For a man dying by inches, Doc Holliday moved with startling speed. He stepped into the Hyman Saloon in Leadville, Colorado, on the evening of August 19, 1884, and positioned himself so he could watch the front door. He had been pushed too far—insulted, threatened, and humiliated for weeks by Johnny Tyler and his crowd. A bartender named Billy Allen had been looking for him, vowing to kick his brains out over a five-dollar debt.

Doc had a confidant sneak a pistol into the saloon earlier and hide it under the bar. When Allen stepped through the door, Holliday reached down, grabbed the revolver, and opened fire. The first shot missed. The second shattered Allen’s right arm.

As Doc thumbed back the hammer for a third round, the bartender grabbed him and restrained him. He was arrested on the spot. Doc Holliday claimed self-defense, insisting the five-dollar debt was nothing but a pretext. “It is the old trouble,” he said, “and Allen was picked out to be the man to kill me.

” He meant Tyler, the same man he had quarreled with at the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone years earlier. He would spend nearly a month in jail before his bond was lowered enough for release, and the trial would not come until late March 1885, when a jury acquitted him of all charges. None of this was how the man from Griffin, Georgia, was expected to end up—if, that is, anyone could have predicted anything about John Henry Holliday. He was a drunk and a gambler, a consumptive and a deadly shot, and quite possibly a con artist.

He was also an educated Southern gentleman, a graduate of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, a man liked by some, hated by many, and feared by nearly everybody. He died at thirty-six, yet lived long enough to become one of the most enduring figures of the American West. The question has always been how an educated dentist found himself in places like Fort Griffin and Dodge City, and what exactly drove him west in the first place. The answers, such as they are, are tangled, contradictory, and mostly uncorroborated.

John Henry Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia, on August 14, 1851. His father, Henry Burroughs Holliday, was a druggist who had fought in Mexico under General Taylor and returned home with a young Hispanic boy orphaned by the war, whom he adopted and raised as his own. Henry then married Alice Jane McKey, daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner. Their first child, a girl named Martha, died before reaching six months.

Just over a year later, Alice gave birth to John Henry. The family may have had as many as six children, all of whom died in infancy except John Henry. He grew up essentially an only child, though not lacking for companionship. His adopted brother Francisco was much older and had already moved out, but Doc grew close to several cousins—one perhaps too close.

When his maternal grandparents died, his father became guardian of Doc’s younger aunts and uncles, including fourteen-year-old Thomas, who became something of an older brother figure. For the first decade of his life, things were decent. Henry prospered, bought land, and Alice doted on her son, instilling manners and faith. Like other white Southern boys, young John Henry was given extraordinary freedom.

As biographer Gary Roberts put it, “At an early age, they learned independence, took to the fields and woods, and began their tutelage in hunting, the handling of firearms, and horseback riding. Courtesy, spirit, and firmness were all part of the curriculum of individualism. ” There is a single source claiming Doc was born with a cleft palate, corrected by surgery, leaving him self-conscious and withdrawn—the wife of one of his cousins, who never actually met him. Take it with a grain of salt.

Everything changed with the Civil War. The Hollidays, who owned slaves, moved some two hundred miles south to Valdosta to avoid Sherman’s March on Atlanta. It was there, in September 1866, that Doc’s mother died of tuberculosis. He was fifteen.

His father remarried just three months later, wedding twenty-three-year-old Rachel Martin, a turn of events that reportedly left Doc quite sullen. He continued his schooling at the Valdosta Institute, where he first showed an inclination toward violence. He and a classmate agreed to a mock duel using pistols charged only with powder. Doc showed up with a fully loaded weapon, looking for blood.

Cooler heads prevailed, and his classmate offered a very sincere apology. In the fall of 1870, Doc headed to Philadelphia to enroll in the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, one of the best dental schools in the country. Students needed two full courses of lectures, an internship with a private practice, and a thesis to graduate. Doc finished in just a year and a half and took a job as a dentist in Atlanta.

Some accounts claim he first went to St. Louis, where he met a young woman named Kate Fisher, later known as Big Nose Kate. Born Mary Katherine Horony in Hungary, she immigrated with her family at ten, lost both parents within a few years, and was working as a prostitute in St. Louis as early as 1870.

The only source placing Holliday in St. Louis is Kate herself, and her recollections are riddled with inaccuracies. As historian Mark Lee Gardner noted, “To date, no contemporary evidence has surfaced documenting Holliday’s presence in St. Louis in 1872.

”

What is certain is that Doc went to Atlanta, though not for long. His dental partner contracted tuberculosis, his uncle Robert died, and in early 1873 his adopted brother Francisco passed away from the same disease. Doc returned to Griffin, then to Valdosta, then, by the summer of 1873, he was in Dallas, Texas. Why he made such an abrupt move will likely never be known for certain.

One popular narrative holds that he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and headed west for the drier climate, the so-called western cure. His own uncle, a physician, had examined him and diagnosed him as consumptive. But Dallas is hardly a dry-air paradise, and there are other theories. One involves his first cousin Maddie, daughter of the deceased Uncle Robert.

They were said to be very close, romantically so, but Maddie was a devout Catholic and canon law did not allow marriage between first cousins. There were also rumors the family disapproved. A third theory involves a swimming hole outside Valdosta. Doc, a son of the South, objected to sharing it with people of color.

He warned them off, and when they failed to heed him, he returned with a shotgun, opened fire, killed two, and wounded several others. The local law reportedly was not concerned, but his family thought it wise for him to make himself scarce. There is no contemporary evidence for this—no newspapers, no legal documents—only stories, one shared by Bat Masterson decades later and a mention in one of Holliday’s obituaries. Even the Holliday family disagrees: some say it happened, others say Doc used a pistol and purposely aimed high.

