Marshal J.W. Scott watched him carefully at first, but Doc had not come to cause trouble. He was quiet and would be remembered as a “well dressed, soft-spoken southern gentleman who was politely cordial to the ladies.”146 Doc soon gained employment as a faro dealer and bartender, and during the first four months of his stay in Glenwood Springs, despite his failing health, he managed to support himself. Judd Riley later claimed that Doc helped him guard a coal claim at a mine near Glenwood Springs at the rate of ten dollars a day for a time. Kate Elder would say that he served “as undersheriff of Garfield County under Sheriff Ware,” although there was no evidence of this and the sheriff at the time was James Kendall.147
The summer passed quickly, and “by his quiet and gentlemanly demeanor during his short stay and the fortitude and patience he displayed…[Doc] made many friends.”148 The big excitement came in August when Sheriff Kendall raised a posse to help suppress a reported Ute uprising. Billy Allen, who was living in Garfield County at the time, served as a scout. The “war” was reported over by September 1. By the end of September, Glenwood Springs was dressing up the town in preparation for the arrival of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
The springs Doc had hoped would relieve his symptoms seemed to exacerbate rather than ease his suffering. He knew enough about the difference between consumption and “galloping consumption” to recognize the meaning of the sores that began to appear on his body and other telltale signs that his time was short.
Doc must have realized that he had moved into the terminal stage of consumption. His body was emaciated, his face hollow, and his eyes sunken and staring. His body was wasting away. His shoulders slumped, and he found it increasingly difficult to walk because of the pain in his joints and the swelling in his legs. His pulse accelerated and slowed, accelerated and slowed. Breathing became increasingly difficult, and his cough became the distinctive “graveyard cough” that was hard to mistake. Then came the almost uncontrollable diarrhea, sweats, and coliclike pain. In the most graphic ways, Doc was being consumed by his disease. He may have suffered from the sensation of suffocation as his lungs filled and he struggled to free them from the accumulated matter in them, or he may have experienced profuse hemorrhaging with blood pouring from his nostrils and mouth. And yet, consumption defied timetables. Even in the terrible last stage, the symptoms might suddenly abate, cruelly giving hope in a hopeless situation. And through it all, the mind remained clear.
It was during this period that Doc struck up friendships with both Father Edward T. Downey, a Catholic priest, and Reverend W. S. Rudolph, a Presbyterian minister. It was not unlike Doc to hedge his bets even when it came to eternity, although he may well have surprised them both with his knowledge of theology. Through Mattie, he doubtless had learned much about Catholic beliefs; in fact, he may have known Father Downey at Leadville because his ministries included both places and everything in between.149 And though his mother’s Methodist faith was deeply embedded in his mind, he remembered his father’s stern Presbyterian beliefs as well.
The arrival of the Denver & Rio Grande would also bring Dr. W.W. Crook, who had met Doc in Leadville, to Glenwood Springs as a physician and surgeon for the railroad. He later recalled that Doc “was a likeable fellow and not looking for trouble but one could get it from him at any time they wanted it.”150 Each day brought Doc closer to the end, and he lacked both the energy and the inclination for trouble. One old-timer recalled, “He walked the streets with a feeble tread and a downcast look. If he heard a shot, he raised his head with eager attention and glanced this way and that.”151 Another resident of Glenwood Springs would remember that “[t]he man was breaking to pieces.”152
The Hotel Glenwood, shortly after its opening in October 1886. Doc lived here for the last few months of his life; he died here on November 8, 1887.
Art Kendrick and George Weirick were bellboys at the Hotel Glenwood, and they would recall later that when they gave him a wakeup call each morning, he always gave them two dollars, one for a bottle of whiskey and the other for a tip. His generosity indicated that he was still making a living for himself.153 In September, he was still tending bar at a local saloon when he fell victim to another bout with pneumonia that forced him to bed. He never recovered. On October 5, the Denver & Rio Grande finally reached Glenwood Springs, and the town’s leaders celebrated with a parade, fireworks, and a banquet in the Hotel Glenwood that lasted late into the night; it was followed by a two-day celebration.154
Doc was unable to participate, but after that Dr. Crook was on hand to supervise his care. For thirty-three days after he was forced to bed, he was able to get up only twice. For the next two weeks after that, he was delirious and slipped in and out of a coma. For twenty-four hours before his death, he did not speak, and at ten o’clock on the morning of November 8, 1887, he died. Kendrick said later that he and other locals took turns tending to Doc during those last weeks.155 Kate, whom Doc had not seen since she slipped out of Tombstone while Doc was in jail during the Spicer hearing in November 1881, would claim that Doc contacted her during his last illness. She wrote, “I went to him and we made up. I nursed him and attended him until he died.”156
Such a reunion would have been fitting, perhaps, but so far, no contemporary evidence has been found to support it. Instead, the record indicates that Doc died among strangers, without any dramatic last words. The first published report of his death, which appeared in the Aspen Daily Times, November 9, 1887, was simple and direct: “Glenwood Springs, Colo., November 8.—Doc Holliday died here this morning at the Hotel Glenwood and was buried this afternoon and was followed to the cemetery by a large number of kindred spirits.”
