by Mike Resnick
With all of Doc's shortcomings and his undeniably poor disposition, I found him a loyal friend and good company. At the time of his death, I tried to set down the qualities about him which had impressed me. The newspapers dressed up my ideas considerably and had me calling Doc Holliday “a mad, merry scamp with heart of gold and nerves of steel.” Those were not my words, nor did they convey my meaning. Doc was mad, well enough, but he was seldom merry. His humor ran in a sardonic vein, and as far as the world in general was concerned, there was nothing in his soul but iron. Under ordinary circumstances he might be irritable to the point of shakiness; only in a game or when a fight impended was there anything steely about his nerves.
To sum up Doc Holliday's character as I did at the time of his death: he was a dentist whom necessity had made into a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long, lean, ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption and at the same time the most skilled gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew.
And here's Doc as seen through the eyes of one his many biographers, Sylvia D. Lynch:
Doc was a very complicated man who lived an intense and prismatic life, and who seemed to exist on sheer will and determination. And when John Holliday committed himself to something or someone, he apparently held on with a death grip that nothing could pry loose. He was one of those people who seemed to have an unusual penchant for drawing extraordinarily back luck in some of his endeavors, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of extraordinarily good luck in others. He was a walking paradox who never shied away from encounters which had the toughest odds, and he kept his poker-faced attitude toward the world as he moved within his self-made cosmos. Those who knew him, those who saw him work his craft day after day, have testified that when he became involved in one of those awkward moments for which he was so well known, that it was most often wise counsel to leave him to fend for himself, so fend for himself he did, and very well at that.
And even though so many of his more memorable circumstances revolved around relationships with others, he seemed to be the one who rarely asked anything from those with whom he associated. He had an uncanny knack for being at the wrong places at the wrong times, and on many of those occasions, when the bad timing wasn't present in the nature of the situation, he seemed to delight in creating his own extenuating circumstances. Some say he thrived on whiskey, some say he thrived at the gaming table. Others say he drew his persistent strength from the deadly confidence with which he drew the nickel-plated weapons from underneath his coat in a split second's warning, much to the final regret of many of those who stood at the opposite end of his gun barrel.
There may be a good case for the argument that he thrived on boldly “bucking the tiger,” on pushing his luck just as far as he could possibly shove it, whether it be in a card game, in his personal relationships, or in his private battle with the disease that was slowly consuming his body while he was making a name for himself in the West. There may also be truth in the theory that he carried with him an irreversible death wish for almost half his life span, and that his brash, confident manner was nothing more than the manifestation of his lack of assurance of being around the next day—the cruel uncertainty of having nothing to lose.
SO WHY WOULD ANYONE SPEND SO MUCH TIME, as I have done, writing science fiction stories and novels about Theodore Roosevelt?
Well, they have a lot in common, science fiction and Roosevelt. Both of them deal with ideas. Both of them are entertaining. And most of all, both of them are bigger than Reality.
You think not?
Let's take a look at Roosevelt's life.
Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1858. As a boy he suffered from a debilitating case of asthma. Rather than give in to it, he began swimming and exercising every day—and like every pulp hero you ever read about, he built himself up to where he was able to make the Harvard boxing team.
But he'd been making a name for himself before he went to Harvard. Even the Gray Lensman and Doc Savage weren't exclusively brawn, and neither was Roosevelt. An avid naturalist to the day of his death, he was already considered one of America's leading ornithologists and taxidermists while still a teenager. Nor was his interest limited to nature. While at Harvard he wrote what was considered the definitive treatise on naval warfare, The Naval War of 1812.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, married Alice Hathaway, went to law school, found it boring, and discovered politics. When Theodore Roosevelt developed a new interest, he never did so in a halfhearted way—so at twenty-four he became the youngest man ever elected to the New York State Assembly, and was made minority leader a year later.
He might have remained in the state assembly, but on February 14, 1884, not long after his twenty-fifth birthday, his beloved Alice and his mother died in the same house, only hours apart. He felt the need to get away, and he went west to become a rancher (and, being Theodore Roosevelt, one ranch couldn't possibly contain him, so he bought two).