Biographer Gary Roberts offered the most honest assessment: “Perhaps the truth was some combination of all these issues. Perhaps John Henry learned he had tuberculosis, pressed Maddie for an answer, only to be turned down, returned to Valdasta, and was forced west by the shooting incident. This much is clear. Something traumatic and devastating enough to interrupt his plans drove him west that summer of 1873.

Coughing spasms, a broken heart, a shotgun blast, or combination of all three cut him off forever from his past and threw him into an unknown future. ”

In Dallas, Doc partnered with a fellow dentist named John Seeger, and by all accounts they prospered, even winning prizes at the state fair, including best set of teeth in gold. But the dark side soon came calling. Nobody can say for certain when Doc first started gambling, but in Dallas the vice became an obsession.

As Bat Masterson later put it, those who wished to consult professionally with Doc had to do so over a card table in some nearby gambling establishment or not at all. Holliday himself admitted, “I was a member of the Methodist church and also a prominent member of the temperance organization until I deviated from the path of rectitude. ” That deviation likely caused him and Seeger to part ways in early March 1874. A month later, Doc was arrested for playing keno—the first arrest on record for John Henry Holliday.

As Mark Lee Gardner wrote, it “marked the beginning of a restless life in one western town after another, consistently running afoul of the law and more often than not running afoul of other humans. ”

That summer, Doc spent a brief period in Denison before returning to Dallas. On New Year’s Eve 1874, he experienced his first known gunfight, exchanging bullets with a bartender known as Champagne Charlie. Neither man was hit, but both were arrested, and Doc was charged with assault with intent to murder.

He was acquitted in less than a month and headed some two hundred miles west to Fort Griffin. Fort Griffin was about as wild as it got. Established in 1867 to protect settlers, it had become a popular stopping point for cattle herds heading north and a hub for bison hunters. One local described a town where “buffalo hunters, bullwhackers, soldiers, cow punchers, Indians, gamblers, toughs, refined businessmen, and fallen women all mingling in one common herd on the streets.

” Everyone had plenty of money, and half a dozen big stores, eight or ten saloons, and two or three dance halls were doing business at full capacity. Doc was arrested there at least twice in the span of a single week, both times on gambling charges, and rather than face the grand jury, he headed north to Denver. He is alleged to have taken a knife to the neck of a fellow gambler there, though there is no evidence to back it up. He may have gone as far north as Cheyenne under the alias Tom McKey.

According to one John C. Thomas, a “platinum blonde desperado tried Colorado, extinguished several gunmen there, came to Cheyenne, and did right well at gambling. ” Maybe. But Doc still had not killed anyone by this point, at least no one historians can identify.

Nearly all of 1876 remains a blank. Some say Doc spent time in Deadwood and St. Louis; others say he returned to Texas and killed a black soldier; his family says he visited an aunt in Kansas. What is certain is that he was back in Dallas by January 1877, because he was arrested for gambling.

Six months later, he was shot. During the summer of 1877, Doc stepped into a saloon in Breckenridge and beat the owner, one Henry Kahn, with a walking cane. Why is unknown. He was arrested, paid a fine, and as soon as he was released, went straight back to the saloon to finish what he started.

Kahn saw him coming, grabbed a pistol from a customer, and opened fire. No one knows where the bullet struck or how badly Doc was wounded, but it was bad enough for some papers to report he had died. He survived, and by September he was back in Dallas, once again arrested for gambling. He then decided to try Fort Griffin again, and this time he stayed.

It was there that he struck up or rekindled his relationship with Big Nose Kate. She had been arrested for prostitution in Wichita in 1874 and again in Dodge City the following summer for assault and battery, by which point she was going by Kate Elder. No one knows how she got the nickname—her nose does not look all that large in photographs. A more plausible theory holds that she got it from always sticking her nose in other people’s business.

Whatever the case, she and Holliday hit it off. According to Kate, Doc was six feet tall, fair-complexioned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, with a fine mustache and a fine set of teeth. He was a gentleman, she said, quiet, never hunting for trouble—but if he was crowded, he knew how to take care of himself. Bat Masterson painted a completely different picture: “Mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was the most dangerous man.

He was hot-headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling. And among men who did not fear him, he was very much disliked. ” Masterson later claimed Doc was a weakling who could not beat a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a fair fight, and that the only reason he was ever nice to Holliday was their shared friendship with Wyatt Earp. It was at Fort Griffin that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday first met.

Earp was on the trail of a wanted fugitive named Dave Rudabaugh, and when he stopped at a saloon, the proprietor introduced him to Holliday. There is also a story, from an interview Wyatt gave in 1906, about Doc stabbing a gambler named Ed Bailey. Bailey was cheating, “monkeying with the deadwood,” as Earp put it. “Finally, having detected him again, Holliday pulled down a pot without showing his hand…

Thereupon Bailey started throwing his gun around on Holliday… But before he could pull the trigger, Doc Holliday jerked a knife and caught Bailey just below the brisket. ” Doc was placed under guard in a hotel by two lawmen. Kate, fearing he would be lynched by Bailey’s friends, sneaked around back and set a shed on fire.

