The name of Wyatt Earp ranks as high in the history of the Old West as the names of Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickock, and Buffalo Bill Cody, for Wyatt Earp was possibly the greatest gunfighter the Old West ever knew. Yet the tall, quiet man with the strikingly pale blue eyes ruled Dodge City, Wichita, and other wild cow towns only by fear of the unpressed trigger. He was the first frontier peace officer who believed that peace could be enforced without bloodshed, and only once did he shoot to kill. When he was forced by the sheriff of Tombstone, Arizona, to fight or run away, he chose to fight; and the Battle of the O.K. Corral in October, 1881, showed how he and his brothers fought in a showdown.