Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  If he did make the trip, Doc was back in Leadville by June, in time for an episode with a touch of irony in light of the Allen case. Doc’s old acquaintance, Curly Mack, the ne’er-do-well gambler who had been in Leadville since his earlier brush with the law, owed him fifty dollars. He had apparently owed the debt to Doc for some time when Doc collected it in an unusual way, as the Aspen Times reported:

  Some nights ago, Curley [sic] was seated at a faro bank with a big stack of “reds” before him. Luck was with him and he made a winning of a hundred and fifty dollars. Holliday was standing behind him deeply interested in the game. Just as Curley was about to “cash in” his creditor stepped to one side so that Curley could see him, and drawing a six-shooter from the waistband of his pants he coolly remarked, “I’d like that fifty to-night Curley.” When the player looked up and saw the muzzle of the gun and the cold, hard face of “Doc” with its determined expression he shoved the whole pile of chips over and said, “take them all.” “Doc” counted out his fifty dollars and pushed the others back to the winner and walked out, and that settled it.126

  In October 1885, street gossip revived talk of the old rivalry between Doc’s friends and the Tyler-Allen group and predicted the possibility of gunplay. Pat Kelly, who had succeeded Faucett as marshal, kept both groups under close surveillance, and the talk never progressed to action.127 Johnny Tyler, who remained strangely mute through the whole Holliday-Allen affair, despite his role in stirring things up in the first place, remained in Leadville. His luck appears to have waned too, because he soon dropped from view. He was still in Leadville in 1886, and a John Tyler was working as a porter at the Palace of Fashion as late as 1890. He was reported to have left Leadville for Japan at some point and vanished into obscurity.128 Frank Lomeister prospered in Leadville. When Mannie Hyman reopened his saloon on April 3, 1886, after renovation “that imparts to the famous old resort a brand new appearance as well as a most airy and attractive one,” Lomeister and Henry Kellerman were still operating the bar. Lomeister was still in Leadville at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was serving as town marshal.129

  Billy Allen remained in Leadville after his encounter with Doc before moving to Garfield County, where he served as a scout during the Ute Indian troubles in 1887. Afterward, he apparently lived in Denver and Pueblo briefly, then moved to Chicago. In 1892, he moved again, this time to Salt Lake City, Utah, to be near his sisters. He even joined one of the land rushes in Oklahoma, but he would eventually settle in Cripple Creek, Colorado. There, in 1896, he became chief of the Cripple Creek Fire Department. Shortly before his arrival, most of the town had been destroyed by fire. He took charge and quickly put together a fine working department. Later, he became embroiled in a controversy that spoke well of him. When the “old town” of Cripple Creek, where Allen was fire chief, and West Cripple Creek were combined under a single city government, Allen was appointed chief of the new combined fire department, but when the city council passed over his firemen in favor of the West Cripple Creek men, Allen resigned in protest. Later, when the manager of the insurance underwriters for the state of Colorado came to Cripple Creek for an inspection, he said that he “was very sorry, indeed, that any change was made in the Cripple Creek department. I do not wish to reflect on the incumbent, but insurance men always object to a change in any fire department when it is in efficient hands. I have known Billy Allen for a long time, and know him to be a good organizer, a strict disciplinarian and a strong, brave, determined man.”130

  Shortly thereafter, Allen was reinstated and allowed to hire his own men. Allen remained at Cripple Creek for a time after that, but in June 1898 he joined the Klondike gold rush. He later moved from Dawson to Nome, Alaska, and he was appointed fire marshal for Nome by the city council, over several other candidates, and praised for his energy and ability by the Nome News on October 9, 1899. A year later, he was appointed deputy U.S. marshal by U.S. Marshal Cornelius R. Vawter, in time to be part of the effort to clean up Nome. As a part of that job, he arrested Doc’s old friend, Wyatt Earp, who was running the Dexter Saloon in Nome at the time. He stayed in Alaska for a while, and then moved to Seattle, Washington, where he was deputy sheriff of King County. In 1930, he entered the Old Soldiers’ Home in Orting, Washington, where he died on March 21, 1941.131