When everyone was distracted, she brought Doc two revolvers, tossed him one, kept the other pointed at the deputies, backed out, and the two of them hopped on a horse and rode off. It is a hell of a story, and it may even be true—but there are no records of Holliday stabbing anyone at Fort Griffin, and Kate herself denied it ever happened. As Gary Roberts put it, the Bailey episode could have happened somewhere else entirely, in some “camp off the beaten path” that escaped attention. That spring, Doc and Kate headed north to Sweetwater, then took the wagon road to Dodge City.

Earp returned in May and later said Doc had already arrived and settled in. Dodge City in 1878 was a veritable who’s who of the West: Bat Masterson as county sheriff, Charlie Bassett as town marshal, and Wyatt Earp as Bassett’s second-in-command. It was there, in the spring or summer of 1878, that Earp and Holliday formed a lifelong friendship. The story goes that Wyatt found himself surrounded by a gang of desperadoes one evening, outnumbered and with no way out.

Just as things seemed dire, Doc came running out of a saloon, pistols in each hand, holding the desperadoes at bay while Wyatt placed them under arrest. According to Earp, “It was because of this episode that I became the friend of Doc Holliday ever after. ”

Despite stories portraying Doc as a dangerous drunk and a con artist, official records show he kept a relatively low profile in Dodge. Masterson confirmed he stayed out of trouble the entire time.

Doc advertised his services as a dentist in the Dodge City Times and carried what was described as a pocket dental office, a small kit of basic tools. How much dentistry he actually accomplished is unknown, given all his drinking and gambling. Later that fall, Doc and Kate headed west to Trinidad, Colorado, a town described by one journalist as having all the “numerous necessary evils you always find in a live, wide-awake, git-up town. ” They did not remain long.

Possibly on account of Doc shooting a man known as Kid Colton or Kid Dalton—the only sources are Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, who could not agree on the name—they moved on, this time about 130 miles south to Las Vegas, New Mexico, or more precisely, the Montezuma Hot Springs just north of town. Doc was in rough shape by then, his tuberculosis advancing. The hot springs were thought to have curative effects, and this one even had a “Lungers Club” with a motto: “Cure our maladies, we tuberculars unite. Coughing and wheezing, we continue the fight.

For rest and recuperation in hot springs we soak. ” The springs did help some, and once Doc was able, he and Kate moved into Las Vegas proper, where he opened another dental practice and resumed gambling. The territorial government had recently outlawed gambling, and Doc was arrested three times over the next six months—twice for gambling, once for carrying a pistol. A story often told is that Doc left Las Vegas in the spring or summer of 1879 to help Bat Masterson recruit gunfighters for Colorado’s Royal Gorge War.

There is no evidence he was involved. Masterson never mentioned it. The only source is vaudeville actor Eddie Foy, who wrote in his 1928 autobiography that Doc tried to recruit him—but Foy was known to stretch the truth. Doc likely remained in the vicinity.

He may have traveled north to Otero, now the town of Raton, and may have killed a man there. Probably not. On July 19, 1879, Doc opened his own saloon in Las Vegas. That same day, he killed a man named Mike Gordon.

Gordon had been drinking at Doc’s place during the grand opening and tried to talk one of the sporting girls into leaving with him. When she refused, he stepped outside, pulled his gun, and started firing into the saloon. Doc stepped outside and put a bullet into Gordon’s chest. There was a coroner’s inquest, but Gordon was not well-liked, and nobody would identify Doc as the shooter.

He got off scot-free. Las Vegas, like Dodge City, attracted a who’s who of the West: J. J. Webb, Dave Rudabaugh, Dave Mather, Hoodoo Brown, and eventually Billy the Kid.

Even Jesse James was rumored to have visited. In late fall or early winter of 1879, Wyatt Earp also showed up. He had resigned his position in Dodge City the previous September and was looking to try his luck in the new boom town of Tombstone. At Las Vegas came the cheerful reunion between Wyatt and Doc.

Kate found nothing cheerful about it. She was jealous of anything or anyone she saw as competition for Doc’s attentions, and she especially disliked the strong influence Wyatt held over her lover. “I love Doc and thought the world of him,” she said decades later, “and he was always kind to me until he got mixed up with the Earps. This reunion meant the end of the happiness we had enjoyed.

”

Wyatt convinced Doc to tag along to Arizona, and Kate, despite her hatred of Wyatt, decided to join. The group stopped in Prescott, where Wyatt’s brother Virgil lived. Doc did not make a good first impression on Virgil’s wife. “Wyatt kind of casually introduced him to us as a dentist,” she later recalled.

“Right away, I said, ‘How’d you like to yank out a loose tooth of mine? ‘ He gave me a nasty look and said, ‘Keep your baby teeth in your mouth where they belong. I’ve got no use for them. ‘”

Wyatt and Virgil left for Tombstone a few weeks later, but Doc and Kate stayed behind in Prescott, most likely at Kate’s urging.

The area was ripe for a gambler—there was even a part of town known as Whiskey Row, catering to prospectors and soldiers from nearby Fort Whipple. In late February 1880, Doc returned to Las Vegas to get an old gambling charge dismissed, and while he was in town, he killed a man named Charles Wright. The story, which comes from a single source, Miguel Otero’s My Life on the Frontier, published over half a century later, holds that Doc entered the saloon with a revolver and began hostilities at once. Wright ducked behind the bar while customers hit the floor, emerged with a six-shooter, and a duel began, many shots exchanged at short range without effect.

Eventually one of Doc’s bullets hit Wright, who dropped in a lifeless heap. Doc casually stepped outside and went about his business. Wright was not dead—the bullet had merely grazed the skin near his spine, causing temporary paralysis, and he was back on his feet by that evening. The whole story may be fabrication.

