Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  Doc Holliday, who has grown famous as the Wells-Fargo shotgun messenger, was a member of the Earp crowd. Everybody has read about how Holliday stopped stage-robbing in Arizona. Well, he did stop it to a certain extent—that is to say, nobody could rob a stage who was Holliday’s enemy. The Earps stood in with Holliday and his crowd of Wells-Fargo messengers, and every time we would hear of a stage that carried a lot of money or bullion being held up Wyatt Earp would collect a posse of his gang and start out to run the robbers down. If they could manage to catch any of the “rustlers” of the opposition crowd they would hang them without ceremony, come back to the town and explain how they tracked the road agents down.26

  Over the years, articles by Alfred Henry Lewis (before his association with Bat Masterson changed his mind), Charles Michelson, John Scanlon, and others brought this image to the public view. Will H. Robinson, in a history of Arizona published in 1919, said that Doc Holliday “hung out a dentist sign, had gambling for a vocation and manslaughter for an avocation.” Still, for the most part the pro—Cow-Boy old-timers’ view of the Earps as bad men was largely confined to Arizona until the publication of William MacLeod Raine’s Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws and, more important, William M. Breakenridge’s Helldorado: Bringing the Law to the Mesquite.27

  These books gave voice to the Cow-Boy perspective on a broader scale, although neither took much time to characterize Doc Holliday. Both portrayed him as a bad man. Breakenridge called him “a two-gun man and noted as a killer,” but his most notable contribution to the legend of Doc Holliday was tampering with a Nugget article concerning the escape of Luther King from jail after the Benson stage robbery to include the statement “He was an important witness against Holliday,” which was not in the original. For the most part, the old-timers seemed content to describe Doc simply by reference to his misdeeds. He was cowardly, ruthless, dishonest at cards, and a backshooter. Wyatt Earp was their true target, and Doc was useful only to the extent he could be used against Wyatt.28

  The persistent “anti-Earp” view rankled Wyatt Earp and eventually convinced him that he had to set the record straight. But Earp was also difficult. He wanted the story told, but on his terms, and he had Sadie around to watch over his reputation as well. Some time around 1920 Forestine Cooper Hooker wrote “Arizona Vendetta,” which may have been an early effort to tell Wyatt’s story the way that he wanted it told. It almost certainly had input from Earp, but if it was a collaboration, Hooker was one of the first to encounter just how difficult Wyatt was to please. Despite her connection to the family of Henry C. Hooker, the Arizona rancher who had supported the Earps, with whom Earp had remained friendly, he would not permit it to be published. It was an interesting effort, nonetheless, although her discussion of Doc was limited to his actions in support of Wyatt.29

  At some point thereafter, Wyatt began to tell his story to a young friend, John H. Flood Jr., in hopes that, at last, he could tell the story his way. It was an exercise in naivete on both their parts. Despite revisions and the assistance of William S. Hart, the result was unpublishable. Wyatt did include Doc in his story, devoting a chapter to Doc saving his life, which concluded with a revealing, if out of place, sentence: “And poor Bat Masterson, and the world, wonder long, long years at the loyalty of Wyatt Earp for the stranger who proved his friend.”30 Thereafter, Doc was on hand as Wyatt’s friend, although he handled some of the more controversial topics related to Doc gingerly or not at all. The Flood effort would have noteworthy consequences, however.

  Perhaps the most revealing commentary on Doc’s role in Wyatt’s life, especially at Tombstone, came in a 1925 court case over the estate of Lotta Crabtree, the famous nineteenth-century actress who had lived in Tombstone for a time.31 During the course of Wyatt’s testimony, the attorneys asked him specifically about Doc:

  Q: With you was allied Doc Holliday?

  A: Yes.

  Q: He was somewhat of a notorious character in those days?

  A: Well, no. I couldn’t say that he was notorious outside of this other faction trying to make him notorious. Of course he killed a man or two before he went there.

  Q: Didn’t he have the reputation of being a holder-up of stages?

  A: I never heard of it until I left.

  Q: With the Behans were allied the Clandons [sic]?

  A: Yes. And the Behan side whenever they got a chance to hurt me over Holliday’s shoulders they would do it. They would make a lot of talk about Doc Holliday.

