One additional source suggests that he may have been there. Alice Earp Wells, the daughter of Newton J. Earp, Wyatt’s half-brother, recalled years later that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday visited their home while her family lived at Garden City, Kansas. She said that one afternoon two riders approached their home. She recognized her uncle, and spoke to him, but he barely acknowledged her and went into the house to speak with her father. The other man stayed outside with her.
Alice did not recognize the man with her Uncle Wyatt, but he smiled and asked her if he could sit with her. She said yes, and the two of them talked for a while about all kinds of things. She was charmed by him because of his interest in her. Eventually, he asked her if she would excuse him for a little while. She said yes and watched him ride away. A short time later, he returned and gave her a rag doll with his compliments and another smile. When her uncle’s visit with her father was over, her uncle and the handsome stranger left, and her father told her, as they stood watching them ride away, that the man with Uncle Wyatt who had been so kind to her was “the notorious Doc Holliday.”
Alice was infatuated with him because of his kindness to her and the interest he took in her, and years later she would proudly show visitors “the doll Doc Holliday gave me.” She always remembered the visitor as Doc Holliday, “a kindly gentleman,” in contrast to her uncle’s cold demeanor. She kept Holliday’s gift until she died. And her story was consistent with the behavior of Doc Holliday remembered by Billy Hattich, who had known him at Tombstone.46
Alice gave the date of this visit as 1884, when she was nine years old, but it is difficult to place either Wyatt or Doc in Kansas during 1884. For the record, Newton lived in Garden City from 1880 until 1896, when he moved to Casper, Wyoming, so the visit could have taken place at some other time. In June 1883, after the Dodge City War, the Garden City Irrigator reported that “Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp alighted from the west bound train, Sunday, and had a confab with Marshal [Newton] Earp. They were on their way to the recently discovered silver mines at Silver City, N. M.”47 Perhaps Alice, being so young at the time, confused Masterson and Holliday. Given Bat’s personality, that would have been possible, but she always insisted that her father had called him “the notorious Doc Holliday.”
Whatever the truth about the Kansas adventure, Doc returned to Leadville by midsummer and passed it quietly enough. Leadville’s attractions were compelling, as a correspondent for the Boston Post recorded:
Leadville by gaslight is a revelation to one unacquainted to the strange life of these western mining camps. Harrison avenue, the main thoroughfare is brilliantly illuminated from one end to the other, and from the hotel window I can look down upon throngs of people. The street is fairly lined with pedestrians, and handsome turnouts and fast horses make the boulevards lively. What this town must have been in ’78 I cannot imagine, it is so full of life now. This mountain town, which seems so dull and prosaic by daylight is certainly a most charming and picturesque spot by gaslight.48
One observer was surprised at the gambling halls. “Enough to say,” he wrote, “I saw money, the amount I could only conjecture—won and lost without a change of countenance, but in many instances high up in the thousands. Here the most punctilious regard was observed to the usual courtesies; the utmost order was maintained; here was nothing to indicate an unusual state of affairs.”49 Not everyone was so impressed. One English writer was astonished that “[g]ambling halls abound without the least attempt at concealment.” He was also repulsed by the saloons, theaters, and “worst haunts still, where vice, and dissipation, and immorality were rampant.”50
On the morning of September 10, E.D. Cowen, Doc’s champion in Denver, who had recently taken a position as city editor of the Leadville Herald, “was most brutally beaten and kicked by Alderman C.C. Joy” at the Board of Trade. The altercation occurred when Cowen had claimed that he could name the next street commissioner. Joy bet him that he could not, and when Cowen wrote his choice on a piece of paper and placed it in an envelope, Joy, who wanted him to announce the name out loud, grew angry. The alderman, who had been drinking, struck the editor twice, knocking him to the floor, and then proceeded to beat and stomp “his face with his heavy boots in a horrible manner.” The brutal beating caused quite a stir, and the press used the occasion to speak out against crime in general, using the Joy-Cowen episode as an example because Joy had been quickly released on bail while Cowen remained in critical condition.51
Doc must have smiled when he read the reaction to the incident in the Chronicle: “There is but one remedy. If the agents of the people will not execute the will of the people then it is time the people should interfere. And a frequent interference on the part of the people with the duties of the courts will produce a most salutary effect, not only upon the courts themselves, but also upon the criminals.”52 So the editors of the Tombstone Epitaph and the Tucson Citizen were not the only ones who felt that way.