As of this recording, there is not enough evidence either way. Doc returned to Prescott and had his likeness taken by photographer Daniel Mitchell. It is one of only two provably authentic images of Holliday as an adult; the other is his dental school graduation photo. By mid-September 1880, Doc made the move to Tombstone.

Things had changed. Wyatt and Virgil had planned to start their own stagecoach business but found the market already taken, so Wyatt took a job riding shotgun for Wells Fargo while Virgil settled in as a deputy U. S. marshal.

It was in Virgil’s capacity as marshal that the first clash between the Earps and the Cowboys occurred—a posse, including Wyatt and Morgan, went after stolen army mules and found them in the possession of the McLaury brothers, Tom and Frank. By the time Doc arrived, Wyatt had accepted a position as deputy sheriff for Pima County. Doc was not in Tombstone a full month before he was arrested. On the night of October 10, he and another gambler, Johnny Tyler, began quarreling at the Oriental Saloon.

The argument escalated, and as the two were about to go for their guns, a crowd rushed in to separate them. The saloon’s manager, a former blacksmith named Milt Joyce, ordered Tyler out and then berated Doc. Holliday gave it right back until Joyce physically threw him out the front door. Doc returned moments later demanding his gun; Joyce told him to get lost.

Doc showed up again that night with a borrowed pistol and shot Joyce in the hand. He fired three shots before Joyce managed to rush him and disarm him. Virgil arrested Doc and escorted him from the saloon. When Doc appeared before the justice of the peace, four witnesses curiously failed to appear.

The attempted murder charge was dropped; Doc pleaded guilty to assault and battery and got off with a fine plus costs. Joyce came very close to losing his hand. A couple of weeks later, on October 28, 1880, cowboy leader Curly Bill Brocius shot and killed Tombstone Marshal Fred White. Contrary to what movies show, it was an accident.

They proved in court that the revolver malfunctioned and fired on half-cock. White was only about thirty years old. Despite Brocius otherwise being a complete outlaw, the charges were dropped. The Cowboys were a loose confederation of ranchers and bandits in Pima County who rustled cattle and robbed stagecoaches.

They had a ready market for stolen beef in Tombstone’s hungry prospectors and sold cattle to the San Carlos reservation. Leaders included Curly Bill Brocius, the McLaury brothers, Johnny Ringo, Pony Diehl, Billy the Kid Claiborne, Frank Stilwell, Sherman McMaster, Michael Rourke (also known as Johnny Behind the Deuce), and the Clanton brothers—Ike, Phineas, and Billy. Estimates of their numbers vary; Virgil Earp put them at around two hundred. They were not universally hated.

As Virgil put it, they spent money “free as water in the saloons, dance houses, or faro banks,” which is one reason they had so many friends in town. Even a few politicians realized the Cowboys constituted a large voting bloc. When Pima County Sheriff Charles Shibell ran for reelection in November 1880, the Cowboys helped him win by stuffing the ballots. Wyatt quit his deputy sheriff job in protest and thought about running for sheriff of the newly formed Cochise County.

Rather than risk losing to his rival Johnny Behan, the two made a deal: if Wyatt dropped out, Behan would appoint him undersheriff and split the tax revenue. It could have been lucrative—in 1882 the sheriff’s office collected over $24,000 in taxes. But when Behan received the appointment, he reneged on the offer. Then when Wyatt and Virgil helped apprehend a stagecoach robber, Behan refused to reimburse them because they had not been officially sworn in as deputies.

As for Doc, he stayed busy—dabbling in mining properties, water rights, and running a faro bank at the Alhambra Saloon. He also reunited with Kate. On March 10, 1881, he got into a drunken row with her and was arrested. The Daily Epitaph reported: “A man about town named John Doc last night, while under the influence of too much family disturber, grew noisy and disorderly, and officers Ramsay and Kirkpatrick proceeded forthwith to take him in.

While that transaction was in progress, the inevitable gun made its appearance and in the melee was somehow discharged. The shot fortunately striking no one. ” He was taken before Judge Wallace and left twenty-five dollars poorer. Kate had initially chosen not to come to Tombstone, and when she finally showed up, she was still jealous over Doc’s relationship with Wyatt Earp.

By all accounts, Doc really was devoted to Wyatt. Bat Masterson described Doc as having his whole heart and soul wrapped up in Wyatt Earp, always ready to stake his life in defense of any cause Wyatt was interested in. Virgil Earp said, “Outside of us boys, I don’t think he had a friend in the territory. He was a slender, sickly fellow, but whenever a stage was robbed or a row started and help was needed, Doc was one of the first to saddle his horse and report for duty.

”

There was another man in Tombstone Doc was friends with: a fellow lunger and dope fiend named Bill Leonard. That friendship would draw Doc into the events that led to the most famous shootout in American history. On March 15, 1881, there was an attempted stage holdup between Tombstone and Benson. The driver and a passenger were killed, but the shotgun messenger managed to fend off the bandits long enough to get everyone else to safety.

A posse was formed the following day and arrested one suspect, Luther King, who squealed on his accomplices: Jim Crane, Harry Head, and Billy Leonard. It happened that Leonard was good friends with Doc Holliday—Doc had even visited him on the very day of the holdup. That association led some to think Doc was in on it. Rumors swirled, and Doc found himself arrested for making threats against life when Milt Joyce accused him of being a stage robber.

Doc went for his gun, but Sheriff Behan intervened before shots were fired. Wyatt Earp hatched a plan to clear Doc’s name and gain a little glory. He correctly concluded that many of the Cowboys would sell out their own mothers for a quick buck, and the Benson suspects had substantial bounties on their heads. He reached out to Ike Clanton, Joe Hill, and Frank McLaury, offering them the full bounty if they provided the suspects’ location, and promised to keep his mouth shut about the source.

