Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  Doc settled in at Montezuma Hot Springs in Gallinas Canyon, a few miles northwest of the town’s plaza. An army hospital had been built there during the Mexican War. It was later abandoned, and Dr. Oscar H. Woodworth reportedly established the first private spa there in 1864. Next, W. Scott Moore took over and renovated the abandoned hospital as the Old Adobe House. When Doc arrived, he most likely stayed there with several other consumptives drawn from across the country to take treatments in the sulfurous waters. When not resting in the steaming pools, he practiced dentistry at the Adobe House. Once his tuberculosis seemed under control again and weather permitted, Doc and Kate moved into quarters on the plaza in Las Vegas. Las Vegas was the destination of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, but in the winter of 1878—1879 it was still some distance and months away. Las Vegas was a stable and well-established community. Doc and Kate wintered there in what was perhaps the quietest environment they had known in years.40

  Later, he opened an office near the plaza in a building that also housed a tubercular young jeweler named William Leonard, who would play a significant role in Doc’s life. Both of them were young, both were consumptives, and both specialized in gold work, albeit for different purposes. They had, however, a respect for each other’s skills. Leonard already had something of a reputation as an unsavory character and a gunhand. In September 1878, he had shot a man named Jose Mares in front of Ilfeld’s store and was “pounded” severely by Mares’s friends. But Doc was used to such company. They had much in common and were soon friends. In March 1879, a local grand jury returned indictments against Leonard in the Mares case, but Leonard skipped town rather than face the charges.41

  The climate and springs revived John Henry physically, and he was soon plying his trade as a gambler in Las Vegas saloons. Unfortunately, the territorial legislature passed a law against gambling that winter, and on March 8, 1879, about the time that Leonard took off, Doc was fined $25 because he “did keep a gaming table called monte.” He may have used this as an excuse to leave, because he left before paying the fine, and papers were issued ordering the collection of the fine by August.42 He headed north toward the end-of-track for the railroad being built into New Mexico, where he caught the train to Dodge City without Kate. He may have been included in this notice from the Ford County Globe of March 23: “A fresh invoice of gamblers arrived last Monday. Foy and Thompson are back in the Comique.”43 Once back in Dodge, Doc assisted Bat Masterson in the organization of a group of fighters for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad.

  The problem was that the discovery of silver at Leadville set off a rivalry between the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande because the only feasible route to Leadville was through the Royal Gorge. The Royal Gorge was an awesome work of nature with thousand-foot walls. It simply was not big enough for two sets of tracks, and each railroad company was determined to have the gorge for itself. The Rio Grande had already leased its road to the Santa Fe for a period of thirty years, but General W. J. Palmer, the president of the Rio Grande, took the Santa Fe to court, claiming that it had violated the lease. He also sent armed men to keep the Santa Fe out of the gorge.44

  At that point, the Santa Fe went to Dodge City for help. As Robert M. Wright later wrote, “It was only natural for them to do so, for where in the whole universe were there to be found fitter men for a desperate encounter of this kind. Dodge City bred such bold, reckless men, and it was their pride and delight to be called upon to do such work.”45 In Dodge, Holliday continued his efforts as a recruiter, attempting to enlist Eddie Foy, the entertainer, in the effort. Foy recalled (though with a somewhat strained Georgia accent for Doc):

  “But listen, Mr. Holliday,” said I. “I’m no fighter. I wouldn’t be any help to the gang. I couldn’t hit a man if I shot at him.”

  “Oh that’s all right,” he replied easily. “The Santy Fee won’t know the difference. You kin use a shot-gun if you want to. Dodge wants a good showin’ in this business. You’ll help swell the crowd, and you’ll get your pay anyhow.”

  But I declined to join the expedition, much to Doc’s disappointment.46

  On March 25, the Globe announced the nature of the expedition:

  Last Thursday evening, Sheriff Masterson received a telegram from officers of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe road at Canon City, asking if he would bring a posse of men to assist in defending the workmen on that road from the attacks of the Denver and Rio Grande men, who were again endeavoring to capture the long contested pass through the canyon. Masterson and Deputy Duffey immediately opened a recruiting office, and before the train arrived Fri- day morning had enrolled a company of thirty-three men. They all boarded the morning train, armed to the teeth, Sheriff Masterson in command and started for the scene of the hostilities.47