The Denver Tribune took up the cause as well, announcing that Thomas J. Fitch, of all people, had been hired to assist in the prosecution of Joy and asking, “Is there no rope in Leadville? We can send some if it is necessary and have a committee to escort the rope.” Nothing so dramatic ever happened. Joy was suspended from the city council, and when his case came up for trial, he was granted a change of venue to Breckenridge. He went through two trials, with both ending in hung juries. After that, the case was dropped and Joy was reinstated on the city council.53 For a time, Cowen was out of Leadville, recovering, but he would return to be on hand for other episodes involving the good Doc Holliday.
Early in October, an incident occurred at Hyman’s between the policeman William Steadman and George O’Connor, which led later to a fight in which Officer Steadman was severely beaten. Later in the month, Frank Gallagher killed James B. “Tex” Garvin in a gunfight at the boardinghouse where they both lived. Gallagher would later be released on the grounds of self-defense. However, Doc was not interested in such matters.54
That October, he received news from home that could not have been wholly unexpected but may well have affected him deeply. Martha Anne Holliday—his dear cousin Mattie—had written to him faithfully through the years, and she must have told him of her intentions to enter a religious order. However, intending to do something and actually doing it were two different things. Family tradition always said that Mattie was an “unreconstructed rebel” who blamed the Yankees for her father’s premature death. As a result, she would not enter a Northern convent. She waited for an opening in the South, and on October 1, 1883, she entered the Religious Order of the Sisters of Mercy at Saint Vincent’s Convent in Savannah, where she took the religious name Sister Mary Melanie.55
Sisters of Mercy—Doc must have pondered the thought and reflected on the Sisters of Charity he had seen on the streets of Leadville working to relieve the suffering of men and women there and maintaining a local hospital. The effect of her decision on John Henry can only be imagined, since the true nature of their relationship remains a mystery, and it may have been merely coincidental that her decision seemed to mark a significant shift in his fortunes and quality of life, but it did.
In November, a dispatch concerning “old-time Tombstoners” made the rounds of regional newspapers, noting among other things that “Doc Holliday is the chief engineer of three faro games in Leadville, and Johnny Tyler is holding his own in the same camp.”56 Other old-time Tombstoners must have chuckled at the thought of Holliday and Tyler coexisting in the same town, but they had so far kept their animosities at bay. That, too, was about to change.
At some point that fall or winter, Cy Allen discharged Doc at the Monarch. Exactly when and why was lost, but it was likely the combination of Doc’s drinking and his worsening consumption that caused it. Without a doubt, Doc’s social and economic woes deriving from his disease multiplied in Leadville; they were not the result of stigma arising from the disease, but of consumption’s debilitating effects on his capacity to work. The st
age-two symptoms of his disease were increasingly obvious: he had a persistent cough, an accelerated heart rate, and a deepening hoarseness resulting from the ulcers in his throat. At times, he could scarcely speak above a whisper, and in his weakening condition, he suffered recurring bouts with pneumonia. Still, the symptoms that were most obvious were likely more attributable to the treatment than to the disease itself. Doc’s drinking, which was a standard treatment to relieve symptoms, had surely become alcoholism long before he reached Leadville, and, as the symptoms worsened there, he seems to have begun the use of laudanum as well. Nearly all consumptives used some form of opiate to quiet the cough, control diarrhea, and reduce stress. The druggist Jay Miller, at the corner of Harrison and Sixth Street, provided Doc with laudanum at no charge. In time, these addictions affected his ability to deal cards as well as his judgment and self-control.57
Still, Doc’s dismissal from the Monarch may not have been about either his disease or his dissipation. Cy Allen had struck up a friendship with Tom Duncan, Tyler’s old Sloper buddy from Tombstone, who was also pimping for Mollie Price, a madam who operated an upscale whorehouse on West Fifth Street. Clearly, he was not a savory character. In January 1884, Duncan got drunk while circulating saloons on Harrison. A friend of his called on Mollie and asked her to take him home. She found him at Shea & Hillary’s Saloon at 423 Harrison. He ignored her efforts to get him to go home with her until she grabbed his hat and started to leave with it. Duncan followed her into the street, where he grabbed her by the hair, dragged her home, and beat her severely. She never pressed charges.58
Hyman’s Saloon, where Doc Holliday was employed for part of his sojourn in Leadville, Colorado, with inset of Mannie Hyman, “the Leadville Sport,” a prominent gambler and saloonman in Leadville.
