The Life and Final Days of Doc Holliday

DOC HOLLIDAY No fiction could create this career killer

Sometimes history gives us a true original, a character so colorful and clearly drawn that he stands across time as part of our collective imagination. Such a man was John Henry "Doc" Holliday.

As every schoolboy knows, Holliday fought beside Wyatt Earp near Tombstone's O.K. Corral, shooting his way into American folklore in a gunfight that lasted less than 30 seconds.

But Holliday was a great deal more than Earp's sidekick. He was a career gunman whose personality was marked by so many shades, quirks, and blunt edges that no fiction writer would dare create him.

He was a dentist with a bad case of the jitters who once told Earp that he felt relaxed only when he was in a gunfight or working on someone's teeth.

Holliday had a penchant for fine clothes and was classically educated, but he could spit a stream of obscenities to make a trail boss blush. He also was a drifter who seemed to have emotional ties to no one. Yet he wrote tender letters to his cousin, Sister Melanie, an Atlanta nun some believe was the model for the strong and saintly Melanie Hamilton in Gone With The Wind.

Holliday was a huge drinker who punished two or three quarts of whiskey a day, yet he possessed an eerily cool hand when wielding his nickel-plated Colt .45s.

Unlike many infamous frontiersmen, whose reputations were earned at the point of pens rather than pistols, Holliday really was a cold-blooded killer. Yet he reportedly sat on his bed and wept after doing the killing near the O.K. Corral.

Ultimately Holliday's life was a kind of Western epic, a tragedy worthy of fine actors on a great stage. The defining fact of his existence, that which colored and shaped his every deed, was the tuberculosis he contracted as a young man.

It was because of the disease and a doctor's prediction that he had a year or two to live that he came West. Tuberculosis also kept him in considerable pain, which made him seek relief in the bottle.

His persistent cough drove away dental patients and ruined his practice. So he became a gambler, following the money from one boomtown to another. But mostly tuberculosis made Holliday indifferent to death. He knew the end was coming, and whether it was brought on by a coughing spasm or a bullet cut no figure with him.

The most persistent theme coursing through Holliday's short life was violence. The pattern started with his departure from Georgia, where he was born in 1851 or early '52, the son of Alice and Henry Holliday, a politician and land speculator who became an officer in the Confederate army.

In the late 1860s, while still in his teens, Holliday was named in a plot to blow up the courthouse in his hometown of Valdosta, which had been taken over by carpetbaggers. Following that incident, and perhaps because of it, Holliday headed north for two years of study in a Baltimore dental school. He practiced briefly in Atlanta before learning of his fatal disease, and the chance of living a somewhat longer life if he moved west.

Thus, in 1872, Holliday left Georgia, embarking on a nomadic existence that basically consisted of two activities: gambling and mayhem.

No matter which new town he entered from Dallas and Jacksboro, Texas, to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Cheyenne, Wyoming - it seemed that some unlucky citizen was soon lying wounded or dead after a confrontation with Holliday.

Ed Bailey, a resident of the rollicking buffalo hunters' camp of Fort Griffin, Texas, made the mistake of ignoring two warnings from Holliday about cheating at poker. An article by Wyatt Earp in the San Francisco Weekly Examiner told what happened when Holliday, rather than deliver a third warning, simply raked in the pot without showing his hand: "Thereupon Bailey started to throw his gun around on Holliday But before he could pull the trigger Doc Holliday had jerked a knife out of his breast pocket and with one sideways sweep had caught Bailey just below the brisket."

Bailey was eviscerated and died, one of about 16 souls dispatched by the hot-tempered Southerner.

Although some doubt the facts behind Holliday's many violent encounters and in some instances whether they occurred at all - their constant repetition in the sensation-seeking press gave him a fearsome reputation.

Everyone knew the Doctor. Anyone who didn't could pick him out of a crowd by his distinctive look, which Earp said was so striking that it haunted him throughout his life. Holliday was 5 feet 10 and painfully thin at 130 pounds. His face was emaciated, his complexion pallid. He had wavy ash-blond hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. But what drew the most notice were his icy blue eyes. Commentators seeking to discredit Holliday invariably made note of his devilish gaze before launching into other criticisms, of which there were many.

Charles Reppy, an editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, called him "the most thoroughly equipped liar and smoothest scoundrel in the United States."

Lawman Bat Masterson once said: "Doc had few real friends. He was selfish and of a perverse nature, characteristics not calculated to make a man popular on the frontier. I never liked Holliday; I tolerated him and helped him at times solely on Wyatt Earp's account, as did many others."

It was true that the kindest words anyone had for Holliday came from Earp. The two were introduced in a Fort Griffin saloon by an ex-prizefighter named John Shanssey. Years later Earp recalled having to wait through a considerable coughing fit before the haggard-looking gambler was able to shake his hand.

Lawman Earp was in Fort Griffin on the trail of a train robber. Shanssey made the introduction as a favor to Wyatt, figuring that if anyone knew the whereabouts of such a low-life, it would be Holliday. That turned out to be a wise hunch, and a friendship began.

In the same town at the same time, the fall of 1877, Holliday met his longtime lover, Kate Elder, a rowdy Hungarian saloon girl whose affections for him ran a wide spectrum, depending on the size of his bank account. Big Nose Kate, as she was known, is said to have saved Holliday's hide in the angry mood that prevailed following his killing of Bailey.

As the story goes and it has been doubted by some Holliday was being held prisoner in a Fort Griffin hotel room, and there was talk of lynching in the air.