  Doc lingered in Leadville through the autumn of 1885, but he did not choose to chance another winter in Leadville and moved back to Denver before year’s end. Doc’s luck seemed to turn for the better in Denver. At least he did not have to battle pneumonia, and he was able to support himself. Apparently, he headquartered at the Chucovitch Saloon owned by Vaso Chucovitch, an associate of Ed Chase’s who was considered to be the kingpin of Denver’s underworld, although Doc reportedly “flited [sic] from the Arcade, the Argyle, the Missouri gambling place, and other resorts for gamblers and gambling.”132 For a time he enjoyed the opportunities and pleasures of the big city. He also had time to meet ghosts from the past.

  One night, Doc met Milton E. Joyce, his old nemesis from Tombstone, on the street. Joyce had prospered after the Cow-Boy war. He had remained active in politics and had established the Magnolia Ranch in January 1883. He could not avoid controversy, however. He was embroiled in an election-day fight with David Neagle in November 1882. In January 1883, he and John O. Dunbar were accused of tampering with county funds as the result of an audit by George W. Parsons. He beat that rap and became leader of the Tombstone Rangers, a militia company formed to invade the San Carlos Reservation and stop Apache raids once and for all. The group caused more trouble than it solved and dealt Joyce’s reputation another blow. As a result, he left the management of his ranch in the hands of one of his partners, Buckskin Frank Leslie, and moved to San Francisco, where he opened the Baldwin Billiard Parlor in the Baldwin Hotel with J. M. Vizina (an Earp partisan in the old days) and James W. Orndorff. Later, he and Orndorff opened the Café Royale, which was touted as “the finest saloon and billiard hall on the coast.”133

  In 1885, Joyce was on his way back to San Francisco after a business trip when he encountered Doc Holliday in Denver. At the time of Joyce’s death in 1889, Orndorff provided Joyce’s account of what happened:

  Joyce was one of the closest-mouthed men I ever knew, … and it was pretty hard to get him to talk about the game he had been in.

  Just before we went into business together at the Café Royal [sic], after we left the Baldwin, he went East. One night, soon after his return, as we were talking, I spoke about a man from Arizona who said he saw Joyce’s fight with Doc Holladay [sic], and I asked if he had met Holladay since they left Arizona.

  “Only once,” he said, “and then I made a blanked fool of myself.”

  “I stopped over in Denver,” he said, “on my way home. One evening, as I was coming out of a barber-shop, who should I see but Doc Holladay [sic]. He evidently had been waiting for me. As I reached the sidewalk he came along the edge of the crowd and brushed against me.

  “Restraining my first impulse, I ignored what I thought was a challenge, and kept on my way. When I got half way to my hotel a thought struck me that maybe he imagined I was afraid of him because I was in a strange city where he had all his friends and satellites about him. Turning on my heel, I walked back and looked for him till [sic] I found him in the saloon where he hung out. I deliberately brushed against him, the same as he had against me.

  “I looked at him and he looked at me, but neither of us spoke a word. Some old Arizona men who knew us both were in the place, but they didn’t have any remarks just then. I walked around him three times, just to give him a chance if he wanted it, and to remove any idea he might have that I wanted to run away. He didn’t look at all scared, but he wasn’t looking for any more trouble.

  “I have thought of it lots of time since then, and have thought how foolish I was to go back, but the impulse struck me to do it, and I couldn’t help it.”134

  Joyce’s version of the incident is the only one that survived, but his
observation, “He didn’t look at all scared, but he wasn’t looking for any more trouble,” was doubtless the truth of what happened.

  A more poignant reunion occurred in a Denver hotel that summer or fall. In May 1885, “Wyatt Earp and wife [of] Texas” moved to Aspen, and, in partnership with H. C. Hughes, opened a saloon there called the Fashion.135 While in Colorado, the Earps visited Denver from time to time, and on one of their visits they encountered Doc Holliday in the lobby of the Windsor Hotel. Wyatt and Josephine Earp had met H.A.W. and “Baby Doe” Tabor and learned that Thomas J. Fitch was also staying at the hotel. One day the Earps were sitting in the lobby talking with Fitch and his wife when, as Josephine recalled, “an exclamation from my husband caused me to look up.” She remembered:

  There coming toward us was Doc Holliday, a thinner, more delicate appearing Doc Holliday than I had seen in Tombstone.