Despite this incident, Duncan had managed to ingratiate himself with many of the sporting crowd. He had been one of the greeters who welcomed John L. Sullivan, the heavyweight boxing champion, when he visited Leadville in December 1883. The others were Mannie Hyman, John Morgan, and Sam Houston, all notable sporting men friendly to Doc.59 Among those with whom Duncan had won favor were Cy Allen and A. E. Scott, the owners of the Monarch, so that it was probably not by chance that Doc was fired or that Johnny Tyler replaced Doc at the faro tables in the Monarch. Doc’s enemies would later claim that he did not take the firing well. They claimed that he exchanged heated words with both Cy Allen and Johnny Tyler. And, based on what Doc himself said later, that could have happened.60 This incident may have restarted the old controversy in earnest. Without a doubt, Doc believed that the firing was part of a plot of the Slopers against him.
Doc was not yet without resources. He was still welcome at other places on Harrison Avenue. He began to hang out at Mannie Hyman’s saloon, two doors down from the Monarch, and he still frequented John Morgan’s Board of Trade. He dealt for Hyman for a while, and doubtless would have recovered easily enough had his health not failed. The Leadville winter took a heavy toll. Not only was Doc drinking and combating worsening symptoms of consumption, but that winter his recurring battles with pneumonia increased. Hyman was not a sentimentalist. He expected his dealers to be at their tables, and when they could not be depended on to be there, he replaced them. When Doc did make it to the gambling halls, he was left to find work where he could, mostly “bucking the tiger” against the house or playing poker when he had cash enough for a game. Still, he struggled on. He lost coordination, dexterity, and powers of concentration. The vigor he had shown when he first arrived in Colorado from Arizona was gone. He was dropping weight as well, to the point that men described his condition as “delicate.”
It was then, when Doc was fragile, broke, and down on his luck, that Johnny Tyler and his crowd began to prod Doc in every way they could, hoping to provoke an incident or to humiliate him publicly. As a Leadville correspondent of the Tucson Citizen would later put it, “The old imbroglio was rankling in their breasts here, and Tyler and his friends did everything they could to prejudice the public against Holliday.”61 Though sick, Doc was still game, but they knew they had him at a disadvantage. He did not want to do anything that might cause him trouble with the authorities, and the frail body and the tremor in his hands made a confrontation seem foolhardy. For the first time in his life, Doc asked for help. On several occasions, he complained to the police that a plot was afoot to kill him and requested them to help him. Johnny Tyler showed his true colors then. Despite everything, he was still unwilling to face Holliday directly and alone.
The trouble simmered through the spring and was public enough that the Slopers’ bully tactics won John Henry friends and supporters. The local police were concerned enough that they frequently searched Doc for concealed weapons, almost to the point of harassment. On July 21, 1884, some of Tyler’s bunch accosted Holliday in Hyman’s Saloon, “and several of them called on him to ‘pull his gun.’ He said he had none, and as he passed out was called filthy names.” The next day, the Leadville Daily Democrat reported what had happened:
The well-known Doc Holliday claims to have been the victim of a put-up job to murder him in Hyman’s saloon yesterday morning, and the place has been on the verge of a shooting match ever since. At an early hour Holliday and John Tyler, another sporting man, got into an altercation in which the latter used very abusive language. Holliday said he didn’t want to have trouble, and Tyler called on him to draw. Friends interfered and there was no blood shed. There were some bad threats made during the day, and trouble is anticipated. Tyler killed a man in Frisco and is regarded as “bad.”