Father Downey was out of town attending to his duties as chaplain for the U.S. Army at Leadville, and the Glenwood Springs Ute Chief reported, “Rev. W. S. Rudolph delivered the funeral address, and the remains were consigned to their final resting place in Linwood cemetery, at 4 o’clock on the afternoon of November 8th, in the presence of many friends.”157 Expenses for the funeral were paid from a collection taken up among the gamblers, saloonmen, and other locals who had come to know Doc during those last months. The Chief also noted, “He only had one correspondent among his relatives—a cousin, a Sister of Charity [sic], in Atlanta, Georgia. She will be notified of his death, and will in turn advise any other relatives he may have living. Should there be an aged father or mother, they will be pleased to learn that kind and sympathetic hands were about their son in his last hours, and that his remains were accorded Christian burial.”158
The Denver Evening Times responded to the news with the simple statement, “Doc Holliday died in Glenwood on the 8th with his boots off.”159 Those would not be the final words on the subject of Doc Holliday, however. The man may have died, but his legend was still very much alive.
Chapter 12
THE ANATOMY OF A WESTERN LEGEND
Doc Holliday is ten feet tall and weighs a ton.
—Tucson Daily Star, June 11, 1882
Lorenzo D. Walters, in his book Tombstone’s Yesterday, preserved a tale about John Henry Holliday traveling to Deadwood, South Dakota, in the summer of 1882, after he left Denver. According to the yarn, Doc observed a bartender harassing a miner who came in for a drink simply because he would not order a second drink. When the harassment turned to threats, and the bartender drew a pistol to force the miner to buy another round, Doc intervened and shot the bartender in the wrist. The shot brought a crowd on the run, and when it turned on Doc, Doc stood with folded arms and dispersed the mob by simply saying, “Gentlemen, I am Doc Holliday of Tombstone.”1
John Henry would probably have found that story amusing, especially since in it he was the champion of a person being abused, the wounded bartender apologized for his rude behavior, and the whole crowd had a round of drinks afterward just to celebrate a happy ending. That, after all, is the way that stories about bona fide legends ought to end. However, in the earliest stories of Doc Holliday the image was always more ambig
uous, more confused, as if the legend makers could not quite make up their minds about who and what he was. Even when Doc was a hero, he was a dark hero, a man with demons who struggled as much against himself as with the forces arrayed against him. And yet, what is most remarkable is how quickly the image of Doc Holliday jelled into a surprisingly consistent image.
Sometimes, of course, the portrayal was simple—and sinister. The nationally circulated article from the Cincinnati Enquirer that came hard on the heels of his Denver adventure portrayed Doc as an evil man. Perry Mallon’s claim that Doc’s “record of shameless murders and robbery during this time throws the deeds of Jesse James, Billy the Kid or any other desperado entirely in the shade” was ludicrous on its face. Of course, this piece of nonsense was the setting for Mallon’s moment of glory with Doc’s arrest in Denver. The reporter who penned the piece said that he asked Mallon who Doc Holliday was: “‘Well, that’s hard to say,’ said Mallen [sic] thoughtfully, ‘unless perhaps, that he is the greatest scoundrel that ever went unhung.’” He said Doc was far worse than Jesse James, having a lesser reputation simply because he was so far removed from civilization. He claimed Doc had killed close to fifty men. With Doc’s arrest, “there’s no doubt that the future welfare and prosperity of Arizona is assured.”2
But Mallon’s attempt to influence the public view of John Henry Holliday failed as miserably as his effort to profit from Doc’s arrest. The image of Doc Holliday as a profligate and conscienceless man killer simply did not hold. In a New York Sun interview in 1886, that image began to subtly turn:
A crowd following a rather good looking man around, stopping when he stopped, listening as to an oracle when he had anything to say, and all time gaping at him in open-mouthed wonder, proclaimed the fact than an important personage was in town.
“Who is that duck?” an old miner asked.
“Sh-h-h!” replied a companion: “That’s Doc Holiday [sic]. He’s killed thirty men in his day, and there’s no telling when he’ll turn himself loose again.”
The article presented stories not unlike those in Mallon’s piece. One of many unnamed “early settlers” destined to talk about Doc proclaimed:
I remember one time in Tombstone he killed two men in one night, and the next day he called on the editor of the paper and said that, as he was opposed to sensational literature, he hoped there would be no undue prominence given to the occurrences of the evening before.
When the paper came out in the afternoon it had a three-line item saying that it was understood that two men had been found dead on the streets, but the reporter had not learned there [sic] names. The same issue had a long editorial article on the advantages of Arizona as a health resort.