They agreed. But Doc’s friend Leonard and Harry Head were both killed in Eureka before the plan came to fruition, and Jim Crane was shot dead a month later by Mexican soldiers. Wyatt never spilled the beans about the agreement with Ike, but Wells Fargo agent Marshall Williams put two and two together. Williams witnessed Wyatt and Ike together in close conversation on multiple occasions, and after an intoxicated Ike approached him and began mumbling about the reward and Ike aiding Wyatt, Williams concluded their secret was out.

Ike Clanton was not happy. If his fellow Cowboys knew he was working with the authorities, there would be hell to pay. He confronted Wyatt, who denied telling Williams anything, but Ike and the McLaurys began leveling threats against Wyatt, his brothers, and Doc Holliday. As for Doc’s involvement in the Benson stage robbery, Wyatt Earp stayed firm: Doc was not in the Benson stage holdup and never did such a thing as holdups in his life.

On July 5, Holliday found himself under arrest again after a fight with Kate. She went to Sheriff Behan and claimed Doc had been part of the Benson holdup—a total lie, which she later admitted. Doc was released when the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. He and Kate made amends and even went on vacation together in Tucson.

While they were gone, Ike Clanton started telling lies about Doc. Still terrified his fellow Cowboys would learn of his deal with Earp, he confronted Wyatt again, this time accusing him of telling Holliday about their agreement. Earp denied it. Clanton claimed it was Doc who had told him.

Whether he was telling the truth or fishing for information is unknown, but when Doc got back to town in late October, he found Ike, who called him a lying son of a bitch to his face. Doc’s vocabulary of profanity was monumental, and he worked it proficiently in talking to Ike. He also stuck his hand in his pocket, presumably around the butt of a pistol, and told Clanton to do the same. Ike was unarmed.

They were separated, and Doc went to bed. Ike continued drinking, found himself a pistol, and started making threats against Doc and the Earps. Come daylight, he was still drunk, prancing around with his pistol on his belt and a Winchester in hand, telling all who listened he was out for blood. He went to Doc’s boarding house, but Holliday was still asleep.

When he woke, Kate told him Ike had come calling. Doc replied, “If God lets me live long enough to get my clothes on, he shall see me. ”

By noon, the Earps were roused from bed. Virgil found Ike Clanton on Fourth Street with a Winchester in hand and a six-shooter in his waistband.

“I walked up and grabbed the rifle in my left hand,” Virgil recalled. “He let loose and started to draw his six-shooter. I hit him over the head with mine and knocked him to his knees and took his six-shooter from him. I asked him if he was hunting for me.

He said he was and if he had seen me a second sooner, he would have killed me. ” Virgil arrested Ike for carrying firearms inside the city limits. By the fall of 1881, Virgil was the official marshal of Tombstone, Morgan was one of his deputies, and Wyatt held a commission as a deputy U. S.

marshal and was sworn in as a special policeman. Ike paid his fine and was released. Meanwhile, Wyatt confronted Tom McLaury, who was making the same sort of threats. Wyatt slapped him across the face and gave him a few whacks upside the head with his pistol.

Tom’s brother Frank came riding into town with Billy Clanton. They linked up with Ike at the gun store, then started making their way down to the Dexter stables with Wyatt close behind. Virgil met with Sheriff Behan to discuss the situation. Behan agreed to speak with Ike and his companions and disarm them.

By the time Behan caught up with them, they were at the OK Corral, where a bystander heard them making threats to kill the Earps on sight. He ran and told Virgil. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Doc had just finished a leisurely breakfast when he joined the Earps at Hafford’s Saloon, wearing a fancy overcoat and carrying a silver-headed cane.

When the Earp brothers headed off to arrest Ike and the McLaurys, Doc asked if they were leaving him behind. Wyatt warned him this was likely to be a hard game. Doc replied with a smile, “That’s just the kind I like. ” Another version has Wyatt telling Doc he did not need to trouble himself, and Doc replying, “That’s a hell of a thing for you to say to me.

” Either way, Virgil handed Doc his shotgun to hide under his coat, and Doc gave Virgil his walking stick. On they marched. The Cowboys, now including twenty-one-year-old Billy Claiborne, had made their way to a vacant lot next to Fly’s Photography Studio. The actual gunfight would not take place at the OK Corral, despite the name history gave it—but very close to it.

Behan had not been successful in taking their guns. Whether he lied to the Earps about it is debated. When Doc and the Earps turned the corner on Fremont Street and the Cowboys came into view, Doc thumbed back the hammers on the shotgun. Wyatt drew and cocked his revolver.

When only a few feet separated the two groups, Virgil ordered the Cowboys to throw up their hands. No sooner had the words left his mouth than Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury went for their guns. Virgil shouted, “Hold—I don’t want that,” but it was far too late. Wyatt and Billy fired at the exact same moment.

Billy’s shot went wild; Wyatt struck Frank McLaury in the belly. Then came the slightest of pauses, as if everyone needed a split second to process that this was really happening. Virgil switched the cane to his left hand and jerked out his revolver with his right. More metallic clicks, flames streaking from barrel muzzles, and gunshots reverberating off the walls.

Ike Clanton, the tough talker, ran up to Wyatt, grabbed him by the arm, and begged him not to kill him. Wyatt shoved him aside and told him to get to fighting or get away. Ike ran into a nearby building. Billy Claiborne did the same.