Doc Holliday states that the trouble arose over an old grudge in Arizona where Tyler tried to put up a job to kill him, but failed to make it work. Tyler’s friends say he wants to fight a duel with Holliday.62
The following day, Doc spoke with a reporter for the Democrat, most likely E. D. Cowen, who had left the Herald and was now working for the Democrat. With “tears of rage coming from his eyes,” Doc told his friend that they dared to do it because they knew he could not retaliate: “If I should kill some one here…no matter if I were acquitted the governor would be sure to turn me over to the Arizona authorities, and I would stand no show for life there at all. I am afraid to defend myself and these cowards kick me because they know I am down. I haven’t a cent, have few friends and they will murder me yet before they are done.”63
The reporter did not doubt that what he said was true. Nor did most other folks. On July 24, the Carbonate Chronicle added its opinion about the disturbance at Hyman’s: “It looks very much as though a gang of would be bad men had put up a job to wipe Doc Holliday off the face of the earth. There is much to be said in favor of Holliday—he has never since his arrival here made any bad breaks or conducted himself in any other way than a quiet and peaceable manner. The other faction do not bear this sort of reputation.”64
All of this made something that had happened earlier somewhat baffling—it seemed to be at least a serious lapse of judgment on Doc’s part. Doc had pawned most of his belongings when Lady Luck abandoned him, and sometime in late June he borrowed five dollars from William J. Allen, a bartender at the Monarch Saloon.
Billy Allen was a former Leadville police officer who now worked as a special policeman and bartender at Cy Allen’s place. Leadville’s Billy Allen was not Tombstone’s Billy Allen, the man who testified against Doc and the Earps in the Spicer hearing, as has usually been supposed. Tombstone’s William A. Allen already was safely settled in Arizona when Leadville’s William J. Allen became a policeman in Leadville in 1880. Leadville’s Billy was from Freeport, Illinois. He was athletic and had enjoyed a successful career as a foot racer (then a popular sport with the sporting crowd) as a young man, successful enough that he eventually used an alias (Murphy) to be allowed to run in the important races. He apparently had killed a man in Illinois, although Leadville locals did not agree on whether he had been acquitted or had jumped bail in the case.65
Allen was a tough man who proved his m
ettle as a police officer. In June 1880, he stood off a mob of miners to protect a militia colonel during a labor dispute. In July 1880, he was shot in the groin while attempting to arrest Charles E. Bakewell, who had already killed two policemen. In September, he was involved in raids against several brothels that resulted in the arrest of some prominent local politicians. His role in that affair won him powerful enemies. Afterward, he patrolled the Second Ward, which included the infamous State Street and environs, clearly the most dangerous area of Leadville. There, he was shot in the leg while trying to arrest a man on Chestnut Street, and still later, while approaching a burglar in “Cat Alley,” a bad place in a bad neighborhood, the burglar shot him in the chest and then stabbed him. He survived all these incidents, “owing to a splendid constitution.”66
Following the local election in April 1881, he was discharged as a policeman. He worked for a time with the fire department as a fitness trainer but was never given the appointment he wanted as the foreman of a hose company, apparently because of the political enemies he had made. Instead, he was given a job as special policeman, first at the Grand Central Theater and then at the Monarch Saloon, where he also became a bartender. He was considered to be fearless, and he may have worked at the Monarch when Doc was a faro dealer there, although he most likely went to work there after Doc left. His only link to Tombstone was Johnny Tyler, who apparently fed him plenty of information about Doc’s alleged bad character.67
Because of Allen’s connection to the Monarch Saloon—and thus to Tyler and Duncan—why Doc accepted money from him has always been a mystery. However, since Doc may have worked with Allen at the Monarch before the changes, or simply because Doc knew him as an independent sort of man, Doc probably did not consider him to be a part of the Sloper clique. If he did already consider Allen one of the Tyler crowd, which seems unlikely, then the transaction simply demonstrated Doc’s desperation. Given Allen’s association with the Monarch Saloon and the crowd that hung out there and in light of what happened later, some believed it was part of a setup to either humiliate Doc or kill him. More likely, Allen was a late convert to the Tyler camp because his personal disagreement with Doc over the money made him more responsive to Tyler’s vicious prattle.
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