Not content to simply be a rancher, a sportsman, and a politician, like hundreds of pulp and science fiction heroes he became a lawman as well, and, unarmed, hunted down and captured three armed killers in the Dakota Badlands during the fearsome blizzard that was known as “the Winter of the Blue Snow.” Could Hawk Carse or Lije Baley have done any better?
He began building Sagamore Hill, the estate he made famous in Oyster Bay, New York, married childhood sweetheart Edith Carew, and started a second family. (Alice had died giving birth to his daughter, also named Alice. Edith promptly began producing sons—Kermit, Theodore Jr., Archie, and Quentin, as well as another daughter, Ethel.) In his spare time, he wrote a number of well-received books. Then, running short of money, he signed a contract to write a four-volume series, The Winning of the West. The first two volumes became immediate bestsellers. He was also an avid correspondent, and it's estimated that he wrote more than 150,000 letters during his lifetime—and what science fiction writer, I ask you, is not an avid correspondent?
He was now past thirty years of age, and he decided it was time to stop loafing and really get to work—so he took the job of police commissioner of the wildly corrupt City of New York…and to the amazement of even his staunchest supporters, he cleaned the place up, just like heroes from The Shadow to Lincoln Powell had done. He became famous for his “midnight rambles” to make sure his officers were at their posts, and he was the first commissioner to insist that the entire police force take regular target practice.
He made things so uncomfortable for the rich and powerful (and corrupt) of New York that he was kicked upstairs and made assistant secretary of the navy in Washington. When the Spanish-American War broke out, he resigned his office, enlisted in the army, was given the rank of colonel, and assembled the most famous and romantic outfit ever to fight for the United States—the fabled Rough Riders, consisting of cowboys, Indians, professional athletes, and anyone else who impressed him—and what classic space operas don't have a crew of romantic misfits just like that? They went to Cuba, where Roosevelt himself led the charge up San Juan Hill in the face of machine-gun fire, and he came home the most famous man in the country.
Less than three months later he was elected governor of New York, a week after his fortieth birthday. His new duties didn't hinder his other interests, and he kept turning out books and studying wildlife.
Two years later they kicked him upstairs again, finding the one job where his reformer's zeal couldn't bother anyone: he was nominated for the vice presidency of the United States, and was elected soon afterward.
Ten months later President William McKinley was assassinated, and Roosevelt became the youngest-ever president of the United States, where he served for seven years.
What did he do as president?
Not much, by Rooseveltian standards. Enough for five presidents, by anyone else's standards. Consider:
He created the National
Park System.
He broke the back of the trusts that had run the economy (and the nation) for their own benefit.
He created the Panama Canal.
He sent the navy on a trip around the world. When they left, America was a second-rate little country in the eyes of the world. By the time they returned, we were a world power.
He became the first president ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize when he put an end to the Russo-Japanese war.
He mediated a dispute between Germany and France over Morocco, preserving Morocco's independence.
To make sure that the trusts didn't reclaim their power after he was out of office, he created the Departments of Commerce and Labor.
When he left office in 1909 with a list of accomplishments equal in magnitude to any galactic president in science fiction, he immediately packed his bags (and his rifles) and went on the first major safari ever put together, spending eleven months gathering specimens for the American and Smithsonian Museums. He wrote up his experiences as African Game Trails, still considered one of the half dozen most important books on the subject ever published. Clearly he had a lot in common with science fictional hunters, from Gerry Carlyle to Nicobar Lane.
When he returned to America, he concluded that his hand-chosen successor, President William Howard Taft, was doing a lousy job of running the country, so he decided to run for the presidency again in 1912. Though far and away the most popular man in the Republican Party, he was denied the nomination through a number of procedural moves. Most men would have licked their wounds and waited for 1916. Not Roosevelt. He formed the Progressive Party, known informally as the “Bull Moose Party,” and ran in 1912. It's thought that he was winning when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest while he was being driven to give a speech in Milwaukee. He refused all medical aid until he had delivered the speech (which ran ninety minutes!), then allowed himself to be taken to a hospital. The bullet would never be removed, and by the time Roosevelt was back on the campaign trail, Woodrow Wilson had built an insurmountable lead. Roosevelt finished second, as President Taft ran a humiliating third, able to win only eight electoral votes.