  Offered three dollars a day, board, and a little excitement, the Dodge City recruits included the Texas gambler and gunfighter Ben Thompson, Deputy Sheriff Joshua J. Webb, Kinch Riley, Dave Rudabaugh, and a number of others. At Canon City, Colorado, the Santa Fe army found the mouth of the gorge held by nearly fifty men under the leadership of J. R. DeRemer, a tough-minded Rio Grande engineer. The situation was very tense, but, to his credit, Bat Masterson kept control of the situation, realizing that the Rio Grande fighters held the high ground and hoping that the courts would resolve the issue. On April 21, the courts did hold that the Rio Grande held prior claim to the gorge, but the matter of the lease still had to be resolved. So, for a time, Bat and company returned to Dodge, and Doc returned to New Mexico.48

  Holliday did not immediately return to Las Vegas, however. Instead, he settled in the little railroad town of Otero, north of Las Vegas. Otero was a monument to the tenacity of its namesake, Don Miguel Antonio Otero, already an entrepreneur par excellence in New Mexico. He now watched as the Santa Fe moved into New Mexico over Raton Pass and down toward Las Vegas. The first railroad town and station was named Otero in his honor. The town had a boomtown flavor, and Doc settled into a dental practice with a partner named Fagaly.49 He may even have purchased property there, for as late as 1891 a parcel of land, with past due taxes outstanding, was recorded as the property of “John Holiday.”50 Later, Dr. T. O. Washington, a physician, “purchased a half interest in the room occupied by Holliday & Fagaly.” Perhaps the biggest surprise for Doc, though, was the town marshal. Even the editors of the Otero Daily Optic could scarcely hide their disbelief:

  An individual taller than the majority of men, wearing a large revolver strapped in sight, and more than ordinary determined expression of countenance, is apparent, always, day and night, prominent upon our streets. A history of his life would not be adopted for Sunday school reading—“it fills a want long felt” in the heart of a train boy. His experience has been something of an Illiad. He was well known in Kansas, Texas, and all over the frontier. His name is Hurricane Bill. As marshal of Otero he is unquestionably doing a good work. It is claimed that this is the most orderly city, and from the start has been, that this road has found west of Atchison. Hurricane Bill having brought an experience with the Vigilance Committee of the Lone Star, and the Indians in the vicinity of Pawnee Rock, to this territory, has contributed not a little to this quiet. His reputation is at stake; he is interested in keeping order, and is equally as active in keeping the peace as he ever was successful in breaking it.51

  That must have brought a smile to John Henry’s lips, but it gave a certain familiarity to the games of chance at Henry & Robinson’s Saloon. The Otero Optic reported that Doc, Hurricane Bill Martin, and eight others were on hand there when “a splendid violin was raffled off” at five dollars a chance. Samuel Burr “was the lucky individual [to win], he throwing higher dice than any of the others.”52 Eventually, Hurricane Bill would be fired for “drunkenness and incompetency.” Dr. Washington proved to be a mistake, too. His quick temper eventually led him to stab a man to death. He moved to Raton afterward, where he made advances to a female patient. Her fiancé threatened Washington, after which he was put in jail
at Otero, but a mob followed and hanged him on the town water tank.53

  By then Doc had left Otero in the service of the Santa Fe railroad once again. He may even have been retained by the Santa Fe, because he apparently did some recruiting for the railroad in Cimarron and other points en route back to Dodge.54 Fearful of the outcome of court action, W. B. Strong, the vice president and general manager of the Santa Fe, had decided to make a show of force to prevent the Rio Grande from seizing the road before countermeasures could be taken legally. The result was described by the Denver Rocky Mountain News:

  Three extra trains came in from the south and east yesterday with the following men: Paddy Welsh and forty-five of Dick Wooten’s deputy sheriffs from Trinidad; Bat Masterson, sheriff from Dodge City, Kansas with sixty-five men; Charles Hickey, sheriff of Bent County, with eighteen men. An extra went to Colorado Springs last night with a lot of bad men from Dodge City. Bat Masterson goes to Canon City this afternoon to regulate Hadden and DeRemer. Does the governor care to hear of this?

