Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  This article provided useful insights into Doc’s life, not so much in detail as in terms of contemporary perceptions of who he was among those who knew him. At the same time, here the life and legend of Doc Holliday began to blend in ways that made separating the two even more difficult. Even the mistakes were more subtle. Misstatements were less exaggerated; they seemed possible, at least. Some of the reporter’s informants were closemouthed, like the one who “put forward the usual sporting phrase,” that “[h]e’s come of good people back East and I won’t say nothing agin him.” Others attributed a certain style to him:

  “It can be set down as a fact,” says a man who knows “Doc” Holliday well, that the doctor has killed at least sixteen men. He usually looked out to have the law on his side and then blazed away at them. The doctor was a peculiar one and was a trifle deceptive in his methods. He would seem to back out and hesitate and act as if afraid, then suddenly he would rush on his antagonist and before the latter knew what was coming he was perhaps laid out stiff with one of the doctor’s bullets in his carcass.13

  The Denver Republican’s treatise prompted other items, including a noteworthy account from the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph titled “A Gritty Georgian.” Recalling that Doc began his career as a dentist on Whitehall Street in Atlanta, “where he was quite popular,” the author said that his Atlanta friends remembered that “he was a small man of the blonde type, and weighed about 125 pounds. His manners were free and genial, and his company was much sought after on account of his social qualities.” Once he went west, “Holliday was thrown on his own resources, and he soon learned that he would have to take care of himself, and not depend too much on any friends or associates that circumstances might make for him.” Here followed a recounting of Doc’s fights in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, culminating in his appointment in Tombstone as a deputy town marshal, Wells, Fargo detective, and special guard “to go with express messengers whenever valuable packages were sent off in the express.”14

  Most of the article was devoted to the street fight and bore the mark of his old friend Lee Smith. The article briefly recounted Doc’s troubles in Colorado, and then closed with a comment on the source of the information for the article who had “quite a number of letters from Holliday, written in recent years.” The source, doubtless Smith, then added this commentary on Doc:

  He was a warm friend, and would fight as quick for one as he would for himself. He did not have a quarrelsome disposition, but managed to get into more difficulties than almost any man I ever saw. He seemed to be peculiarly unfortunate in this way and invariably when he killed a man or gave him the worst of the fight, it turned out that he was justifiable. When I lived in Colorado it was common talk that he had killed more men than any other one man in the West. I think he got credit for killing a good many more men than he really did kill.15

  Wyatt Earp himself would further stabilize the legend of Doc Holliday in a series of articles for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Wyatt was affiliated with the Hearst family at the time, and the article was almost certainly ghostwritten. Its florid, melodramatic style could hardly have been produced by Earp; it was most likely Hearst’s ace feature writer, Robert Chambers, who put the series together. The newspaper that fathered yellow journalism could hardly be expected to do less than put one of its best on the job, particularly when it took the time to publish an editorial on the importance of the Earp articles.

  The August 1896 article “How Wyatt Earp Routed a Gang of Arizona Outlaws” gave considerable space to Doc Holliday. It was the first time in print that Kate Elder, Doc’s companion, was referred to as “Big Nose Kate.” The article stated, “Nor shall a heroine be wanting for Big Nose Kate was shaped for the part by nature and circumstances.” There followed an accounting of a key component of the Holliday legend, if not his life: the story of his knifing of Ed Bailey at Fort Griffin and his subsequent rescue from the authorities by Kate. This story led to arguably the most quoted description of Doc Holliday and what might be called the standard view of who he was:

  Such, then, was the beginning of my acquaintance with Doc Holliday, the mad, merry scamp with heart of gold and nerves of steel; who, in the dark years that followed stood at my elbow in many a battle to the death. He was a dentist, but he preferred to be a gambler. He was a Virginian [sic], but he preferred to be a frontiersman and a vagabond. He was a philosopher, but he prefered to be a wag. He was long, lean, an ash-blond and the quickest man with a six-shooter I ever knew.16

  Here, and in two other articles in the series for the Examiner, Wyatt laid out his friendship with Doc while describing his own life. In the process, he fixed the image of Doc as his “faithful sidekick” during the Tombstone drama.