That left the already wounded Frank McLaury, his brother Tom, and Billy Clanton to face the Earps and Holliday. Tom put a bullet in Morgan’s shoulder, but Wyatt shot the horse Tom was hiding behind. When the horse jumped, Doc unloaded one barrel of his shotgun into Tom’s right side. He tried to squeeze the other trigger, but it refused to fire, so he tossed it aside and yanked out his pistol.

Tom collapsed in the street. The wounded Frank McLaury shot Virgil in the right calf and put another round through Wyatt’s coat. He spotted Doc and hollered, “I’ve got you now. ” Doc allegedly responded, “Blaze away—you’re a daisy if you do.

” Both men fired. Frank’s round grazed Doc’s thigh; Doc’s struck Frank squarely in the chest. The wounded Morgan struggled to his knees and put a bullet into Frank’s head. It was over.

Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were dead. Virgil and Morgan were wounded. Doc had a bruised leg. Wyatt was untouched.

Doc went back to his hotel room and wept. According to Kate Elder, “After the fight, Doc came in, sat down on the side of the bed, and cried and said, ‘Oh, this is awful. Awful. ‘ I asked, ‘Are you hurt?

‘ He said, ‘No, I am not. ‘ He pulled up his shirt. There was just a pale red streak about 2 inches long across his hip where the bullet had grazed him. ”

In late January 1882, Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo came within seconds of turning the streets of Tombstone into a slaughterhouse.

According to one version, Ringo approached Doc and asked if he had been talking about him. Doc replied, “Well, I don’t know, but if I have, it still goes. ” Bystanders stepped away as the two gunmen reached toward their revolvers. Acting police chief Jim Flynn intervened and placed both in custody.

It became, in Mark Lee Gardner’s words, “the greatest gunfight that never was. ” Another version has Ringo challenging Wyatt, and when Wyatt declined, Doc stepped from the shadows with a cold little smile on his cadaverous face. Ringo drew a handkerchief from his pocket and flipped a corner toward Doc. “I don’t need but three feet to do my fighting.

Here’s my handkerchief. Take hold. ” Doc uttered the now iconic phrase: “I’m your huckleberry. ” In the nineteenth century, that meant, “I’m the right person for the job.

” Whether the real Doc ever said it, no one knows. There are too many versions of the standoff to say for certain. All that is known is words were exchanged, and Doc, Ringo, and Wyatt were arrested for carrying concealed weapons. The charges against Wyatt were dismissed because he was a lawman.

Tensions were running high. Not even three months had passed since the gunfight at the OK Corral. The remaining Cowboys compiled a hit list and threatened to storm the town, though the raid never materialized. But on the night of December 28, 1881, they shot Virgil Earp.

He had just left the Oriental Saloon when three double-barreled shotguns opened fire from a distance of about sixty feet. The blast came from between the charred boards of a burned-out building across the street. Despite being horribly wounded, Virgil survived—but without the use of his left arm. Doc joined Wyatt in searching for the men who shot Virgil.

The turn of events worked wonders on his health. As Gary Roberts put it, Doc “had exchanged smoke-filled saloons and gambling halls for the trail. At the very least, his participation in these posses suggested that his health was better than it had been. ” They applied enough pressure to force Ike Clanton and his brother Phineas to turn themselves in.

They stood trial for shooting Virgil in early February but were acquitted. On March 18, 1882, Morgan Earp was murdered. He had been playing billiards at the Campbell and Hatch Saloon when an assassin’s bullet tore through his back. The trigger man disappeared into the night, just as with Virgil.

Wyatt Earp had reached a breaking point. If the courts would not bring the Cowboys to heel, he would dispense his own frontier justice. Doc Holliday was right there with him. Their first target was Frank Stilwell.

Wyatt and a small posse caught up with him at the train depot in Tucson. Ike Clanton was there too, but he took off running, just as he had in Tombstone. “I ran straight for Stilwell,” Wyatt later recalled. “What a coward he was.

He couldn’t shoot when I came near him. He stood there helpless and trembling for his life. As I rushed upon him, he put out his hands and clutched my shotgun. I let go both barrels and he tumbled down dead and mangled at my feet.

I started for Clanton then, but he escaped behind a moving train of cars. ” Moments later, Holliday and several others arrived and emptied their guns into Stilwell’s body. An eyewitness described Frank as the worst shot-up man he had ever seen. A few days later, they did the same to a cowboy known as Indian Charlie, suspected of taking part in Morgan’s assassination.

On March 24, Wyatt and the posse rode straight into an ambush. “We approached a spring which was situated in a hollow,” Holliday said. “As we did so, eight rustlers rose up from behind the bank and poured from 35 to 40 shots into us. Our escape was miraculous.

The shots cut our clothing and saddles and killed one horse, but did not hit us. I think we would have all been killed if God Almighty wasn’t on our side. ” The men who ambushed them were also Cochise County Cowboys—the same people they were hunting. Rather than run, Wyatt dismounted, took aim with his shotgun, and sent a load of buckshot into the chest of cowboy leader Curly Bill Brocius.

Or so he claimed—there is some debate about whether Earp truly killed Brocius. Either way, it effectively marked the end of the vendetta ride. By this point, Wyatt, Doc, and the others were wanted for the murder of Frank Stilwell. They headed east for New Mexico—Silver City, Deming, Albuquerque.