  It was a short jaunt, as it turned out, and less heroic than some hoped and expected. Bat Masterson concentrated his force, including Holliday, at the roundhouse and rail station at Pueblo, the pivotal spot in the railroad system, but once General William J. Palmer figured out that the Santa Fe planned to hold its positions until the court’s decision could be appealed, he decided to move quickly. At six o’clock in the morning on June 11, the Rio Grande forces moved against all the Santa Fe positions. Two men were killed and more wounded at Cuchara, and sharp fighting occurred at Colorado Springs, but the Dodge City force held its ground at Pueblo.55

  Pat Desmond, Pueblo’s town marshal and a deputy sheriff as well, was a tough Irishman with long experience on the frontier who had seen more than his share of group violence, having been a participant in the Bear River riot of 1867 alongside “Bear River” Tom Smith, who later made a name for himself as a peace officer in Abilene, Kansas.56 Now, Desmond and J. A. McMurtrie, Palmer’s chief engineer, decided to move against Masterson’s men. It was a bold decision. Masterson had more men, and they were holed up inside the roundhouse with a cannon pointed up the street. Armed with bayoneted rifles, Desmond’s force charged the telegraph office at the depot, overwhelmed the defenders, and forced them out the back windows. One Santa Fe fighter, Harry Jenkins, was shot in the back there, and Josh Webb had a tooth knocked out in the melee. After taking the telegraph office and cutting Bat off from any communication with his superiors, the Rio Grande force laid seige to the roundhouse.

  R. F. Weitbrec, the senior Rio Grande official on the scene, then called for a meeting with Masterson and pointed out that the roundhouse defenders were the last holdouts of the Santa Fe fighters, that he had a legal writ to take control, and that it was foolish to risk further loss of life. Bat agreed, and his men were soon en route back to Dodge. “Sheriff Masterson and party of fifty men returned from Pueblo on Thursday morning,” the Times reported. “He had been placed in charge of the railroad property there but surrendered his authority upon writs served by U.S. officers. The Denver & Rio Grand [sic] has possession. And ‘our boys’ didn’t smell and burn powder. Their voice is for peace.”57

  Not everyone was happy about the outcome, but the Royal Gorge War was over. A few days later, locals assuaged their disappointment with the news that “[t]he boys and girls across the dead line had a high old time…. They sang and danced, and fought and bit, and cut and had a good time generally, making music for the entire settlement.”58 The Times also reported that Josh Webb was sporting a new gold tooth in the place of the one he had lost at Pueblo, doubtless the work of the Santa Fe force’s personal dentist, John Henry Holliday. In fact, neither Webb nor Doc lingered long in Dodge. Webb went to Pueblo and, shortly, to a position on Pat Desmond’s police force. Doc headed back to New Mexico. They would soon meet again.

  Doc was always comfortable with the Dodge City crowd and appeared to win their respect, if not their friendship. Young George D. Bolds remarked in his recollections that men like “Earp and Holliday were not the friendly type.” Bolds met Doc that summer of 1879, describing him as a “slim man with ash blond hair and the mark of tuberculosis on his gaunt face,” but he said Doc “barely nodded” when introduced. Bolds described the longest conversation he ever had with Doc, “‘How old are you kid?’ he asked in a hoarse voice. When I told him, he said, ‘I’m just ten years older.’”59 Still, he knew that Doc was a man who could be counted on in a fight, and Kate later claimed that Bat Masterson showed his appreciation by giving Doc a nickel-plated revolver before he left Dodge.60

  Holliday did not reopen his dental practice in Otero, although John Myers Myers, his first biographer, claimed that before he left, he “was arrested on charges of killing an unnamed, and probably unknown gunman, albeit under circumstances that led the court to exonerate him on the broad Western grounds of ‘self-defense.’”61 If so, the incident did not make it into the Colfax County records. Considering that there was only one surviving issue of the Otero Daily Optic and few town records, the episode could have evaded documentation, but it was more likely a latter-day addition to the Doc Holliday legend.