  It was an appealing image. In December 1898, Doc was reported en route to Cuba, in company with Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, on the heels of the opening of a saloon in Havana by prizefighter Jim Corbett. The Kansas City Journal decided to set the record straight in an article that was widely reprinted across the country. After noting that Doc had died “six years” earlier with “his boots off” in “Colorado Springs,” the writer offered this portrait of Doc:

  A braver man, or a more loyal friend never drew a gun on an opponent than “Doc” Halliday [sic]. He was a misfit in his environments. Although as gentle naturally as a child and with a heart as tender as a woman’s, he became a “man killer” through necessity, and in a career on the frontier of less than ten years he was credited with having sent unprepared to their Maker no less than fifteen human souls.

  Men who were in Tombstone, Arizona in the palmy days of that great chloride camp well remember “Doc” Halliday. He was a thorough gambler, rather temperate in his habits and was always tastefully dressed. Although young in years his hair was iron-gray and marks of care and sorrow heavily lined a face that had at one time been handsome. Of his past he rarely spoke, of the present he gave no thought and the horizon of his future did not reach beyond the small cemetery on the mesa. He had the innate gallantry of the true southerner and would resent an insult to a woman, no matter how degraded, as quickly as he would face a bully with murder in his eye.

  A great lover of fair play, he was generally the self-constituted referee of saloon fights which were frequent in the mining camp, and once a fight began it was never permitted to end until a decision was reached.17

  There followed an admixture of fact and fantasy that did, at least, try to follow the general outlines of his life. The author offered the tale that Doc had practiced dentistry in San Antonio until one of his patients, “a beautiful and imprudent woman,” caused talk about the nature of her relationship with Doc: “The inevitable happened. Her husband indulged in threats and hunted for Halliday. When the smoke cleared away the husband lay a corpse in the dusty street. Halliday was arrested, tried and acquitted. Later a friend of his victim took up the quarrel, sought satisfaction and was killed at the first shot. Again Halliday was subjected to a trial and acquitted.”

  That ended his dental career, and he became a gambler in the mining camps of the West, until at last he came to Tombstone and struck up a friendship with the “kings of the camp,” the four Earp brothers. Doc became their ally, and “[a]lthough weak physically and the possessor of a hacking cough of a consumptive Halliday never shirked in the performance of his self-imposed duties. No trail was too difficult for him to follow, no act of bravery he would not smilingly perform. He laughed at death, while courting its embrace.” The elements of the legend continued to fall into place.

  The article confused Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury with each other, and its account of the street fight centered on Doc:

  The first shot was fired by “Doc” Halliday. His weapon was a cut-off double-barreled shotgun. The first charge entered Tom McLowry’s [sic] breast; the second went wild, as Tom staggered around a corner only to fall dead in his tracks. Frank McLowry, as he reached for his Winchester, slung to the saddle of his now frantic horse, was shot in the
abdomen, and Billy Clanton received a bullet in his left breast. Shot after shot rang out and in the midst of the smoke “Doc” Halliday, ankle deep in dust of the road, a six-shooter in each hand, could be seen alternately firing at Frank McLowry and Billy Clanton, the latter on the ground, dying as bravely as ever a hero died.

  “Now it’s my time,” Frank McLowry was heard to cry out, “I’ll get you now!”

  “You’ll be a dandy if you do,” replied Halliday, with a smile, and taking deliberate aim he planted a bullet in his game adversary’s forehead.