So now did he relax?
Fat chance. This is Theodore Roosevelt we're talking about. The Brazilian government asked him to explore a tributary of the Amazon known as the River of Doubt. He hadn't slowed down since he was a baby, he was in his fifties, he was walking around with a bullet in his chest, all logic said he'd earned a quiet retirement—so of course he said yes.
This trip didn't go as well as the safari. He came down with fever, he almost lost his leg, and indeed at one point he urged his party to leave him behind to die and to go ahead without him. They didn't, of course, and eventually he was well enough to continue the expedition and finish mapping the river, which was renamed the Rio Teodoro in his honor. (I don't really need to compare him to the hundreds of explorers who inhabit the worlds of science fiction, do I?)
He came home, wrote yet another bestseller—Through the Brazilian Wilderness—then wrote another book on African animals, as well as more books on politics…but his health never fully recovered. He campaigned vigorously for our entry into World War I, and it was generally thought that the presidency was his for the asking in 1920, but he died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, at the age of sixty—having crammed about seventeen lifetimes into those six decades.
He was so fascinating, so talented in so many fields, so much bigger than Life, that I decided (and I hope you agree) that he belonged in the one field that could accommodate a man with those virtues—science fiction, where he could finally find some challenges that were truly worthy of his talents.
DID THIS NOVEL EXAGGERATE THE COPE-MARSH FEUD? Try this, from R. W. Howard's The Dawnseekers, on for size:
“Cope spent hours each day on a hilltop spying on the Marsh dig. This encouraged Marsh's crew to assemble a skull from the jawbones, teeth, eye sockets and horns of a dozen species. They buried Old-what-you-may-call-it just before Cope showed up for his daily spell at the telescope. When he did arrive, they put on an elaborate pantomime of arduous shoveling and great excitement. Cope sneaked over that dusk, dug up What-you-may-call-it and wrote a paper about its significance.”
Cope's response?
He began dynamiting his own digging sites when he was done, so that no one from Marsh's camp could possibly find some treasure he'd overlooked.
Marsh's response to that?
He used his political connections to get the Department of the Interior to demand that Cope turn over all his finds to them.
Cope's response?
He went to the press, pointing out every mistake and misstatement Marsh had ever made.
Marsh's response?
The same.
End result?
Each man started with a huge fortune, and each man bankrupted the other.
But when the dust had cleared, these two men had advanced American paleontology a couple of centuries.
Doc Holliday Museum
209 North Thirteenth Street
Griffin, GA 30223
Theodore Roosevelt Memorial
American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at Seventy-Ninth Street
New York, NY 10024
Buffalo Bill Museum
199 North Front Street
Le Claire, IA 52753
Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park
37 Christie Street
Edison, NJ 08820
Othniel Charles Marsh collection
Peabody Museum of Natural History
170 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT 06520
Edward Drinker Cope collection
Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19103
The Buntline Special is on display at:
The Autry Museum
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027
THERE IS A GAME—The Game of Ruthless Paleontology—based on Marsh and Cope's rivalry, created by James Cambias and Diane Kelly, and produced by Zygote Games.
ALMOST ALL THE GREAT SHOOTISTS AND ADVENTURERS of that era have been immortalized in song, but here's a link to a song I'll bet you didn't know about:
“Bone Wars, Marsh and Cope (to the tune of ‘Two Black Cadillacs’ by Carrie Underwood),” YouTube video, 5:12, posted by “Zack Neher,” April 21, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA3fhPs1aKk
Mike Resnick has won five Hugos (from a record thirty-six nominations), plus a Nebula Award and other major awards in the United States, France, Spain, Poland, Croatia, Catalonia, and Japan, and has been short-listed in England, Italy, and Australia. He is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction. Mike is the author of seventy-four novels, twenty-five collections, over two hundred sixty short stories, and three screenplays; he has edited forty-one anthologies. He is currently the editor of The Stellar Guild book series and Galaxy's Edge magazine. He was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.
