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| Doc Holliday |
Bat Masterson spoke admiringly about most of the big-name
gunfighters of the Old West, but he had a particularly low opinion of Doc
Holliday. “I never liked him, and few persons did. He had a mean disposition
and differed from most of the big gunfighters in that he would seek a fight...He had few friends anywhere in the West.”
Virgil Earp told the Arizona Daily Star,
“There was something peculiar about Doc...outside of us boys. I don’t think he
had a friend in the territory.”
Although
Masterson didn’t come right out and call Holliday a coward, he said, unlike
Wild Bill and Wyatt Earp, who were as good with their fists as they were with
their pistols, Doc Holliday was a “physical weakling.” His opinion was that a
fifteen-year-old could make easy work of him in a “go-as-you-please fistfight.”
But as soon as you put a gun in his hand, danger transformed Doc Holliday from
a 98-pound weakling into a raging madman.
Like most legendary figures of
the Old West, so much of what’s been written
about Doc Holliday is contradictory at best. In the Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters (1942), Bill O’Neal credits Doc
with just two kills in eight gunfights, far from the dozens of kills and near
kills most biographers attribute to him.
Doc
Holliday was like a fish out of water in Dodge City and Tombstone. He was a
dentist by profession, but a gambler and a gunfighter by choice.
Not
long after he graduated from dental school, Holliday took the equivalent of his
first bullet when he learned he had contracted tuberculosis. Doctors informed
him he had only a short time to live, and the best thing he could do would be
to move to a drier climate. Doc took the news to heart, headed west, and set up
a practice in Dallas, Texas. Not too many months after that, he gave up
dentistry. Apparently, patients didn’t appreciate his coughing spells. As word
got around about the tubercular dentist, business dried up quicker than the
weather.
It’s
likely knowing that he was going to die young made Doc so fearless in a
gunfight. Better to go out in a blaze of glory than cough your lungs out in a
hospital bed. The knowledge that he was likely to die any day probably drove
Doc Holliday to the dark side—gambling, drinking, and gun fighting.
Big Nose Kate, Doc Holliday's Common Law Wife
Rumor has it Doc shot up some Negroes down in Georgia when he was fifteen. No one disputes there may have been some shooting, but it’s unlikely anyone got themselves killed.
Doc’s
first known gunfight took place on January 2, 1875. He traded shots with a
Dallas saloonkeeper named Charles Austin. No one was hurt. The Dallas Weekly Herald reported that the
two men were just blowing off steam. No actual harm was done. Both men were arrested
and quickly released.
Doc
got into another scrape a few days later and killed a Dallas businessman. He
hightailed it out of there one step ahead of the law and made his way to the rough and tumble cow town of Jacksboro,
Texas.
Doc’s
transformation into a gunfighter took place there. He dealt poker and Faro, but went around armed to the hilt. He
wore a gun on his hip, another in a shoulder holster, and carried a Bowie knife
strapped to his leg. When he wasn’t gambling
or drinking, Doc practiced his draw. By all accounts, it was time well spent.
Wyatt Earp told the San Francisco
Examiner, Doc was “the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest,
deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew.”
When
Doc finally left Jacksboro, one man was dead, and several others were wounded
from his three gunfights there. Keep in mind; there are no newspaper accounts
or court records to back up any of these fights, just stories told about Doc
and his prowess with a gun.
Did
those gunfights happen? Maybe. Maybe not. You
may as well flip a coin. The result is likely to be just as accurate.
He
moved to Denver in the winter of 1876 and
tangled with a local bully named Budd Ryan. This time, the story is Ryan pulled
a gun, and Doc manhandled his attacker, slashing his throat with a knife. But,
again, this story is nothing more than rattlesnake snot and tumbleweed. Every
account I’ve read says Doc couldn’t have manhandled a girl scout, so the odds
of him striking a gun-wielding bully are beyond belief.
Wyatt Earp told the San Francisco Examiner that Doc was "the most
skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, man with a six gun I ever knew."
In July 1877, the Dallas Weekly Herald reported that a young man named “Doc Holliday, well known in this city, was shot and killed” by a man named Kahn. They never printed a retraction, but Doc turned up alive and breathing in Fort Griffin, Texas, several months later. The rumors of his premature demise were greatly exaggerated.
Holliday
first met up with Wyatt Earp in Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1877. Earp was hot on
the trail of Dave Rudabaugh, and Doc tipped him off the outlaw was hiding out
in Fort Davis.