  I have never seen a man exhibit more pleasure at meeting a mere friend than did Doc. He had heard that Wyatt was in town, he said, and had immediately looked him up.

  They sat down at a little distance from us and talked at some length, though Doc’s almost continuous coughing made it difficult for him to talk.

  Wyatt repeated their conversation to me later.

  Doc told Wyatt how ill he had been, scarcely able to be out of bed much of the time.

  “When I heard you were in Denver, Wyatt I wanted to see you once more,” he said, “For I can’t last much longer. You can see that.”

  Wyatt was touched. He remembered how Doc had once saved his life. Wyatt was arresting one drunken cowboy, when another was about to shoot him from behind. Doc risked his own life to extricate Wyatt and for this he had always felt grateful. My husband has been criticized even by his friends, for being associated with a man who had such a reputation as Doc Holliday’s. But who, with a shred of appreciation, could have done otherwise? Besides my husband always maintained that the greater part of the crimes that were attributed to Doc were but fictions created by the woman with whom he lived at times when she was seeking solace in liquor for the wounds to her pride inflicted during one of their violent disputes.…

  Wyatt’s sense of loyalty and gratitude was such that [if] the whole world had been all against Doc, he should have stood by him out of appreciation for saving his life.

  “Isn’t it strange,” Wyatt remarked to him, “that if it were not for you, I wouldn’t be alive today, yet you must go first.”

  Doc came over and chatted with us for a few minutes then he and Wyatt walked away, Doc on visibly unsteady legs.

  My husband was deeply affected by this parting from the man who, like an ailing child, had clung to him as though to derive strength from him.

  There were tears in Wyatt’s eyes when at last they took leave of each other. Doc threw his arm across his shoulder.

  “Good-bye old friend,” he said. “It will be a long time before we meet again.” He turned, and walked away as fast as his feeble legs would permit.

  Only a short time after this we heard that he had died.136

  Josephine, who described Doc as a “misanthropic Dentist, whose mysterious attraction to Wyatt was more than a liability to the peace officer’s reputation than an asset” and who said that “Wyatt’s loyalty to the irascible tubercular was one of gratitude not unmixed with pity,” never mentioned her own obligation to Doc for his financial help to her when she was with Behan in Tombstone.137 Her account seemed designed more than anything else to protect Wyatt’s reputation from the taint of his association with Doc by rationalizing their friendship.

  In February 1886, John Henry received a letter from Georgia announcing the birth of his cousin Hub Holliday’s son. Hub’s wife, Mary, later recalled that Doc wrote them back, congratulating them and expressing interest in Hub’s efforts to establish a dental college. “Yet, it was not perfunctory,” she recalled. “Rather, it was quite long. Specifically, I recall his disappointment in the failure of President Cleveland’s administration to increase the government’s purchasing of silver.” Having spent so many years in the silver camps, Doc had taken a strong interest in the silver issue, which would be increasingly important in the 1880s.138

  Clearly, Doc still had some life in him. He was in Denver through the spring of 1886, living at the Metropolitan Hotel at 1325 Sixteenth Street, when the Denver Tribune-Republican began a reform crusade to rid Denver of gambling houses and prostitution.139 Initially, the results were predictable. Saloon owners, gamblers, and prostitutes were rounded up, arrested, fined, and turned loose to resume business as usual. In May, Doc left town to visit his old haunts in Pueblo and then traveled west to Silverton. He stayed there long enough to generate a feature article for the New York Sun that was soon being reprinted everywhere from Tombstone to Valdosta. Most of it was the contrived sensationalism that people had come to expect in stories about Doc Holliday, but he did claim in it “to have been a benefactor to the country.” And the article concluded with a statement that reflects the themes that Doc had voiced since he left Arizona in his comments to the press: “The claim I make is that some few of us pioneers are entitled to credit for what we have done. We have been the fore-runners of government. As soon as law and order were established anywhere we never had any trouble. If it hadn’t been for me and a few like me there never would have been any government in some of these towns. When I have done any shooting it has always been with this in view.”

