Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  For the record, the earliest published explanation from the Valdosta Times in 1882 was that he had “a roving and reckless turn of mind, and like a great many of our southern boys of similar nature he soon sought his fortune out West.”18 The most common explanation is that John Henry learned that he had contracted tuberculosis and decided to go west for his health. No doubt this news would have stunned him. He had watched his mother die, he had buried Francisco, and he knew of Arthur C. Ford’s condition. Furthermore, he grasped the ominous prognosis of the disease, he knew its symptoms, and he understood the prescriptions for diet and exercise. Diagnosis might explain anger, disorientation, or denial. As an explanation of his decision to move west, however, such a diagnosis is not sufficient.

  In the first place, consumption was an insidious killer. The very term presented an image of a body wasting away, of being “consumed,” in frightening and disturbing ways. Diagnosis was itself chilling, and yet at its outset the disease left its victim with the desperate hope that it was not consumption at all. Even though the symptoms were dramatic enough, accurate diagnosis was difficult. The dry cough, the sore throat, the chest pains, the elevated pulse rate, and the difficult breathing were also symptoms of other, less serious or more treatable ailments. In John Henry’s time, diagnosis was not based on identification of the tubercle bacillus through medical testing. The microscope and even the stethoscope played little role. Diagnosis amounted to a suspicion, albeit a calculated one in the hands of an experienced physician. The presumption was that any symptoms not corrected with purgatives and emetics most likely meant consumption, but the hallmark of the first phase was uncertainty.

  The first response, then, was often disbelief or a stubborn refusal to believe, especially for one who, like John Henry, had seen the horrible reality of the disease. The suspected victim of consumption faced life without the expectation of seeing it unfold while clinging to the cruel hope that his malady was not consumption at all. Treatment was little more than a bland diet, active exercise, and “removal to, and residence in a mild, genial, uniform, and salubrious climate.” The patient was admonished to choose an ennobling lifestyle, consoled by the notion that the disease “would purify him and edify his friends.” A “perverted sentimentalism” toward the disease that extended into the last third of the nineteenth century became the incubator of both faith and cynicism.19

  The Hollidays were a close family, and sending one of them away for his health argued against their nature. It was more natural for them to come together in support. This was an important consideration since, at the time, in the treatment of consumption there were as many advocates of a “Southern cure” as of a “Western cure.” Ponce de Leon Springs in Atlanta was famous for its curative powers. Indian Springs, just a few miles from Griffin, was known as “the Saratoga of the South,” which might explain why John Henry chose to move back to Griffin, if he did, as local tradition there insists. In discussing the pros and cons of what it called the western fever, the Griffin News made the argument this way: “There is no country on earth equal to our own Middle Georgia, and nine men out of ten who leave it will find themselves woefully mistaken. Our advice is, remain where you are.”20

  Other options were available. One “JLM” of Hamilton County, Florida, wrote the News with this advice: “I desire to call the attention of your people who have a desire to emigrate to the advantages of Florida over the West.” He added, “Within a mile of me, is a spring that excels Saratoga or the celebrated Virginia White Sulphur Springs.”21 Hamilton County, Florida, was the home of John Henry’s McKey relatives, and it is tempting to think that the “L” in the signature of the News article was a misprint for a “T” (a handwritten capital “T” and capital “L” are remarkably similar in the florid styles of the 1870s), raising the possibility that its author was Dr. James Taylor McKey, John Henry’s own uncle and a man with a connection to Griffin that would explain why a person from Hamilton County would write a letter to the Griffin newspaper. At the very least, the Hamilton County springs provided another option for John Henry close to his own family, including his father at Valdosta. Dr. Ford would eventually move to Palatka, Florida, to find treatment for his own consumption. He died there in 1882.22

  Perhaps the most compelling argument against an abrupt change in John Henry’s plans because of a diagnosis of consumption was the chronic nature of the disease. The average life expectancy after diagnosis in 1872 was fifteen to twenty-five years. Commonly, people diagnosed with consumption married, raised families, and built businesses before succumbing to the ravages of the disease. Indeed, consumption was almost romanticized. It was thought to be more prevalent in more sedentary and “bookish” careers such as teaching, the law, the ministry, and even medicine. Consumption might produce a melancholy fatalism, but it could also inspire “spasms of creative eagerness.” Until the last third of the nineteenth century it was seen as “the muse of literature.”23

  By the time John Henry was diagnosed, the sentimentalism was fading, but functioning with the disease, supported by proper diet and exercise, gave consumptives an almost heroic edge. Climate did matter, and the Western cure was growing in popularity by 1872, but if John Henry had chosen to move west for his health, Dallas, Texas, where he eventually did go, was an unlikely choice. Its general climate was little different from Georgia’s—the town had been quarantined because of yellow fever until weeks before John Henry’s arrival there—and it was not “on the way” to anywhere, because it was the end of the rail line.24

  It would not have made sense, then, for John Henry, with bright prospects for the future, including a planned partnership with his cousin Robert, to suddenly move west simply because of a diagnosis of consumption. Even if John Henry’s consumption was diagnosed before he left Georgia (which is possible, even probable), the sudden nature of his departure had to be attributed to something else, something personal and shattering that triggered a quick response.

