It is during this time that he meets Doc Holiday and they become loyal friends. He next takes a job with the Santa Fe Railroad, going after train robbers. He is replaced by Ed Masterson, brother of Bat. Back on the side of the law, he eventually becomes Sheriff of Dodge City but when he is criticized of for being too tough, the Mayor fires him. After he rids a town of a viscous troublemaker, he is made a deputy. Still emotionally troubled and self destructive, he wanders about and engages in a variety of activities from horse thief (for which he is jailed) to buffalo hunter. In his grief, a drunken Wyatt sets fire to his home and heads west again on his horse. Wyatt works as a constable while studying law and life is perfect until Urilla, who is pregnant, contracts typhoid fever and dies. He can't forget Urilla, a girl he met six years before in Missouri and he returns to court her. The family travels west and Wyatt grows to adulthood, an intelligent and basically peaceful man, yet courageous and skilled with a gun and his fists. When several of the younger Earps resist the move, because they have other plans, Nicholas Earp proclaims that the family must stick together as "Nothing counts as much as blood. He wants to move all of them to California where he and his sons can practice law and where he envisions great opportunities for his large family. Wyatt is eager to leave home and join the fight against "The Rebs", but Wyatt's father, Nicholas, who is a lawyer, has other plans for his family. Wyatt's brothers Virgil and James have just returned from the Civil War where James was badly wounded. The scene then flashes back to an Iowan farm in 1863 when Wyatt was just fifteen.
The film opens just as the infamous shoot-out with the Clanton gang, known as the gunfight at the "OK Corral, begins. All the anticipated action is there, but the film also explores in depth, the life and times of Wyatt Earp and the events that made him a heroic legend. Wyatt Earp is a Western which spans the last 40 years of the 19th century.