  “The Doc’s auditors listened attentively, nodded assent, and gradually slipped away,” the reporter for the Sun informed its readers. “He has been arrested but once, and nobody here will undertake the job.”140

  Not in Silverton, perhaps, but Doc was on his way back to Denver.

  Doc returned to his room at the Metropolitan, but he soon realized that the reform effort was serious. Denver was “growing up” and becoming respectable. Reform-minded city fathers took a much dimmer view of the gambling fraternity than had been the case in former times. The sporting element found itself under siege, and Doc felt the pressure along with the rest, perhaps more so because of his notoriety. Denver’s police force was using the vagrancy laws to crack down on gamblers and confidence men. He had not been back in Denver long when, on the night of July 6, a serious fire destroyed the Academy of Music and several other buildings near the Metropolitan Hotel. The hotel itself and several other buildings were damaged by the fire and smoke.141 The police took advantage of the fact that he was homeless, at least temporarily, to advise him to leave town or run the risk of being arrested as a vagrant, since a gambler was regarded as “a person with no visible means of support.”

  Doc left, but he returned three weeks later, “in company with a score of other confidence men, thieves, and sure-thing workers [a characterization of all professional gamblers by the reform minded].”142 The influx of gamblers was probably due to horse races scheduled in July and August. On the evening of August 3, Doc was arrested standing on Sixteenth Street, as were J. S. Smythe, a night watchman, and Kenneth McCoy, a bartender. The trio was arrested for vagrancy by Officer Michael B. Norcott, although the Tribune-Republican added a curious twist to the story: “They were locked up in jail and opposite their names on the prison slate were marked with the words ‘safe keeping.’ When asked why such a charge was preferred the reporter was informed that if a charge of vagrancy was preferred the prisoners must necessarily be arraigned in the Police Court in the morning, where the sentence, in all probability would be a slight fine only.”143

  Actually, the cases were heard the next day, and the cases of Doc and McCoy were continued while Smythe’s case was tried. Doc was the only one not regularly employed, so he was again asked to leave town.

  The editorial staff of the newly combined Tribune-Republican conveniently forgot that both the Tribune and the Republican had championed Holliday’s cause in 1882, in prose that both papers had strongly denied and corrected earlier:

  Doc. Holladay [sic] has the reputation of being a “killer.” He gained his notor
iety as an Arizona rustler in 1881–3. He was a member of the noted Earp Brothers gang, who are reported to have killed a dozen or more men in those bloody days of Arizona’s history. Holladay is credited with doing his full share of the killing. The country finally became too “hot” for Holladay and he came to Colorado, where he was joined by Wyatt Earp, the most noted of the Earp Brothers. Within a few months after his arrival here, Holladay was arrested on Sixteenth street by an Arizona officer. The prisoner protested against being taken back to Arizona, saying that he would surely be lynched. After two weeks parleying the Governor refused to sign the extradition warrant, and Holladay was released. He then went to Leadville, and soon engaged in two shooting scrapes, which he got out of by leaving town.…

  He then came to Denver, and since that time has been living here—that is, when the police did not drive him out of town. His only means of living was gambling in its worst form and confidence work.144

  Doc was too tired to argue. The police escorted him to the train station, and he caught the train “home” to Leadville. He wintered there in 1886–1887, working again for Mannie Hyman, who seems to have found some sympathy in his makeup at last. But John Henry knew that his time was running out.145

  In May 1887, he caught the Carson stage for Glenwood Springs in a last desperate attempt to prolong his life. Glenwood Springs was a small but prosperous camp in a quiet valley nestled among the mountains on the western slope. It drew its name from the sulphur springs that the Utes believed had curative powers, and Doc, who had “taken the cure” at springs in New Mexico and Arizona, thought it worthwhile to give these springs a try. He settled into the Hotel Glenwood, a modern facility with electricity and hot and cold running water, and tried his hand at the town’s gambling halls.