Doc
made his way to Dodge City in 1878 and
tried his hand at dentistry, but his return to respectability was short-lived.
Doc’s common-law wife, Big Nose Kate, couldn’t handle the quiet life and went back to whoring at a local
saloon. When Doc got upset over her extracurricular activities, Kate made
herself scarce and disappeared. This time, Doc gave up dentistry for good and
went back to dealing Faro.
Not
too long after that, a group of cowboys rode into Dodge City with their guns
blazing, shooting up storefronts and shop windows. After blowing off a little
steam, the cowboys headed to the Long
Branch Saloon where Doc Holliday was dealing faro. The leader of the group, Ed
Morrison, saw Wyatt Earp coming through the door. Morrison and the other boys
drew down on him, challenging Earp to draw or die.
Doc
got the drop on all of them and ordered the cowboys
to drop their guns, or they’d be wearing Morrison’s brains. Doc and Wyatt
quickly disarmed the cowboys and tucked
them away in the Dodge City jail. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that would last the remainder of
Doc’s short life.
When
things in Dodge City got a little too hot for Doc, he traveled around a bit. He
spent some time in Leadville and Trinidad, Colorado, then Las Vegas, New Mexico
Territory.
Legend
has it he left a trail of dead bodies scattered along the way. While Doc was in
Las Vegas, there was some talk he killed a drunk named Mike Gordon, but there
is no documentation to back it up. The consensus is Gordon was drunk on his ass and started shooting up the town. Later
that night, he was found all shot up and died early the next day. Because Doc
was in the area, it was convenient to pin the killing on him.
Doc
was involved in a string of shootings in 1879 and 1880. On March 12, 1879, he
supposedly shot Charlie White. The story is Doc ran White out of Dodge City and told him he’d kill him if he ever ran
across him again. Former New Mexico Territory Governor Miguel Antonio Otero
told reporters he saw the whole thing. The two men faced each other down. They
drew their pistols and fired, but both
men missed. Scared for his life, Charlie White beat it out of town before Doc
got another chance to take him down.
For thirty seconds, the guns talked. Three men lay dead at the O.K. Corral.
In October 1880, Doc got into a disagreement with a gambler named Johnny Tyler at the Oriental Saloon. When Doc challenged him to a fight, Tyler hurried out of there. Milt Joyce, the owner of the Oriental Saloon, had Doc removed. Big mistake. Doc rushed back in a few minutes later with pistols roaring. Joyce took a bullet in the hand. William Parker, a friend of Joyce’s, got shot in the toe. Joyce got the last word in when he whacked Doc over the head with a pistol and knocked him out cold.
Doc
appeared in court on October 12, charged with attempted murder. That should
have slowed him down some, but neither Milt Joyce nor William Parker appeared
as witnesses. Doc was fined twenty dollars for assault with a deadly weapon and
quickly released.
On
August 13, 1881, Newman Hayes, “Old Man” Clanton, and several of his companions
were shot and killed in Guadalupe Canyon while driving a herd of cattle to the
Tombstone market. There’s some confusion about whether Clanton was killed by a
group of Mexican rustlers or a posse sent out by the Earps. Whatever happened
that day, most of Tombstone blamed the killings on Doc Holliday and Warren
Earp.
The
situation came to a head on August 13 when Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday clashed
in a drunken war of words. Doc challenged Clanton to draw, saying he was the
one who drew a bead on “Old Man” Clanton. Ike Clanton was unarmed and walked
away, leaving things unsettled.
The
next day was a bloody mess. Three men would die in the fallout from the
previous night’s argument.
Ike
Clanton came by Fly’s boardinghouse at about 3 p.m. looking for Doc. For thirty
seconds, the guns talked. Three men lay dead at the O.K. Corral when it was
over. Those killed were—Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury. Ike Clanton
ran away, like a scared, frightened girl, at the first sound of gunfire and
lived to fight another day.
On
August 19, 1884, Doc bushwhacked Billy Allen at Hyman’s Saloon in Leadville,
Colorado. As soon as Allen walked through the door, Doc fired a shot that hit
him in the arm. Allen fell to the floor. Doc ducked behind a cigar case and
fired again, just missing Allen. The crowd quickly disarmed Doc. He was
arrested, tried, and found not guilty.
Doc
Holliday died in bed in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in May 1887. Tuberculosis
had finally done what bullets couldn’t.
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