  McLowry threw up his hands when the bullet struck him and fell over backwards. His finger convulsively pulled the trigger of the weapon he still held, and the last bullet of the terrible fight of October 25, 1881, grazed Wyatt Earp’s hand, bringing blood.18

  The author then gave an accounting of the vendetta, beginning with the shooting of Virgil Earp and continuing in some detail through the fight at “Burleigh springs” where “Curly Bill was killed by either Wyatt Earp or ‘Doc’ Halliday” before the Earp posse slipped out of Arizona. In another article also prompted by the report that Doc Holliday was en route to Havana, the author concluded, “A great many untruthful stories have been printed about him. But the truth is, ‘Doc’ Holliday was one of that brave band of men who drove to cover the desperadoes of the West, and helped to civilize that section. It took desperate men, in a certain sense, to administer the drastic medicine. Holliday helped to carve out a future for that country.”19

  This Holliday was hardly innocent, but he was compelling. The image in all these articles was tragic and sympathetic. Of course, during this period Doc was the subject of occasional articles that portrayed him as simply a cold-blooded killer, but the more complicated view of a man who was the victim of circumstances that led him to an errant lifestyle, yet who did the right things when faced with hard choices, was the view that gained acceptance. C.P. Thomas, a Montana old-timer who claimed to have known a number of the old-time gunfighters, underscored one quality in another article, published in 1906: “Doc Holliday was a native of Georgia, and take him all in all he was possessed of the most daredevil and reckless bravery of any of his associates. He feared not man or devil and acted with such insane disregard of danger that it was generally believed he really courted death.”20

  Curiously, it was one who had known him, had even been called “friend” by him, who restored a darker hue to Doc Holliday’s legend. In 1907, Bat Masterson authored a series of articles about men he had known titled “Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier” for Human Life Magazine, which was edited by Bat’s friend Alfred Henry Lewis. One of the subjects was Doc Holliday. Masterson wrote:

  Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man….Physically, Doc Holliday was a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fist fight, and no one knew this better than himself, and the knowledge of this fact was perhaps why he was so ready to resort to a weapon of some kind whenever he got himself into difficulty. He was hot-headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarrelling, and among men who did not fear him, was very much disliked.21

  Masterson noted that Doc was unable to keep himself out of trouble: “He would no sooner be out of one scrape before he was in another, and the strange part of it is he was more often in the right than in the wrong, which has rarely ever been the case with a man who is continually getting himself into trouble.” He gave a detailed account of the “indiscriminate killing of some negroes in the little Georgia village [that] was what first caused him to leave his home,” then described his peregrinations in the West. Of his time in Dodge, Masterson wrote, “During his year’s stay at Dodge…he did not have a quarrel with anyone, and, although regarded as a sort of grouch, he was not disliked by those with whom he had become acquainted.” Even though “he showed no disposition to quarrel or shoot while in Dodge,” Masterson believed that his trouble “was pretty much of his own seeking.”

  Bat fixed the image of Doc Holliday as the friend of Wyatt Earp with this statement: “His whole heart and soul were wrapped up in Wyatt Earp and he was always ready to stake his life in defense of any cause in which Wyatt was interested….Damon did no more for Pythias than Holliday did for Wyatt Earp.” Masterson concluded, “I have always believed that much of Holliday’s trouble was caused by drink and for that reason held him to blame in many instances. While I assisted him substantially on several occasions, it was not because I liked him any too well, but on account of my friendship for Wyatt Earp, who did.” Bat’s article did little to enhance Doc’s image, but it affirmed as a staple part of the legend the perception of Doc Holliday as Wyatt Earp’s boon companion.

  Interestingly, the popular writer Alfred Henry Lewis presented a somewhat different view of the relationship between Masterson and Holliday. In one story, he pictured the two of them sitting at a table discussing the trouble Doc was in following his arrest in Denver:

  “It’s tough lines, Bat,” said Mr. Holiday [sic], as he poured himself a drink. “I’ve never done anything worse than down a man—always a warrior, at that—and now to have to stand up a party, even when it ain’t on the level, comes plenty hard.”