It was in Albuquerque that Wyatt and Doc had a falling out of sorts. According to Big Nose Kate, Doc accused Wyatt of wearing a steel shirt, an Old West version of a bulletproof vest, and said Wyatt was not taking the same chances as the others. Some of the Cowboys at Iron Springs corroborated this, though Earp later denied it. Another version, from Miguel Otero in 1940, claims Doc told Wyatt he was turning into a “Jew boy,” a reference to Josephine Marcus, who was indeed Jewish, and with whom Wyatt had taken up in Tombstone.

As Mark Lee Gardner noted, the two friends had spent more time together in the last month than in all of the previous five years, and even the best of friends can get on each other’s nerves in close contact. Doc brushed it aside when asked a few weeks later. “We had a little misunderstanding,” he told a reporter, “but it didn’t amount to much. ”

The posse headed north to Trinidad, Colorado, before splitting up.

Wyatt pressed on to Gunnison as Doc headed to South Pueblo to gamble. There he had a strange encounter with a man named Perry Mallen, who claimed to recognize Doc and made up a story about Frank Stilwell’s brother being in town, gunning for him. He showed Doc scars he claimed were from gunfights and threatened to kill him if Doc said anything. Doc brushed him off as a nut job.

Not long after, Doc headed to Denver for the races. No sooner had he stepped off the train than Mallen came out of the shadows with two six-shooters, ordering Doc to throw up his hands. Deputies noticed the commotion and took Doc into custody. Mallen claimed to be a sheriff from California who had spent seven years tracking down Holliday after he killed his partner; he said Doc had shot him six times and had a missing finger to prove it.

It was all a con—Mallen was a two-bit grifter who would be arrested a few months later in Ohio for a similar stunt. But Doc was in a pickle: he was wanted for murder in Arizona and faced the very real threat of extradition. His old friend Bat Masterson intervened. He had a lawyer file a writ of habeas corpus and concocted bogus charges.

On the afternoon of May 17, the South Pueblo city marshal appeared at the Denver jail with a warrant for Doc’s arrest, charging him with robbing a man of $150 in a confidence game. By law, local charges took precedence over charges from beyond state lines. It was a smart move to keep Doc from being sent to Arizona. Doc spent another two weeks in the Denver jail before being taken to Pueblo to answer the bogus charge, posted a $300 bond, and walked free.

The extradition of Wyatt and the others was squashed by Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin. So long as they stayed out of Arizona, they did not have to worry about the murder of Frank Stilwell. Doc joined Wyatt in Gunnison, where he gave a rare interview. Asked about the gunfight at the OK Corral, he said, “One day, six of the cowboys came into town and proposed to run it.

The Earps were informed of their doings, and they invited me to go over where the cowboys were. One of the Earps said, ‘Throw your hands up. We have come to disarm you. ‘ Instead of putting up their paws, they put up their revolvers and began firing.

Three of them were killed on the spot and two of the Earps wounded. I received a slight wound on the hip which caused me some inconvenience for a few days. ”

On July 14, 1882, Johnny Ringo’s body was discovered about forty miles north of Tombstone. His death was ruled a suicide, though many have suspected otherwise.

There are strange details—a portion of his scalp missing, his cartridge belt worn upside down—and some believe Doc Holliday was the killer. But Doc was in Pueblo in early July fighting extradition, and on July 16, two days after Ringo’s body was found, he checked into a hotel in Gunnison. The idea he slipped down to Tombstone unseen, killed Ringo, and rushed some seven hundred miles north to create an alibi is not feasible, especially given Ringo’s state of mind at the time. He had been drinking heavily and openly discussing his own death, so suicide comes as little shock.

Wyatt and his brother Warren headed west to California that July, and Doc set out for Leadville. Historian Casey Tefertiller described it as “literally a field of dreams. ” The boom began in 1877 when silver was discovered, and by 1880 Leadville was the queen of the silver camps, with 40,000 people and a monthly mining payroll of $800,000. At its heyday it boasted 120 saloons, 118 gambling halls, 110 beer gardens, and 35 brothels.

Doc had plenty of opportunity to ply his trade. But the elevation was another matter—Leadville sits high in the Rockies, and for a consumptive already struggling to breathe, the altitude and cold were not good for his health. Promotional brochures of the day actually warned consumptives to give the town a wide berth. Doc dealt faro at the Monarch Saloon, played poker on the side, and became acquainted with the local high rollers.

He even helped put out a fire at a gambling joint that December. By the following spring, he was supposedly back in Dodge City for what became known as the Dodge City War, centered on gambler Luke Short, who was being pushed out of town and called on his friends—Wyatt, Bat Masterson, Charlie Bassett, and possibly Doc—for help. It worked; Short came out on top without a shot fired. But whether Doc was actually there is unknown.

The only evidence is several newspaper articles announcing his arrival, and historians suspect it was more an intimidation tactic than proof he was there in the flesh. As Gary Roberts put it, “Whether or not Doc Holliday was actually one of Wyatt Earp’s fighters, the Short faction did make excellent use of his reputation. ” One of Wyatt’s nieces recalled Doc and Wyatt visiting her family around the same period, so who knows. By the summer, Doc was back in Leadville, and he was not doing well.

He was self-medicating with laudanum and whiskey and suffering from continued bouts of pneumonia. On top of that, he received devastating news: his cousin Maddie had changed her name and joined a convent. If he had held any lingering hopes of marriage, they were gone. And his old enemy Johnny Tyler was in Leadville, along with a crowd of friends, seizing on Doc’s decline and harassing him, trying to goad him into a fight.

Doc owed five dollars to one of Tyler’s friends, a bartender named Billy Allen. When Doc failed to pay in a timely manner, Allen started making threats. Doc avoided the fight, even asking the police for help. They were so concerned about his inability to defend himself that they routinely stopped and frisked him to ensure he was not carrying a gun.