  Q: Because he was allied with you?

  A: He never had no trouble in Tombstone outside of being in this street fight with me. Then on one occassion [sic] he got into some trouble with part of the combination that was against me, Joyce, and his partner, and he shot Joyce in the hand and the other fellow in the foot and of course that made them pretty sore against Holliday. But they knew that I was Holliday’s friend and they tried to injure me every way they could.

  Later in his testimony, Earp drove home what he regarded as the central point of his relationship with Doc at Tombstone in comments about his decision to run for sheriff:

  [A]nd if I do say it myself I was a pretty strong man for the position. He [Behan] knew that he had to do me some way and he done everything in the world that he could against me. He stood in with this tough element, the cow boys and stage robbers and others, because they were pretty strong and he wanted their vote. Whenever they would get a chance to shoot anything at me over Holliday’s shoulders they would do it. As they made Holliday a bad man. An awful bad man, which was wrong. He was a man that would fight if he had to.32

  Pretty clearly, then, Wyatt saw Doc as a liability to his reputation and defending Doc an essential part of defending himself. During that same time period, Walter Noble Burns, a well-known Chicago journalist, published The Saga of Billy the Kid. Afterward, Burns turned his attention to Tombstone. In July 1926, while he was in Los Angeles, he approached Wyatt Earp about writing his biography and spoke with Flood about taking over his manuscript. Wyatt declined because he still hoped to salvage Flood’s effort.

  Earp did, however, offer to help Burns with a book about Doc. Later, Burns wrote Earp requesting information about Doc’s involvement in the Benson stage robbery and about other associates of Wyatt’s. Earp repeated his willingness to help with a book about Doc, although curiously adding, “I would much rather not have my name mentioned to [sic] freely. I am getting tired of it all, as there have been so many lies written about me in so many magazines in the last few years that it makes a man feel like fighting. I know you mean to do the right thing by me, but I would ask of you please to say as little as possible about me.”33

  In the letter, he focused his comments on Doc almost exclusively on the Benson stage robbery, concluding, “Doc was not in the Benson stage hold up. And he never did such a thing as hold ups in his life. He was his own worst enemy. Comes from a very respectful family in the South, gratuated [sic] as a dentist.” Ironically, within days, Flood wrote Burns indicating that he was recommending that Earp reconsider collaborating with him. By then, Burns was nearing completion of Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest. Once he found out about Burns’s book, Earp felt betrayed that Burns had written a book that focused on his life rather than Doc’s. He tried to prevent its publication even though Burns provided a stunning portrait of Wyatt Earp as “the Lion of Tombstone.”34

  Burns’s view of Doc Holliday was also compelling. “He was a rather tall, extremely slender, ash-blond, gray eyed fellow, immaculate in attire, fastidious in his habits, temperamental, hot tempered and cold blooded, querulous and sometimes a little quarrelsome, a wit as well as a desperado,” Burns wrote. He went on:

  He was a consumptive, and the malady had left his face emaciated and very white and given it a look of refinement that might have passed for spirituality. One might have been tempted to suspect that this quiet, pale man with the fine gray eyes was a poet or a scholar who pored over erudite volumes under midnight lamps. But except for a few elegi
es done with finished elegance with his six-shooter, the doctor never displayed any poetic or literary leanings.

  He was, after a kind, a cynical philosopher, and his passing observations were spiced with a dry, acrid humour. Life seemed a bitter joke to him. He was reconciled to tuberculosis, he said, because it had left him so thin that it took might good shooting to hit him. He was still ready to bet, however, that in the home-stretch drive, a bullet would nose out consumption at the wire.

  Burns claimed that Doc was an “excellent shot” with only Buckskin Frank Leslie his equal in Tombstone. “No scruples of any kind handicapped the doctor in his busy life,” Burns said. “Though square with his friends, who would have trusted him with their last dollar, his honesty had various shades and nuances. If honest was convenient, he was honest; otherwise, he used a cold deck.” He added, “His courage was his one outstanding virtue. He was afraid of nothing. Despite his delicate appearance and his physical weakness, there was something in the calm cold look of him which warned of danger.” Here was the apotheosis of the Holliday legend appended to a review of Doc’s life before Tombstone and signed with Wyatt’s signature: “He was one of the finest, cleanest men in the world, though, of course, he was a little handy with his gun and had to kill a few fellows.”35

  Burns also appears to have been the first to say that Doc’s final words were “This is funny.” He added that “with his sense of humour strong to the last, the doctor doubtless considered it a choice joke that, after all his desperate adventures and narrow escapes, he should be dying in bed.” It was funny for the reason Burns stated, and more, but the quote, for all that, has never been documented and seems highly improbable as Doc Holliday’s last words, however appropriate they might be.

  Not even Stuart N. Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, published two years after Wyatt Earp died in 1929—and the work that finally had Earp’s support in the writing of it—added significantly to the “good bad man” of Tombstone. In fact, if anything, Lake tried to temper Burns’s view of Holliday. Lake said flatly that “Doc Holliday was a hot-headed, ill-tempered, trouble-hunting, and, withal, cold-blooded desperado.”36 Doubtless, Lake’s view of Holliday was influenced by two old allies of Wyatt’s, Fred Dodge, who plainly detested Doc, and John P. Clum, who said in 1929 after reading Wyatt’s article from the San Francisco Examiner, August 2, 1896, for the first time, “I never approved of Holliday and this story makes it more difficult to defend Wyatt.” He added flatly, “I will not appear as a supporter of Holliday.”37

  Lake had Bat Masterson attribute to Doc three redeeming traits: courage, loyalty to friends, and affection for Wyatt Earp. Bat allegedly said about Doc’s feelings for Wyatt:

  The depth of this sentiment was shown not only by Doc’s demonstrated willingness to stake his life for Wyatt without second thought; it was even more clearly established by the fact that, despite his almost uncontrollable temper and his maniacal love of a fight, Doc Holliday could avoid trouble when there was a possibility that some encounter might prove embarrassing to Wyatt. On more than one occasion Doc actually backed down before men whom he easily could have killed, simply because gunplay at the time would have reacted unfavorably against Wyatt. To appreciate that fully, you had to know Holliday.38

  Lake’s Wyatt repeated the comparison of Doc to Buckskin Frank Leslie, then added, “But Leslie lacked Doc’s fatalistic courage, a courage induced, I suppose, by the nature of Holliday’s disease and the realization that he hadn’t long to live, anyway. That fatalism, coupled with his marvelous speed and accuracy, gave Holliday the edge over any out-and-out killer I ever knew.” Lake, in words attributed to Earp, claimed that Doc drank two to three quarts of liquor a day, yet never staggered or appeared to be intoxicated. “Under ordinary circumstances he might be irritable to the point of shakiness,” Earp supposedly said, “only in a game or when a fight impended was there anything steely about his nerves.”

  Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal received excellent reviews as an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man, but in southeastern Arizona it prompted a different response. Over the next several years, several Arizona old-timers, including Judge James C. Hancock, Anton Mazzanovich, Joseph F. Chisholm, Melvin Jones, and others raised their voices in protest against the view presented in Lake’s book. These old-timers represented a revival of the Cow-Boy view with a fresh antipathy toward Wyatt Earp. Much, if not most of it, was folk history based on rumor and the poststreet fight campaign to discredit the Earps. The passage of time made the vendetta seem even more ruthless than it was and the obvious exaggerations of the Lake version of what happened gave a sense of credibility to their own mix of memory and rumor.39

  Mazzanovich, an Arizona old-timer who wrote his own book, Trailing Geronimo, based on his experiences, but who played no direct role in the Tombstone story, wrote a series of articles for the Bisbee Brewery Gulch Gazette, beginning in November 1931. He observed, “No doubt a number of the old-timers will resent it. In fact it would have been better if the book had never been placed before an intelligent reading public.” He added, “much has been written about Tombstone and Cochise County in the past and all stories are conflicting. Now Wyatt tells his story entirely different from all the rest that we have read. Some day perhaps some one will come out with the truth. To me the story [as told by Lake] is simply impossible.” He specifically belittled the claims of Burns and Lake that they had interviewed old pioneers in preparing their books, concluding, “they sure missed a number of the old timers.”40

  Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal would help to polarize even further views of the Earp-Clanton troubles and help produce a controversy that continues to exist, but perhaps the most important consequence of Lake’s book insofar as Doc Holliday’s story was concerned came from Mary Katharine Cummings, an elderly woman at the Pioneers Home in Prescott, Arizona. Mary Katharine Cummings was none other than Kate Harony (aka Kate Elder, Kate Fisher, and Big Nose Kate), Doc’s inamorata. She had lived in obscurity for decades since her separation from Doc at Tombstone, but Lake’s book infuriated her, and she set about to have her say on the matter.

  Mazzanovich, who claimed to have met Kate in Globe years before, was corresponding with Kate when Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal was published, and he sent her a copy, which resulted in Kate writing her recollections of her relationship with Doc. Her response to Mazzanovich formed the basis for articles published in the Brewery Gulch Gazette in April and June 1932. Mazzanovich apparently planned to publish her memoir in her own words in some other venue, although it was never published because of his death in 1938.41

  At some point, Joseph Chisholm, another old-timer and writer associated with the Brewery Gulch Gazette, also developed an interest in Kate’s story. Mazzanovich was uncooperative, but when he died, Chisholm obtained access to what Kate had written, after which he “visited her and had her verify the data contained in her correspondence with Tony.” In the unpublished manuscript “Tombstone’s Tale (The Truth of Helldorado),” Chisholm wrote:

  I have met Doc Holliday’s widow in recent months and have since corresponded with her. She is a sweet-faced little woman whose keen intellect and droll humor when discussing her traducers would never lead one to believe that she is eighty-five years old….It is inconceivable to one bred on the frontier that Earp because of personal resentment would so evilly misrepresent a woman in his declining years. Yet there it is in his so-called autobiography.42

  Chisholm included the reminiscence written by Kate for Mazzanovich in his manuscript, declaring that “it required no editing for the lady is well-educated and intelligent,” along with some additions from his own contact with her. However, Kate apparently decided not to allow Chisholm to use the material. She believed that her story would sell for a lot of money, and when neither Mazzanovich nor Chisholm offered to pay for her story or to help her find a publisher who would, she balked. If Chisholm showed his manuscript to her, she might also have been unhappy with Chisholm’s depiction of Doc. Chisholm’s o
pinion seems to have changed about the “sweet-faced little woman” after that, because in his book Brewery Gulch, which was not published until twelve years after his death in 1937, he said Doc was “a vicious killer if there ever was one in the Southwest,” and described Kate as “Doc’s Lady Lou,” identifying her with the character played by Mae West in the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong, which had been so controversial that it led to greater government censorship of sex in the movies in 1934. In the movie, Lady Lou was a singer and nightclub owner with a vicious criminal boyfriend. She did not fear him, however, and, in fact, regularly enjoyed the company of other men. “She was a buxom, comely baggage,” Chisholm wrote of Kate, continuing the Mae West analogy, adding, “She had plenty of nerve, that dance hall girl.”43

  Mary Katharine Cummings, Doc’s “Kate” of prior years.

  The story that Kate told to Mazzanovich and that was used by Chisholm certainly put a different edge on the Holliday story. Essentially, she denied that Doc had a reputation as “the cold-blooded murderer that ‘Wyatt Earp Frontier Marshal’ portrays him” before he went to Tombstone, and held that Wyatt Earp was responsible for all of Doc’s misfortunes thereafter. She believed that Doc “changed” once he was under Earp’s influence. Kate’s story provided new information, but it was also self-serving, designed not only to correct some misconceptions about Doc but also to portray herself in a more positive light and protect her own reputation.

  In the fall of 1935, Mrs. W. J. Martin of Prescott, Arizona, contacted Arthur W. Bork, a family friend and a graduate student at the University of Arizona at the time. She asked his assistance in preserving the story of “the wife of Doc Holliday.” She noted that “some history makers have discovered her and are trying to get her to tell them what she knows. She told them that I had her manuscript and was dealing about it. They try to get the information for nothing.” Martin had a manuscript besides the account Kate had given to Mazzanovich. She told Bork, “I have been nearly four years getting her to finish it, and I want to sell it.” She added that Chisholm was trying to get the story, and she wanted “to do something before he gets back here.”44