  Another possibility sometimes cited as the reason for John Henry’s abrupt departure was his feelings for Mattie Holliday. Although the relationship was usually discounted by members of the Holliday family, who insisted that it was a friendship rather than a romance, the family did acknowledge that the two had a special bond. Family recollections also may have been skewed by John Henry’s later unsavory reputation as a Western gambler and gunfighter and by Mattie’s special place in family lore as the saintly, self-sacrificing nun who inspired the character Melanie in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The family almost certainly sought to prevent her reputation from being tainted by his.25

  Nevertheless, there is a strong circumstantial pattern suggesting an intimate (though not necessarily sexual) relationship between the two of them. She corresponded with him regularly through all those long years in the West. She kept his letters for the rest of her life. His drinking and general moral decline (by traditional standards) were consistent with frustrated love. She never married and eventually became a nun after her cousin became notorious as “Doc Holliday.” John Henry’s sharp decline in health after she took her vows would also be consistent with lost hope. If a romantic relationship did exist between them, a happy consummation was highly unlikely under the best of circumstances.

  The marriage of first cousins was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. Some families even encouraged it as a means of controlling family property. In fact, other first cousins in the Holliday family had married in the past. What made the difference in the case of John Henry and Mattie was that Mattie was Catholic. Not even John Henry’s conversion to Catholicism would have made a difference, because canon law forbade the marriage of first cousins.26 Still, that fact surely was known to both of them before 1873. Did John Henry hope to convert her? Did something else happen that precipitated a crisis? Undeniably, a strong bond existed between them. There are even reports that Mattie’s parents disapproved. Definitive answers to the mystery of their relationship were lost. Mattie destroyed some of the letters he
rself before her death, and after her death, a family member chose to burn the rest of the correspondence that Mattie had kept through all her years as a teacher and nun.27

  Martha Anne “Mattie” Holliday, John Henry Holliday’s first cousin, with whom he enjoyed a special relationship throughout his life. The exact nature of the relationship is still debated, but she went on to become a nun and the inspiration for the character Melanie Hamilton in Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind.

  Even if they were romantically involved, however, their involvement would require some crisis to explain John Henry’s sudden and abrupt decision to go west. Again, consumption would not have been sufficient. There are two distinct claims within different families that John Henry fathered an illegitimate child who was put up for adoption when it was born. In such situations, one common solution among well-to-do families was to “put away” the woman until the child was born, then turn the child over to an adoption group and bring the woman back with some explanation for her absence that protected her and the family’s reputation.28

  Within the families, though, such an event would have created tensions that could well have explained John Henry’s decision to move away, and it would have provided an explanation for Mattie’s decision to enter a religious order. Such a situation seems highly improbable, however. Within the John Stiles Holliday family there was also a report that John Henry was interested in Sallie Tidwell, the daughter of John’s partner in the grocery business.29 So far, no evidence confirms this attachment, nor would proof of the involvement explain John Henry’s move west any more than his connection with Mattie would without a crisis.

  Whatever the reason, in the spring or summer of 1873, John Henry Holliday said good-bye to John Stiles Holliday and the rest of the Atlanta Hollidays. They went with him to the train station, and his uncle gave him a diamond stickpin as a going-away gift.30 According to the version favored by some family members, John Henry left Atlanta bound for Dallas, Texas, by train through Chattanooga, Memphis, New Orleans, and Houston. Through the auspices of John Stiles Holliday, so the story goes, he was to convalesce in Texas until Robert graduated from dental school, during which time he would work in partnership with Dr. John A. Seegar, a former Georgian and an acquaintance of the Holliday family.31

  More likely, though, John Henry, instead of taking the train north and west, would have taken the train south, back home to Valdosta. If he was indeed planning to go west according to a prearranged plan, this would have been only logical. He would have wanted to say good-bye to his McKey relatives as well as to the Hollidays. His ties to the McKeys were as strong as or stronger than his ties to the Hollidays. If he had already learned that he had consumption, he might well have concluded to test the curative powers of Hamilton County waters near the care of Dr. James McKey, his mother’s brother, in a rural environment that would provide opportunities for a more vigorous lifestyle.

  The tensions between himself and his father, who had been elected mayor of Valdosta on January 20, 1872, do not appear to have healed, but such a visit gave him a chance to visit with Dr. Lucian F. Frink and some of his old friends.32 Most important, though, he and his uncle Thomas Sylvester McKey were close. He would have sought advice and comfort from him. For a while, it must have seemed a release as well as a relief to be able to roam over his uncle’s lands between the Little and Withlacoochee rivers near the Lowndes County—Brooks County line even as he had explored his father’s land on Cat Creek a decade earlier, especially if he left Atlanta under the cloud of some kind of social scandal.