  “But it’s the only way, Doc,” returned Mr. Masterson…. “It’s the only trail,” reiterated Mr. Masterson. “The message says that they start today from Tucson with the requisition papers. They’ll be in Denver day after tomorrow. The only way to beat them is to have you under arrest. Our governor won’t give up a man to Arizona who’s wanted here at home. Those people from Tucson will get turned down. Meanwhile, you’ll be on bail, and we can continue the case as long as they stay hankering around. That Arizona outfit can never take you in Colorado. This scheme will make you safe for life.”

  “And that won’t be long,” returned Mr. Holiday, “at the rate my lungs are lasting.”

  “On the whole,” objected Mr. Holiday, following a statement of thought, “why not go back to Arizona and be tried? It’s four to one they couldn’t convict; and I’ve gone against worse odds than that ever since I was born.”

  “Man!” expostulated Mr. Masterson, “it would never come to trial. You wouldn’t get as far as Albuquerque. Some of the gang would board the train and shoot you in the car seat—kill you, as one might say, upon the meet! It isn’t as though you were to have a square deal. They’d get you on the train; get you with your guns off, too, you must remember, for you’d be under arrest, d’ you see. Doc, you wouldn’t last as long as a drink of whiskey.”

  Mr. Masterson spoke with earnestness. His brow was wise and wide, and his cool eye the home of counsel. It was these traits of cautious intelligence that gave Mr. Masterson station among his fellows as much as did that ready accuracy which belonged with his gun. Mr. Holiday knowing these things, yielded.

  “What is your plan then?” said he.22

  Here was Doc as a man with character, loath to allow fake charges to be brought against him even to save his life. There followed a flashback to review Doc’s life in Lewis’s inimitable style through Tombstone and into Colorado, until, at last, Bat sat at Doc’s bedside when he was dying:

  “You must have used up a ton of lead, Doc,” observed Mr. Masterson one afternoon, while in a mood of fine philosophy; “and considering your few years in the West, it’s bordering on the marvelous. You simply shot your way out of one battle into another. How did you come to do it?”

  “It used to worry me,” gasped Mr. Holiday, “to think that I must die, and I mixed up with everything that came along so as to forget myself. It occupied me and took my mind off my troubles.”23

  The Valdosta Times later reprinted the Lewis article, noting that Doc was “an old Valdosta boy” and observing, “He was a dentist by profession and was a victim of consumption. He went to Colorado for his health at a time when that section was under the heel of desperadoes and outlaws. He was against the lawless element and set about to
purify the atmosphere, facing all sorts of dangers and killing numerous men who defied the law. He later died of the dread disease which caused him to go west. The story of his career reads like romance.”24 So, the portrait of Doc Holliday as a tragic consumptive embittered by life’s turns and yet driven by loyalty and a sense of honor to make right choices became the standard view.

  It was not the only view, however. The departure of the Earps from Cochise County in 1882, and the subsequent withdrawal of most of the Earps’ old allies when the Tombstone boom played out, left the Cow-Boy view of the Earp-Clanton troubles as the dominant one in the area. In it, the Earps were remembered as killers and stage robbers.

  In this Cow-Boy view of the Earps as criminal masters of Cochise County that emerged largely from Ike Clanton’s testimony and editorial outbursts during the vendetta, Doc Holliday was the most vulnerable exhibit. Doc was the murderer of Bud Philpott, the cause of the street fight, and the coldest-blooded killer in Tombstone. This Doc Holliday had no redeeming personality traits. He was ruthless, immoral, and uncontrollable. And Doc’s character made the Earps bad men. Even some of the Earps’ friends, notably Bob Paul, were cited as believing that Doc was “the fourth man” in the Benson stage robbery and the man who killed Bud Philpott.25

  In 1896, in the aftermath of the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight during which Wyatt Earp, who refereed the bout, was accused of throwing the fight, the San Francisco Daily Call published an article by Charles H. Hopkins, who had been in Tombstone, that portayed the Earps as ruthless outlaws who were eventually driven from Cochise County. In the feature, Hopkins added yet another twist to the story of Doc Holliday: