On Thanksgiving Day, 1935, Bork and Martin interviewed Kate at the Pioneers Home in Prescott and acquired more details from her. Among other things, she told them that she had been born in Davenport, Iowa, November 7, 1850, that she had attended a convent in St. Louis, that she had married a dentist named Silas Melvin, who later died in Atlanta, Georgia, that she had married Doc at Valdosta on May 25, 1876, and that her maiden name was Mary Katharine Haroney. This information complemented, supplemented, and contradicted the materials that she had given to Mazzanovich. She also confirmed that the photograph of Doc in Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal was in fact Doc and had been taken by C. S. Fly. She said that she worked at a restaurant called the Globe in Globe and claimed to have gone to Colorado, where she took care of Doc until he died. She said his last words were, “Well, I’m going just as I told them,—the bugs would get me before the worms did.”45
From 1935 to 1938, Bork attempted to get Kate’s story published, but she insisted on being paid for it. When offered the opportunity to publish her account without payment, she refused. Bork recalled, “After unsuccessful efforts to interest the national magazines, we gave up.” Later, in 1940, Kate wrote yet another account of her life with Doc to her niece, Lillian Raffert. This account made fewer claims and was more personal. She noted in closing, “there are quite a few that want me to write up things but as they don’t want to give me any thing I don’t write.”
Neither of Doc’s 1950s biographers had access to any of these accounts. The version prepared with Bork and Martin was finally published in Arizona and the West in 1977, in conjunction with material gathered from the Haroney family by Glenn G. Boyer.46 The latter materials provided details about her childhood. This information was revealing and important. Unfortunately, after most of the family informants had passed away, Boyer claimed that Dr. Harony was the personal physician of the Austrian archduke Maximilian and accompanied him to Mexico during the ill-fated reign of Maximilian as emperor of Mexico. The Harony family had been settled in Davenport for more than a year before Maximilian even arrived in Mexico. Nevertheless, this tale opened the way to make Kate into an educated, multilingual aristocrat, adding more romance to Doc Holliday’s story.47
Kate’s relationship with Doc is one of the most perplexing parts of Doc’s life as well as his legend. Despite popular images of a violent and abusive tryst and old-timer gossip about Kate’s proclivities for sex acts frowned on even by her generation of Cyprian sisters, little survived to provide an “intimate portrait” of their life together. Doc left not a word about her, and Kate’s accounts were self-serving and defensive. While they were emotional in the animosity they revealed against Wyatt Earp, they were surprisingly impersonal in describing her relationship with Doc. Kate’s recollections were confused by fading memory, calculated to portray her in the best possible light, and yet filled with information that only someone close to Doc Holliday could possibly have known. It is this internal webbing of intimate knowledge that provides the most convincing evidence that Mary Katharine Cummings was in fact Kate Elder.48
She was a woman with a story to tell and much to hide. The accounts she wrote have to be sifted like river sand in a placer box to separate a great mass of debris from the nuggets of reality that do appear. And yet, there is a sense in which the very composition of emotion, subterfuge, and even outright lies in what she said reveal a fascinating set of insights into the nature of her relationship with Doc. Her recollection was unemotional and almost detached as far as her feelings for Doc were concerned. She defended him against charges that he was a killer and a drunkard, and she insisted that he treated her well. She portrayed herself as loyal and solicitous. There was no romance in her story, however. Indeed, she expressed resentment toward Doc, accusing him of gambling away her money and implying Doc’s complicity in shady dealings with her accusations of Wyatt Earp’s involvement in stage robberies. She also found Doc weak in not standing up to Wyatt. In the end, one of the greatest difficulties she faced was trying to defend Doc as a basically decent man, while insisting that Wyatt Earp was a bad man involved in criminal activity. The contradictions in her writings reveal the difficulty she had with this issue.
The absence of any real sense of her affection for Doc is especially underscored by the fawning romantic portrait of John Ringo she gave to Chisholm. She fairly gushed over Ringo’s appearance and manly traits before concluding, “And he was noble for he never fought anyone except face to face. Every time I think of him my eyes fill with tears.”49 There are no such terms of endearment over Doc anywhere in her recollections. Indeed, her description of Ringo is the only place in her writings where she evinces any emotion other than anger and resentment. It is almost as if her defense of Doc as a “good man” was essential to her own defense as a “good woman,” whereas her sentimentality toward Ringo revealed her simply as a woman, without the guile so painfully apparent in her defense of Doc.
Kate’s accounts, especially what she wrote for Mazzanovich, provided important leads for tracing her relationship with Doc, as well as Doc’s movements. Still, she was careful not to detail her own colorful past in Kansas and Texas before she and Doc came together for what was a fairly stable relationship until Tombstone and Wyatt Earp came between them. Kate’s hatred of Wyatt Earp—and no other word can explain her anger toward him—suggests a history between them that cannot be explained away as mere resentment of his influence on Doc. There is a harshness and an element of deceitfulness in Kate’s accounts that she could not hide. Even so, a bond did exist between Doc and Kate that brought them back together time and again.
Kate claimed in her account to Mazzanovich that Doc sent for her in his final days and that she went to Glenwood Springs, where they were reconciled and she nursed him until his death. She made a similar statement to Bork, although it did not appear in the narrative he helped her prepare, where she said simply that “[h]e went to Glenwood Spring [sic] where he was appointed Under Sheriff for two terms. He died in service of his second term and is buried in one of the Glenwood Spring cemeteries.”50 A reunion would have been appropriate, and it could have happened, but the contemporary record does not sustain a Glenwood Springs reconciliation. And given Kate’s insistence that she was Mrs. John H. Holliday in her later accounts, if she had been at his side, it would have been more than a little odd that the only reference to a relative in the Ute Chief obituary would have been Mattie Holliday. How could the presence of a wife have escaped notice?
At the very least, Kate’s story provided an important counterpoint to the view of her as the nasty whore described in the Las Vegas Optic in 1882 and the recollections of some old-timers. Bork always believed that her prime motive was “to give herself a good name,” and that seems to be borne out by some of her writings. After she married George Cummings, a blacksmith, in 1888, she had done her best to hide her past. That marriage did not last, and Cummings committed suicide in 1915. Kate eventually began to work as a housekeeper for John J. Howard, a mining man in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, and moved in with him. Following Howard’s death in 1930, she served as the executrix of his will. She sought admission to the Pioneers Home and had some difficulty getting in. At that time she claimed that she had come to Arizona in 1895. Her ancient hatred of Wyatt Earp was what brought her “out of hiding,” so to speak, largely as the result of negative portrayals of her by Burns and Lake, both of which she attributed to Earp.51
Two stories illustrate what Kate faced. The first was a tale by an old-timer who claimed that he was present in a Bisbee saloon when Kate was killed. A drunk began shooting up the place, and everyone hit the floor. When the shooting was over, however, Kate did not get up. She was dead, and the locals could find no cause for her death. They sent for Doc Holliday, of course, who arrived shortly and examined her body. Doc discovered a tiny speck of blood on her buttocks, and after performing an autopsy he discovered that one of the drunk’s bullets had made a direct hit on her rectum as she lay on the floor with her posterior slightly r
aised.52
The other story was told by Kate herself:
[H]ere is what happened in Globe one morning, A Merchant Mrs Baily brought a man in for breakfast after breafast [sic] hours, I waited on him because my girl was doing up the rooms, they got to talk- ing about Tombstone, some how Doc & I were mentioned, he told Mrs Baily that Doc took me to New Mexico & killed me up in the mountains & that he helped to bury me, I said the poor woman. Mrs Baily & I laught [sic] but the poor man found out he made a fool of himself & never came back but it is laughable how some people will talk, I often laugh how often I have been dead & buried & turn up some place full of life.53
Kate’s efforts to have her version told went unrewarded. Unfortunately, her story would remain obscure. Some of it would come to light in a piecemeal fashion with publication of Frank Waters’s The Earp Brothers of Tombstone: The Story of Mrs. Virgil Earp, which purported to be the recollections of Allie Earp, Virgil’s widow. Based on comparison with Waters’s earlier unpublished manuscript “The Tombstone Travesty,” the book included some of the materials from Mazzanovich and Chisholm, which, by then, had been acquired by Waters’s close friend, the Earp researcher and collector John D. Gilchriese. In the book, Allie made statements that were not in “The Tombstone Travesty.” Much of what was added came directly from Kate’s remembrances.54
By the time Waters published his book in 1960, some changes were taking place in the popular view of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The first biography of Doc Holliday, written by John Myers Myers, was published in 1955.55 It was a well-structured work that collected many of the stories about Doc and offered useful insights but suffered from too great a reliance on Stuart Lake. Patricia Jahns’s biography, published two years after Myers’s, was much less satisfying as a biography, but much more challenging to the legend of the “good bad man.” Jahns questioned the authenticity of several of the standard events in Doc’s life, including such episodes as the Ed Bailey killing, the Bud Ryan knifing, and the Mike Gordon shooting. She also questioned Doc’s ability as a gun handler, and portrayed Wyatt Earp in a less than favorable light. Perhaps most dramatically, she emphasized the relationship between Doc and his cousin, Mattie, and suggested that it was a romantic one.56 Throughout, her approach was novelistic; she filled in gaps by putting words into people’s mouths and presuming to understand their thoughts.
Jahns’s biography had the virtue of trying to present a more realistic view of Doc Holliday than the image that had survived virtually all challenges since the 1880s. Unwittingly, then, Jahns provided fodder for the debunkers who followed her. In Waters’s book, and in the later Wyatt Earp biography by Ed Bartholomew, Doc’s image was diminished even more, so that he became little more than a cutthroat. Curiously, though, even in the worst depictions of him, he retained a genteel veneer. Bartholomew concluded that Doc was involved in stage robberies in New Mexico based on nothing more than the fact that one of the robbers spoke with a refined accent and vocabulary.57
In the “anti-Earp” literature that gained fresh credibility in the 1960s as part of a general revolt against Western gunfighters and outlaw heroes in general, Doc was increasingly portrayed as a quarrelsome and drunken troublemaker who was a lousy shot and a generally disreputable character. He was involved in the Benson stage robbery and the murder of Bud Philpott, and he was responsible for the street fight, which he started by gunning down the unarmed Tom McLaury without cause.
Of all the ideas that Jahns introduced, the one that produced the greatest interest and stirred the strongest feelings was the suggestion that Doc and Mattie were interested in each other romantically. Sister Mary Melanie died in 1939 after a long and distinguished career of service. The family rightly held her in high esteem and publicly disavowed any suggestion that she and Doc had been in love, but they never denied that she and Doc were close. “After Doc’s death,” one relative recalled, “she would talk of him and say that if people had only known him as she had, they would have seen a different man from the one of Western fame.”58
At the time of her death, a trunk containing her belongings was turned over to her sister, Marie Mahoney. Apparently, before she died, Sister Mary Melanie had burned some of her letters from Doc, perhaps the most personal or the ones that revealed the darker side of John Henry, but the trunk still included a number of his letters. Carolyn Holliday Manley, a descendant of Robert Kennedy Holliday, recalled that “[m]y aunt Catharine says her daddy used to read those letters on a Sunday afternoon, and that they were wonderful, colorful letters describing the Old West.” They were well written and full of historical detail, but they said little about his violent exploits and they certainly were not love letters. When Marie entered a nursing home, the trunk came into the possession of Carolyn’s parents. Later, however, Marie left the nursing home and reclaimed her property. After that, she burned Doc’s letters to Mattie to keep her sister’s “personal life private.”59
The story of a romantic attachment would not die. It was too appealing. Not even the family would completely deny the possibility. “The rumor was that they were in love,” recalled Robert Lee Holliday, the grandson of Robert Alexander Holliday, Doc’s cousin “Hub.” Robert Lee added, “I don’t know if he asked her to go out West with him, but I doubt it because of his tuberculosis.”60 Others in the family also remembered the rumors. Pat Jahns, Doc’s biographer, recalled her exchange with Lillian McKey, the Valdosta relative who cautiously provided information to both Jahns and Myers: “The most that she ever wrote about Doc was in one letter where she wrote a whole paragraph about his relationship with Mattie Holliday,” wrote Jahns. “This was followed several days later by an airmail letter denying the whole thing. It read very much as if she had told another family member about it and gotten a scolding. Very contrite.”61
The reason was simple enough. Doc Holliday was an embarrassment to many in the family. Morgan DeLancey Magee, a great-grandson of John Stiles Holliday, remembered his grandmother, Mary Cowperwaite Fulton Holliday, saying, “No! ‘Doc’ Holliday is not a member of our family! In fact, that is not even his real name!”62 Robert Lee Holliday added, “Much later in life I found out that Grandma Holliday thought Doc was a vagabond, gambler, and other unmentionable names, and disavowed any family relation with him….It goes without saying that a respected Southern family would not admit any kinship to one of the Wild West’s most notorious gamblers and gunfighters.”63
Another factor in the family’s attitude was Sister Mary Melanie’s own reputation as a saintly woman, a reputation that made her a kind of legend in her own right. She visited Margaret’s husband, John Marsh, daily while he was hospitalized in 1936 to 1937. Mattie’s mother was the first cousin of Margaret Mitchell’s grandmother, and Margaret Mitchell always insisted that Sister Mary Melanie was the inspiration for the saintly, self-sacrificing Melanie Hamilton in her novel Gone with the Wind. The inspiration is confirmed in striking fashion by comparison of Mitchell’s word portrait of the young Melanie Hamilton with a family photograph of the young Mattie Holliday:
She was a tiny, frailly built girl, who gave the appearance of a child masquerading in her mother’s enormous hoop skirts—an illusion that was heightened by the shy, almost frightened look in her too large brown eyes. She had a cloud of curly dark hair which was so sternly repressed beneath its net that no vagrant tendrils escaped, and this dark mass, with its long widow’s peak, accentuated the heart shape of her face. Too wide across the cheek bones, too pointed at the chin, it was a sweet, timid face, but a plain face, and she had no feminine tricks of allure to make observers forget its plainness. She looked—and was—as simple as the earth, as good as bread, as transparent as water. But for all her plainness of feature and smallness of stature, there was a sedate dignity about her movements that was oddly touching and far older than her seventeen years.64
Sister Mary Melanie, Doc’s beloved Mattie, in her last years. She had earned a reputation as a devoted and caring teacher and tender caregiver.
Gone
with the Wind is filled with themes reminiscent of the lives of Doc and Mattie. First, one of the characters, Ellen Robillard, Scarlett O’Hara’s mother, was in love with her first cousin, Philippe, who was forced to leave home and travel to New Orleans, where he was killed in a fight. Another character, Tony Fontaine, got into trouble and went to Texas. Scarlett’s sister Carreen was in love with a young man who was killed at Gettysburg, and she devoted herself to a religious life afterward, eventually joining a convent. These are all set against the saintly behavior of Melanie Hamilton Wilkes and Scarlett’s love for a man she cannot marry.
The author David O’Connell also notes that the choice of “Melanie” as Mattie’s religious name had interesting implications. Before Vatican II, women who became nuns chose the name of a saint for the religious life. “Melanie” was a relatively rare choice in this respect. Two saints were named Melanie, one the granddaughter of the other. Melanie the Younger was a woman who fell in love with and married her first cousin, Pinian, who was himself later named a saint. After they had two children, both of whom died, Melanie and Pinian traveled to Jerusalem, where they both entered religious orders.
Of course, O’Connell also points out that Mattie may have chosen the name Mary Melanie because of the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a fifteen-year-old French peasant girl named Melanie Mathieu-Calvat, during which the Virgin Mary stressed the need for penance. The apparition at La Salette was widely acknowledged, and in 1879, just four years before Mattie joined the order, the pope recognized the site of the apparition as a basilica. This would offer a practical explanation of her choice of the name Mary Melanie with no mysterious connections to her cousin John Henry.
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