  Tom’s property on the Withlacoochee was the place where the earliest accounts say that an event happened that forced John Henry to go west. Bat Masterson, who had ample opportunity through the years to hear Holliday discuss his youth, later explained that “the indiscriminate killing of some negroes” was the cause of John Henry’s abrupt departure for the West. According to him, young whites and blacks shared a swimming hole on the river until the whites decided that they would no longer share. He wrote, “The negro boys were informed that in the future they would have to go further down the stream to do their swimming, which they promptly refused to do and told the whites that if they didn’t like existing conditions, that they themselves would have to hunt up a new swimming hole.”33

  This “defiant attitude” caused the whites to “instantly go on the warpath.” Masterson said, “One beautiful Sunday afternoon, while an unusually large number of negroes were in swimming at the point of dispute, Holliday appeared on the river bank with a double-barreled shotgun in his hands, and, pointing it in the direction of the swimmers, ordered them from the river.” The blacks “stampeded for the opposite shore,” and “Holliday waited until he got a bunch of them together, and then turned loose with both barrels, killing two outright, and wounding several others.” Masterson said that Holliday later justified what he did by saying that “the ‘niggers’ had to be disciplined,” but that his family thought it best that he leave for a while, whereupon he went to Dallas.34

  Other accounts of the mayhem survived. One provided by a Mr. Moore, who worked in Valdosta in 1881, was somewhat simpler:

  There was a swimming pool on the Withlacoochee River near Valdoster [sic] and Doc. and the white boys used to think it was theirs. One day, they came down and some nigger boys were swiming [sic] in it. Doc. had a pistol and some say he shot promiscuously and accidentally killed one of the colored boys. Others say he deliberately shot at and killed three. That I do not know. But it was for this reason he is supposed to have left home.35

  Curiously, too, the tradition of a fatal encounter at Blue Springs on the Withlacoochee near Troupville between John Henry and young blacks survived among members of the family of Major Holliday’s second wife, the Martins, who had little reason to remember Rachel’s stepson fondly. According to the version passed down in the Martin family, “there were some words and Doc allegedly killed one of the Black youths with a gun.”36

  In the early 1930s, when Stuart N. Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal revived interest in Doc Holliday, the stories of the Withlacoochee shooting were resurrected. What is interesting is that the family did not deny that such an episode occurred, although it was reported as less bloody. Mrs. Clyde McKey White, the youngest of Tom’s children, remembered it this way: “Papa told me Doc shot over their heads. They rode up on the Negroes in swimming in a part of the Withlacoochee River that Doc and his friends had cleared out to be used as their swimming hole. The presence of the Negroes… enraged Doc, and he drew his pistol—shooting over their heads to scare them off. Papa said, ‘Shot over their heads.’”37 This recollection squares well with the story that Tom himself told as reported by the Valdosta Times in 1931:

  John Henry Holliday, Atlanta, Georgia, 1872. This photograph has good provenance within the family but is questioned by some authorities.

  Accompanied by Mr. T. S. McKey, now one of Valdosta’s oldest citizens, John one day rode out to a point northwest of the city which was noted throughout this section for its fine “washhole.” Arriving there, they discovered that several negroes had been throwing mud into the water and stirring it up so that it was unfit to swim in.

  Holliday began scolding the negroes and one of them made threatening remarks back to him. John immediately got his buggy whip and proceeded to punish this hard-boiled negro. The negro fled and returned in a few minutes with a shot gun. He shot once and sprinkled Holliday with small bird shots. Holliday promptly got his pistol and pursued the fleeing negroes. When the negro who had shot at him saw that the youth meant business, he took to his heels and could not be caught.38

  It would not be surprising if the family sanitized the shooting for public consumption, but the larger problem is that no account of such an incident has survived in the records of the time. That is not entirely surprising. First, the Valdosta papers for 1873 are incomplete, and the criminal records for that period in Lowndes County were lost. Moreover, white violence against blacks frequently went
unreported in the press during those days. Nevertheless, the shooting would have been serious business in a place still recovering from Reconstruction. The detail in Masterson’s account, combined with his knowledge that John Henry went to Dallas and the supporting accounts from family sources, is compelling if not definitive.

  If John Henry did leave Georgia on the run, he would have slipped into Hamilton County, Florida, long enough to say good-bye to his McKey relatives and gather what he needed for the journey, and then caught the train into Tallahassee and traveled west to Pensacola. From there, he might have continued west into Mobile, New Orleans, and on into Texas. Or, more likely, he boarded a steamer at Pensacola bound for Galveston. One story from a family source, which supports the idea that John Henry left by this more southerly route, claims that John Henry fled from Tom’s McKey’s home, taking with him a knife Tom had made from a meat cleaver and carried with him through the Civil War. The knife, which Tom called the “Hell Bitch,” was heavy, long bladed, and double edged in the manner of a Bowie knife. Doc left behind the sheath, which remained with family members.39

  The historical sources, both reliable and unreliable, are exasperating because of all the possible motives for secrecy and whitewashing, both at the time the events occurred and in the treatment of those events by the family over time, and because the public records are incomplete. Perhaps the truth was some combination of all these issues. Perhaps John Henry learned he had tuberculosis, pressed Mattie for an answer only to be turned down, returned to Valdosta, and was forced west by the shooting incident. This much is clear: something traumatic and devastating enough to interrupt his plans drove him west that summer of 1873. Coughing spasms, a broken heart, a shotgun blast, or a combination of all three cut him off forever from his past and threw him into an unknown future.