And so, curiously, for one so well known, Doc Holliday remains a mystery, a legend in the shadows. That is his charm and his frustration for would-be biographers. Biography is, after all, an arrogant, intrusive enterprise. It probes lives in all the places that people prefer to have left alone. Those who do it justify it usually because they find something compelling about a life or because they have a passion to bring down idols. In either case, biographers have purposes more complicated than simply “telling it like it really happened.”
Biographers reveal much about themselves as well as about their subjects. None of them writes in a vacuum, nor should they, because biography—like all history—amounts to processing lives and events through third-party perceptions to gain the measure of a person and a time. Biographers inevitably see their subjects differently than the subjects saw themselves. No matter how honest, how forthright a subject is, distortions will come from what he or she says, or what he or she leaves out.
The truth of a life is more than a sum of the facts. A life is not merely about what a person does, but also about what a person thinks, feels, and values and how he or she affects the people and events around him or her, because ultimately what biographers and readers want to know is what a person’s life means. And meaning involves more than how a person sees himself or herself or even what a person does. Meaning also involves how others see a person, and the perception of others is not always based on the truth of a life or even complete knowledge of it. So, then, approaching the life of a man like John Henry Holliday is complicated by the fact that the man behind the legend is obscured by conclusions and opinions that created the legend in the first place.
Without a body of letters or even reminiscences written by him that would serve as a corrective to the half-known life presented in the opinion-gripped contemporary press and the memories of men and women who saw him through the lenses of their own agendas and emotion-packed prejudices, John Henry Holliday tantalizes the biographer with unanswered questions. He did not have a frontierwide reputation until after his experiences at Tombstone in 1881 and 1882. Before then, his life did not always leave a clear trail. As a result, much of his life—even many of its most critical moments—are left to informed speculation and possibilities. This work, then, is not the final word on the life of Doc Holliday; it is, rather, an informed quest to understand the man and his legend that will point the way to further discoveries, raise new questions, and provide some answers in the search for meaning in the life of this brooding metaphor of the moral contradictions of life on the late nineteenth-century frontier.
Chapter 1
CHILD OF THE SOUTHERN FRONTIER
[T]o ignore the frontier and time in setting up a conception of the social state of the Old South is to abandon reality. For the history of the South throughout a very great part of the period from the opening of the nineteenth century to the Civil War…is mainly the history of the roll of frontier upon frontier—and on to the frontier beyond.
—W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South
The Old South is more an idea than a place or a time. In the popular mind it conjures up images of white-columned plantation houses surrounded by moss-bound oaks, magnolias, dogwoods, and azaleas in bloom, vast fields of cotton, gangs of slaves, and the full range of characters straight out of Gone with the Wind. Perhaps that is why it is almost irresistible to think of Doc Holliday as the scion of a plantation family or why one biographer could not resist characterizing him as “aristocracy’s outlaw.”1 His story is infused with what might be called the Southern mystique as thoroughly and profoundly as it is with the legend of the last frontier. And so, the man behind the myth is both magnified and obscured by a double distortion.
Ironically, from the beginning John Henry Holliday was as much a child of the frontier as he was of the Old South. Indeed, he lived most of his youth on what was even then known as the Southern frontier. Georgia was the youngest of the original thirteen colonies, and although the young country of which it was part had pushed westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean by the time he was born, John Henry’s childhood was spent in the red-clay country of Georgia only a few years distant from the time that the region was the domain of the Creek Nation. When the course of the Civil War persuaded his father that he should move his family beyond the reach of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s armies, the young John Henry was transplanted into the piney woods and wiregrass of southwest Georgia, a thinly populated region of subsistence farmers and free grazers until the railroad gave it life and opened up economic opportunities in much the same way that the railroad generated the boomtowns of the last West.