  That spring, Otero was almost literally boxed up with the terminal and shipped via the Santa Fe to be reassembled at Las Vegas. Said the Optic, “Otero so busy and bustling six months ago, is now passing into peaceful obscurity—saloons all gone.”62 The Santa Fe had advanced to Las Vegas by then, and Doc followed. “We came over Raton summit from Colorado into New Mexico, on the switchback, the tunnel not being then completed, and the last hundred miles of the journey was made in platform cars, with a caboose built on one of them for the ladies,” an old-timer recalled. “There was a mixed crowd of passengers, of old-timers, tourists, Spanish-American families with pretty daughters demurely expectant of the grand baile [sic] which was to conclude the opening day, with a sprinkling of gamblers and other professionals going south to be on hand at the start of the new terminal on the road.”63

  East Las Vegas, which was located on the flats east of town where the tracks ran, was taking shape as a true end-of-track town in contrast to the ancient pueblo of West Las Vegas. The end-of-track settlement had the usual supply of entrepreneurs and frontier vagabonds. Even Russell A. Kistler, the editor of the Otero Daily Optic, soon relocated in what came to be called New Town, and he opened the Las Vegas Daily Optic. On July 4, 1879, both Old Town and New Town celebrated in style, with speeches, grand balls, and dance hall fandangos. By then, tents and makeshift buildings were already dispensing liquor, whores, and opportunities for gambling. The celebration was a high old time that seemed to forecast the future, at least for a while.64

  Doc saw opportunity in New Town, as did others, and he entered into partnership with another recent arrival, Jordan L. Webb, a twenty-one-year-old transplant from Iowa, to open a saloon on Center Street. Webb was probably the younger brother of Doc’s Dodge City crony, Josh Webb, which would explain the partnership. In any event, it did not take Holliday long to get into trouble there.

  Las Vegas had more than its share of gamblers, con men, whores, thugs, and vagrants, all the usual flotsam that followed boom camps. Among them was a former army scout from the Fifth Cavalry named Mike Gordon, who had a weakness for women. Gordon was quite a traveler. He may have been in Wichita in the early 1870s, where a “Gordon” was the boyfriend of Ida May. He was in Dodge City in 1875. He got into more trouble at Fort Elliott in the Texas Panhandle in 1878 over a woman. In Las Vegas, though he was still in his late twenties, Gordon already sported a disfigured face as the result of a brawl in which his opponent had bitten off his nose. He was also a mean drunk.65

  On the night of July 19, Gordon was drunk and apparently had been for several days. Several “places of amusement” opened that night. “His mistress was at a hall on Center Street [actually Holliday and Webb’s saloon],” the Las Vegas Gazette reported. “Gordon tried to persuade her to accompany him to another hall on Railroad St. When she refused to go, he fle
w into a drunken rage and swore that he would kill someone or be killed himself before morning.” The Gazette provided the rest of the story:

  Gordon was standing in the street to the right of the hall after some of his threats and drew a revolver and fired, the bullet passing through the pants leg of a Mexican and struck in the floor in line with the bartender who was standing at the rear of the bar.

  Other shots were fired immediately but it is difficult to tell how or by whom.

  It is said that Gordon fired a second shot. Every person there says three shots were fired, while several maintain that five in all were fired.

  Gordon at once ceased firing and disappeared. An hour or two later a Mr. Kennedy went into his tent some thirty or forty yards away, to go to bed and hearing groans investigated and found Gordon laying on the ground outside. The news soon spread and his woman arriving on the ground had him taken to her room east of the Court house, where he died at 6 o’clock Sunday morning. In the afternoon the Coroner held an inquest and the jury returned a verdict of excusable homicide.66

  The paper reported that the bullet had struck Gordon in the right breast just below the collarbone and exited below the shoulder blade. The Gazette added that although a crowd witnessed the shooting, no one seemed to know who fired the fatal shot for fear of being called to testify.

  John Henry Holliday’s name was not mentioned at the time, quite probably for the reason stated by the Gazette, although town records for July 1879, which would include criminal charges, seem to have disappeared, making it impossible to state with certainty that they did not mention Holliday. Nor was he mentioned in the account provided by the Las Cruces Thirty-Four: “Mike Gordon got drunk in a dance hall in Vegas and began a ‘bluff’ by drawing a ‘pair of sixes’ and firing promiscuously around the room. Some unknown person ‘called his hand,’ and Gordon was ‘froze out.’ He was buried at the expense of the county next day. Vegas is a bad town to ‘bluff.’” Two years later, however, an article by Russell Kistler, the editor of the Optic (who was crusading for reform in Las Vegas at the time), cited troubles involving Doc at Tombstone and described him as “the identical individual who killed poor, inoffensive Mike Gordon.”67 Still later, in another Optic account after Doc and the Earps left Tombstone, Kistler noted that Doc “will be remembered as having killed Mike Gordon in this place at an early day in the history of the town.”68