (1976) and Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone Vendetta (1993). In the first, Boyer suggested Earp had been figuratively murdered by other writers and replaced by a glowing myth, not that the real man had actually been murdered.

Critics who have scrutinized Boyer’s writings fall into two distinct camps of opinion: Admirers have dubbed him “the Icon,” while detractors question his sources and decry him as a fraud. Name-calling between the two sides flared up a decade ago. In October 1998, Wild West ran interviews with Boyer and Casey Tefertiller, author of the 1997 biography Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend. These 10 years later, it is not our purpose to restage the old verbal shootout, but to see how Boyer, at 85, views his long obsession with Earp’s life and involvement with Earp family members, to get a handle on just what primary material he has (or once had) in his collection, and to see whether time has mellowed a man known by friends and enemies alike for his cantankerousness.

What is your family connection with the Earps?
My father was operating a shovel and rocker in Nome, Alaska, in 1901, on the Golden Strand. He was in the employ of a woman looking for her own fortune, whose husband was a saloonkeeper. Pa also worked for her husband as a “swamper,” or janitor, in his saloon. This couple was Wyatt and Josie Earp. My father paid little attention to the fact that Wyatt had earned a reputation as a dangerous lawman.

Later on, Pa, again working as an itinerate laborer, was thrown together with Earp in San Bernardino, Calif., while working orange groves owned by George Miller, a close friend of Wyatt’s. The two had met as teenagers in San Bernardino in 1864. Dad hit it off with Miller’s son, Bill. Given the closeness of George and Wyatt, it provided an opportunity for courtship between Bill and Estelle Edwards, the daughter of Adelia Earp Edwards, Wyatt’s sister. Bill and Estelle married a year later. Eventually, they became a second set of parents to me; likewise, they thought of me as a son.

When did you get interested in all things Wyatt Earp?
Looking back, 1937 was a seminal year for my Earp quest. On November 14 that year, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune, “Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die,” and that led me to Stuart Lake’s book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal [1931]. Eventually, my father read it too, and he made a strange remark: “So that’s who he was.” This was the sort of reaction that emerged later on when Estelle Miller told me, “If I’d known Uncle Wyatt was going to be such a big important man, I’d have paid more attention to him.” When I would ask my father about Earp, he would tell me they talked “mostly horses.” He added, “What would a young fellow say to an old guy that didn’t talk much?” But my interest in Wyatt was off and running, and letters between Pa and Bill Miller stoked the coals as well. Bill would reveal much more about Wyatt years later.

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