Despite its ambitious claims, Georgia entered the nineteenth century still largely the homeland of the Creeks and the Cherokees. The tidewater region was already shifting its economic base from rice and indigo to the Sea Island cotton that would revitalize slavery and bring prosperity to the state, but the tidewater could not hold the burgeoning population. Restless settlers were pushing west along rivers into the interior, mindless of the claims of the natives and certain of their own “right” to be there.2
There was a Celtic edge on the invasion. Willful, sensate sorts, the Scots, the Irish, and the Scots-Irish generated a “Cracker” culture marked by fighting, drinking, gambling, fishing, hunting, idleness, and independence. They faced Georgia’s frontier with the same leisurely attitudes of their Scottish and Irish forebears, and the open-range tradition they brought with them moved them into the interior before the agricultural potential was fully realized and created a values system at odds with the stern Yankee Puritanism and nascent capitalism that held sway to the north.3
At the heart of this Southern society was a fierce determination of its people to resist restrictions on their independence and movement. Their belligerence first manifested itself in their contest with the Indians. The Creeks did not call white Georgians E-cun-nau-nux-ulgee (People-greedily-grasping-after-land) for nothing.4 Settlers assumed a right to go where they chose, and Georgia was perpetually a thorn in the side of not only the natives but federal Indian policy as well. In the nineteenth century, Georgia developed a liberal land lottery system for the distribution of land as an incentive to dispossession of the Indians, and in the first four decades of the 1800s, sixty-nine counties were created, while the population soared from 162,000 to 691,000.5
By November 1827, the last claims of the Creeks were ceded at the second Treaty of Indian Springs not far from where John Henry would be born, and Georgia turned its sights on the Cherokees as the last obstacle to Georgia’s sovereignty over lands within its boundaries. The Cherokees attempted to avoid the fate of other tribes through acculturation. They sought to avoid being labeled as “savages” by adopting “civilized” ways. The Cherokees had a written constitution, their own alphabet, a newspaper, schools, an elected legislature, and a permanent capitol at New Echota. Georgia ignored constitutional restrictions on its powers to deal with the Indian tribes and declared on December 28, 1828, that the Cherokee Nation was part of Georgia and subject to its laws. Later, even after the U.S. Supreme Court took a hand in restraining its excesses, Georgia ignored court edicts as well as treaty rights and began the process of overrunning Cherokee lands and suppressing Cherokee laws. Following the discovery of gold in North Georgia in 1829 and the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the state ordered Cherokee lands to be surveyed in 1831, divided the region into ten new counties the following year, and gave away the land to whites in the Cherokee Lottery of 1833.6
Georgia then proceeded to confiscate Cherokee lands, occupy New Echota, and destroy Sequoya’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, because of its opposition to removal. The federal government, rather than Georgia, eventually capitulated. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s clear decisions in favor of the Cherokees, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the high court’s rulings.7 After the Georgians invaded Cherokee lands, tribal leaders appealed to Jackson directly, and he—wrongly—told them he could do nothing
. When he failed to side with the Indians, the tribe divided into two factions: one accepting removal as the lesser of evils, the other determined to fight on.