He told them numerous times there was a plot to kill him. When they refused to act, he turned to the press. “I am afraid to defend myself, and these cowards kick me because they know I am down. I haven’t a cent, have few friends, and they will murder me yet before they are done.

”

Everyone has a breaking point. Doc reached his on the evening of August 19, 1884. He had word Allen was looking for him, vowing to kick his brains out over the five dollars. Doc had a confidant sneak a pistol to the Hyman Saloon and hide it under the bar.

He stepped inside, positioned himself to watch the door, and when Billy Allen entered, Doc grabbed the pistol and commenced to shoot. The first shot missed; the second shattered Allen’s right arm. The bartender restrained Doc before he could fire a third round. He claimed self-defense, saying the debt was “just a pretext.

It is the old trouble, and Allen was picked out to be the man to kill me. ” He was acquitted. He was back in Leadville by that June, where he ironically used a revolver to collect an old debt. A gambler known as Curly Mack owed Doc fifty dollars, and one night Doc was on hand when Mack won big at the faro table.

Per the June 12, 1885 Aspen Times: “Just as Curly was about to cash in, his creditor, Doc Holliday, stepped to one side so that Curly couldn’t see him, and drawing a six-shooter from the waistband of his pants, he coolly remarked, ‘I’d like that $50 tonight, Curly. ‘ When the player looked up and saw the muzzle of the gun and the cold, hard face of Doc, with his determined expression, he shoved the whole pile of chips over and said, ‘Take them all. ‘ Doc counted out his $50 and pushed the others back to the winner and walked out, and that settled it. ”

By this point Doc was itching to travel.

He went north into Montana, where in January 1886 he allegedly pulled a pistol on a man and made him dance because the man had befriended him and failed to reciprocate. A warrant was issued, but the authorities felt he was too sick to take into custody. A couple of days later he snuck onto a train bound for Denver, where he had two notable encounters with ghosts from his past. The first was Milt Joyce, the bartender he had shot in the hand back in Tombstone.

Doc brushed against him on the street. Joyce continued walking, but the insult gnawed at him. He turned around, found Doc in a saloon, deliberately brushed against him the same way, and walked around him three times. “He didn’t look at all scared,” Joyce said, “but he wasn’t looking for any more trouble.

”

The second encounter was Wyatt Earp. Wyatt and his new wife Josephine were living in Aspen and occasionally visited Denver. According to Josephine, they met up with Doc on one such visit. “Doc came over and chatted with us for a few minutes.

Then he and Wyatt walked away—Doc on visibly unsteady legs. My husband was deeply affected by this parting from the man who, like an ailing child, had clung to him as though to derive strength from him. There were tears in Wyatt’s eyes when at last they took leave of each other. Doc threw his arms across his shoulder and said, ‘Goodbye, old friend.

It will be a long time before we meet again. ‘”

Doc continued traveling through the spring of 1886—Pueblo, Silverton, back to Denver, where they were cracking down on gambling, then back to Leadville, where he spent another miserable winter working at the Hyman Saloon. Come spring, he took a stage some eighty miles northwest to Glenwood Springs, named for the nearby sulfur springs the Ute tribe believed had curative powers. It was no different from the hot springs of New Mexico and Arizona, but this time the consumption was far more advanced.

He supported himself for about four more months, mostly dealing faro and doing a little bartending, before he came down with yet another case of pneumonia. This time there would be no recovery. Doc was bedridden for over a month, at times delirious, slipping in and out of a coma. At around ten in the morning on November 8, 1887, John Henry Holliday went on to his eternal reward.

Whether he uttered the famous last words attributed to him—”This is funny”—cannot be confirmed. The only source is Walter Noble Burns, and no one knows where he got it. He did research his subjects thoroughly but is known to have embellished and created dialogue. Doc may never have said it, but without additional evidence, the possibility should not be dismissed.

Kate later claimed she was present at Doc’s death, but she is not considered a reliable source. Josephine also claimed she and Wyatt visited Doc while he was dying, but there is no evidence of such a visit—no reports in the local newspaper of the famed Wyatt Earp being in town. It may never have happened. “Even so,” Mark Lee Gardner wrote, “it’s the ending we want.

”

Even Doc’s final resting place remains a mystery. The grave in Glenwood Springs may not be the exact location of his burial. Contemporary sources list him as buried in Linwood Cemetery, which seems likely, but not everyone agrees. The large stone that marks his grave was not donated until 1956, when the then city manager relied on an old-timer who pointed out the spot—but at least three other old-timers disagreed.

One said Doc was buried in what is now a residential area; another said at the corner of Ninth and Palmer; another said his coffin was washed away and had to be reinterred. There is also a story of him being temporarily buried at the foot of the hill because the ground was frozen, after which everyone forgot where he lay—debunked, as several bodies were indeed buried on the hill the same week Doc died. Still others maintain his body was returned to Georgia at his father’s request, and when his father died in 1893 he was buried next to his boy. Who knows.

Maddie, later Sister Mary Melanie, outlived Doc by over half a century, dying in 1939 at eighty-eight. It is said she inspired the character of Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind. She and Doc stayed in touch for years after he went west, but all of his letters were destroyed after her death, either by her or her sister. A literal gold mine for historians, lost.

Big Nose Kate married an English blacksmith named George Cummings and, aside from a few years in Colorado, spent her remaining days in Arizona, dying there in 1940 at ninety. Wyatt Earp lived on, and history would remember him too.