Fearing the worst, Kate packed her and her lover's belongings into a couple of bags, hid two saddled mounts a short distance away, then set fire to the rear of the hotel. In the frenzy of trying to put out the fire, Holliday's keepers left him with a lone guard. Kate stepped into the room with a pistol, got the drop on the surprised deputy, and the two of them made their escape on waiting horses.

They fled to Dodge City, and there occurred another much-debated incident that sealed the friendship between Earp and Holliday. It took place just outside the Long Branch Saloon in 1878. Earp, then marshal of Dodge, confronted a drunken mob of Texas cowboys led by Tobe Driskill and Ed Morrison. The situation looked dire when, according to Stuart Lake's Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, Morrison raised his gun to Earp and said: "Pray, you son-of-a-b...., or jerk your gun and . . ."

"Throw 'em up!" challenged a voice at Wyatt's shoulder as the door of the Long Branch burst open. It was Holliday, who had been playing faro when he saw Earp's predicament and decided to intervene. The interruption allowed Earp to conk Morrison on the head with his pistol, at which point one of the Texas cowboys at the back of the mob fired a round at the lawman and missed. Again Holliday stepped in, firing a bullet into the cowboy's shoulder. As the frontier lawman later told Lake: "If it hadn't been for Doc Holliday, I'd have cashed in that night."

Although some have attributed that incident to Earp's imagination, it is undeniable that a strong bond existed between the two men. The shoot-out near the O.Κ. Corral in Tombstone left no doubt of that. When word reached Holliday that Wyatt Earp and his brothers Morgan and Virgil were planning to disarm a band of belliger-ent cowboys, Holliday didn't hesitate to join them.

A feud had been simmering between the Earps and the cowboys, and this was to be one of its several manifestations. Holliday had a beef of his own with the cowboys, but more than that, he was a friend of the Earps'. And if the Doctor possessed one lonesome virtue, it was loyalty to his few friends.

So eager was Holliday to partake of the trouble that day, October 26, 1881, that he hobbled toward the O.K. Corral using a cane for support. But when it came time to shoot, his health suddenly returned. One witness reported seeing Holliday step up to Frank McLaury and shove a pistol into his

At 10 that morning, the 35-year-old Holliday emerged from a coma long enough to request a tumbler of whiskey.

belly, fire, then step back, swing a sawed-off shotgun out from under his long coat and put a load of buckshot into Tom McLaury. Billy Clanton also was killed, but not by Holliday.

The inquest following the short battle showed that Holliday fired first, along with Morgan Earp, and that except for a Win-chester in a scabbard on his saddle, Tom McLaury was most likely unarmed. It is putting it mildly to say that these two facts proved cumbersome to Holliday in the court of public opinion.

But in a surprising claim made years later by Big Nose Kate, Holliday supposedly returned to his room after the fight, sat down on his bed, and cried. "Oh, this is just awful, awful." When she asked if he was hurt, Holliday responded, "No, I am not." Then he pulled up his shirt to reveal a pale red streak about two inches long across his hip where a bullet grazed him.

The killings touched off a string of retribution that left Virgil Earp a cripple and Morgan Earp dead, shot in the back while playing pool in Bob Hatch's saloon in Tombstone. In turn, Wyatt Earp, again with Holliday at his shoulder, tracked down and killed at least four men believed to be involved in Morgan's assassination.

When the sentiments of Tombstone's citizens turned against Earp and Holliday, and the law began to chafe at the number of dead bodies, the two wisely left for Colorado. At Pueblo they split up, thus ending a bloody five-year collaboration.

But Holliday's 30 seconds of work near the O.K. Corral earned him extraordinary notoriety.

In Denver in 1882, amid highly publicized legal efforts to bring him back to Arizona to stand trial for murder, newspapers alternately described him as either a hero or a scoundrel, depending, it seemed, on the time of day.

The Denver Republican said that he had "put more 'rustlers' and cowboys under the sod than any one man in the West."

The story continued: "He has been the terror of the lawless element in Arizona, and with the Earps was the only man brave enough to face the blood-thirsty crowd, which has made the name of Arizona a stench in the nostrils of decent men."

A few days earlier the same paper described Holliday this way: "In comparison, Billy the Kid or any other of the many Western desperadoes who have recently met their fate, fade into insignificance. The murders committed by him [Holliday] are counted by the scores and his other crimes are legion."

Doc Holliday had by now passed into legend. But that dubious fact mattered little to his beloved cousin, Sister Melanie, who kept up her steady stream of letters, always informing him that she was praying for his conversion. It was time ill-spent because even in his later years Holliday kept turning up in the newspapers, the subject of one scrape after another.

A story from the Leadville (Colorado) Daily Herald of August 20, 1884, had him shooting Billy Allen to death in the Monarch Saloon. The trouble started when Allen came to collect $5 he'd loaned Holliday. Another story came two years later in Denver, where Holliday was arrested for vagrancy.

The end came for the Doctor on November 8, 1887, in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where he'd gone hoping the sulphur vapors would aid his worsening tuberculosis. At 10 that morning, the 35-year-old Holliday emerged from a coma long enough to request a tumbler of whiskey. After swilling it down, he reportedly said, "This is funny," then dropped his head and closed his eyes for the final time.Writers of various post-mortems say that comment referred to his belief that he'd die with his boots on from a bullet, rather than with his boots off from tuberculosis. But judging by the abuse of the truth that appeared in Holliday's obituary in the Glenwood Springs paper, it is best to view such remarks warily. The paper concluded: "Of him it can be said that he represented law and order at all times and places."

Sure, and a pair of deuces beats aces and eights.M