Although the vast majority of Cherokees, led by John Ross, flatly opposed removal, federal authorities met with the treaty party led by Major Ridge at New Echota on December 19, 1835, and negotiated the sale of the Cherokee domain of eight million acres for $5 million, despite death threats against the treaty signers by the majority. When Ross’s faction refused to migrate, the federal government sent General Winfield Scott to forcibly remove the remaining Cherokees. Eventually, thirteen thousand men, women, and children were rounded up and herded west to the Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears.8
The Holliday family was a beneficiary of that tragic story. John Henry’s father, Henry Burroughs Holliday, was a self-made man—Andrew Jackson’s “common man”—the kind of man nineteenth-century Americans celebrated.9 His people were plain folk in the Old South. Henry’s paternal great-grandfather, William Holliday, was one of three Scotch-Irish brothers who immigrated to America from Ireland sometime after 1750. He settled in the Laurens District of South Carolina, while his brothers, “objecting to settle in slave states,” moved north, as Henry later recalled. William and his sons fought in the American Revolution with the “hero of Hornet’s Nest,” Elijah Clarke, and took their first lands in Wilkes County, Georgia, from bounties for that service.10
Later, William Jr., Henry’s grandfather, returned to Laurens County, South Carolina. There, his son, Robert Alexander Holliday, met and later married Rebecca Burroughs, whose father had also fought with Elijah Clarke in the American Revolution. Henry Holliday was born to them on March 11, 1819, the first of eleven children.11 After his father’s death, Robert relocated to Anderson County, South Carolina, and in 1831 he followed opportunity into Georgia with his family and eight slaves. He opened a tavern on the road between Newnan and Decatur near Fayetteville and eventually bought an eight-hundred-acre farm in Fayette County, which was part of the old Creek Nation. Over the years, he enlarged his holdings and became a respected and well-known citizen.12
Like most white Georgians, emboldened by President Jackson’s support of the state’s position, the Hollidays saw the Cherokee removal as inevitable and right. The bulk of General Scott’s force consisted of volunteers from Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. On May 12, 1838, young Henry, still shy of twenty, enlisted in Fayetteville as a second lieutenant in Captain John D. Stell’s company of the First Georgia Volunteers to help effect the final removal of the Cherokees from Georgia.13 By May 26, 1838, Scott began operations. He urged the troops to act with humanity and mercy, but a contemporary observer reported that “[i]n most cases the humane injunctions of the commanding general were disregarded.”14
It was disagreeable duty at best, taking men from their fields, women from the hearth, and children from play to push them at gunpoint to relocation centers, but many of the undisciplined and ill-trained militiamen seemed to enjoy the duty too much, taunting their captives and not allowing them time even to gather clothes and other items from their homes for the journey. A motley rabble followed behind the troops, burning homes and crops or moving into cabins to eat the food still cooking over the fires and to plunder the farms before the former owners were out of sight. Z. A. Zile, a Georgia militia officer who later served as a colonel in the Confederate army, would recall, “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”15
The Cherokees were held in makeshift stockades where sanitary conditions were awful and sickness and despair set in quickly. By June 18, General Charles Floyd of the Georgia militia reported to Governor George M. Troup that the only Cherokees left in Georgia were prisoners. General Scott now dismissed all troops save his regular army units, and the youthful Holliday, not yet twenty years old, was discharged with his company at New Echota on June 20. Having done his part to start the Cherokees west on their Trail of Tears, Henry received 160 acres of land in Pike County for his scant service and turned his thoughts to his own future.16
The rich red clay of the region was slowly freed from the forest by the sweat of white men and black men and turned under to become the new heart of Georgia’s cotton belt. The luxuriant Sea Island cotton would not grow well there, but the cotton gin made short-staple cotton practical and profitable. These developments allowed cotton to flourish in the upcountry, but Georgia’s economy was much more diverse than popular myth allows. Corn, wheat, oats, rice, tobacco, sweet potatoes, molasses, honey, butter, horses, mules, sheep, cattle, and swine completed a remarkably diverse agrarian way of life. White settlers poured into the new country of the piedmont, and early arrivals like the Hollidays made the most of their opportunities in the new country they had confiscated.17 Henry settled at the new town of Griffin.
But if Henry Holliday was the product of the forces that glorified the common man in the “age of Jackson,” his was also a society driven by notions of honor, manhood, family, and community. Henry could claim no genteel tradition. There is much in the myth of the Old South about class. Both the cavalier tradition and the Northern critique of Southern life assume a rigid class system in the South similar to the class structure of Georgian England.18
Despite the pretensions of some, it was always largely a fiction in much of the Old South. This is not to say that there were no social distinctions, but that they have been misunderstood. In the first place, there were simply too many planters who wore white gloves to hide the calloused hands that betrayed their common origins and who shared values with the great bulk of ordinary Southerners. Outside of Virginia and a slender strip of tidewater through the Carolinas and Georgia, inherited wealth and position simply did not exist. The great heart of the Cotton Kingdom was frontier. There, rank, and even wealth, were not controlling factors in the measure of men. As was true on other frontiers, the great virtues and marks of distinction were more personal. Courage, strength, conviviality, ability with weapons, skill at cards, keeping one’s word, a readiness to defend one’s honor, and even the ability to hold one’s liquor were just as important.19
Ironically, black slavery preserved a certain egalitarianism among whites. As W. J. Cash pointed out long ago, one of the oddities of the “peculiar institution” was that slavery served as a leveler that preserved independence and individualism and prevented the development of a rigid class system among whites. Middling and even poor whites were neither directly exploited by the Southern aristocracy nor dependent on it. The result, Cash noted, was “the almost complete disappearance of economic and social focus on the part of the masses. One simply did not have to get on in this world in order to achieve security, independence, or value in one’s estimation and in that of one’s fellows.”20
For people like Henry Holliday, then, there was no real sense of social or economic limitation. His people were plain folk, and he lacked both the learning and piety of gentility. But Holliday nurtured the sense of honor, self-worth, magnanimity, and independence needed to forge a place for himself in the upcountry environment while he speculated in land and sought other economic opportunities. He acquired town lots and farmlands as the base for economic security, but, more important, he gained acceptance among his neighbors as a tough but fair-minded and honorable man.
Reputation was everything in the Old South. The opinion of others was a measure of inner worth. Virtue, honor, valor, and respect simply did not exist apart from the view of a man in the minds of other men. Some of the truculence for which Henry Holliday would be remembered by those who knew him doubtless arose from the aggressiveness and steadfastness that Southerners expected of leaders, but he also exhibited the attention to manners, courtesy, and hospitality that the social order demanded of community leaders. External, public factors established personal worth, and Henry made a place for himself in that milieu.
Henry Burroughs Holliday, father of John Henry Holliday.
Making a place for oneself in the antebellum South was a different process from making a place for oneself in New England or other points north. It was less about capital success, sobriety, piety, class consciousness, and the Puritan work ethic than about sociability, honor, manliness, and loyalty to family and neighbors. It was a difference that puzzled Northerners, who dismissed Southerners as a profligate, lazy, and peculiarly violent species. Still, undeniably, Northerners were drawn to, if not charmed by, a warmhearted grace in their social intercourse that was lacking in the more sober, cautious, reasoned, and dignified Yankee ethic.21
Southerners assumed a harsh life, and fate was a part of it. They ordered life with a code of honor, a code rooted not so much in conscience as in pride. Honor imposed duties on every man. It called for self-restraint. It demanded courtesy toward others, even enemies, that sometimes struck outsiders as hypocrisy. And yet it allowed, even demanded, room to act impulsively to defend one’s reputation and self-esteem. In the nineteenth century, especially among the middling and working classes, evangelical Christianity modified the foundations of the code for some to demand a higher standard of moral virtue with respect to such matters as fighting, drinking, and gambling, but Southern honor retained a distinctive character in which sociability and manliness were paramount and manifested, respectively, in loyalty to community and in personal independence.22
There was a martial air, what might even be called a warrior spirit, that prevailed in the South, and it fed the imagery of violence. Some observers attributed it to the dehumanizing impact of slavery, but recent historians credit the Celtic heritage and its peculiar notions of honor and individuality as the primary culprit.23 Whatever the source, Southern individualism, independence, and codes of honor meant, practically, as Cash put it, that every Southerner regardless of station was prepared to “knock hell out of whoever dared to cross him.”24 Here was the origin of the brawling, dueling, and lynching that existed in the Old South to a greater degree than elsewhere, but here, too, was the harbinger of nobility, romanticism, and patriotism that made the Southerner a formidable fighting man in defense of family, community, and country.
Doc Holliday Page 2