The “early settler” repeated some stuff straight out of the Mallon presentation and concluded, “He could be tried now in any one of a half dozen States or Territories, and hanged for murder, but there is no disposition to press him, as it is remembered that the country was pretty wild in those days.”
Another “witness,” in a tale that was lifted almost entirely from the earlier Mallon piece, told the reporter about his run-in with Holliday and his gang near Fort Yuma and how “we ran like cowards.”
The Sun article did not leave the matter there, knee-deep in gore. It gave Doc a chance to respond, even though the feature writer took some obvious liberties with his comments. He had Doc admit to several killings, but then allowed him to justify what he had done. Doc told the crowd, “When any of you fellows have been hunted from one end of the country to the other, as I have been you’ll understand what a bad man’s reputation is built on. I’ve had credit for more killings than I ever dreamt of.” He then detailed examples of false charges against him, adding, “If you take the trouble to examine a good many of the crimes that I am charged with, you will find that when I have been charged with murder I have always been a long way off—never near at hand. That looks odd, don’t it? But it is just because I didn’t do it.”3
Doc finished by claiming for himself a positive role in the settlement of the Southwest. How much of the monologue was Doc’s and how much the reporter’s embellishments is hard to judge, but it gave a new kind of balance to Holliday’s story that took it beyond pure murder and mayhem.4 What emerged was the more complex figure that had been suggested, at least, in other writings from the Denver press during the extradition process in 1882. This view, while not always accurate in detail, had always stuck closer to the outlines of Doc’s life, and, perhaps more important, it carried with it the tantalizing mystique of the “good bad man” that captured Victorian readers already infatuated with “the passing of the frontier.”5
This image was furthered in Holliday’s obituaries in 1887. The tone of some of those death notices was doubtless the result of the sentimentality characteristic of Victorian obituary writing. It was fashionable not to speak ill of the dead, and obituaries had a way of being generous to the worst of scoundrels. Still, although often somewhat confused on the facts of his life, they contributed insights and helped to build the image of Doc Holliday that would be remembered. The Denver Republican said that “[h]e had the reputation of being a bunco-man, desperado and bad man generally, yet he was a very mild mannered man; was genial and companionable and had many excellent qualities.” After mentioning his “bloody encounters,” the editorial writer then described him: “He has strong friends in some old-time detective officers and in certain representatives of the sporting element. He was a rather good looking man and his coolness and courage, his affable ways and fund of interesting experiences, won him many admirers. He was a strong friend, a cool and determined enemy and a man of quite strong character.”6
Doc Holliday’s last photograph. This photograph was taken in 1887 by August W. Dennis, who was in Glenwood Springs for only one year, and an attached note on the back of the photograph was dated not more than twenty years later than the photo itself. It states that the picture was given to Wyatt Earp by Dr. Crook of Glenwood Springs. It was later given to Hiram Sutterfield by Wyatt Earp.
“Of him it can be said that he represented law and order at all times and places,” the Glenwood Springs Ute Chief declared in yet another obituary statement.7 In Valdosta, Georgia, his hometown newspaper said simply, “Dr. John Holliday, than whom no man was better known in the far west for the last ten years is dead. He was raised in Valdosta and was the son of Maj. H. B. Holliday, who has been a prominent citizen and for a number of terms major of our town.” It then reprinted the Republican obituary.8 The Denver Field and Farm noted his passing and added, “He always expected to die with his boots on, and his demise at Glenwood Springs must have been a considerable surprise to him.”9 These statements gave a shape to a far more interesting Doc Holliday story than the one-dimensional caricature that Perry Mallon had promoted.
As the century closed, even “blood and thunder” needed more than one killing after another to sell. At the very same moment that reformers were moving the sporting element from its semirespectable status in many communities of the West to the underworld, fascination with the frontier past and its characters was stronger than ever. Self-reliant men-at-arms were welcome as heroes, and they were all the more intriguing when they tested the limits of Victorian morality.10 Doc Holliday fit this mode, and through the decades on both sides of the new century, Doc Holliday’s image became surprisingly consistent regardless of whether he was viewed either as a positive or a negative figure.
“Thus departed one of those characters formerly quite common in the West, but now, like the Indian and the buffalo, becoming rare,” observed the Denver Republican in an important feature article written a few weeks after his death. “The doctor was as mild mannered as Byron’s ‘Pirate’ and perhaps he was not, after all, such a bad man.”11 This article, which included comments from “police officers and sporting men” who had actually known Doc, for all its sentimentality, might well be regarded as the first real effort to assess his life.
Here was presented a reason
ably accurate chronology of his life. The details were not always correct, and these misstatements would add to the legendary image of the “good bad man,” but the story did include details that would be of value to later writers trying to reconstruct his life. One was Doc’s use of the alias “Tom Mackey” while in Denver in 1876. Another was the insight it provided into the extradition process in 1882. Two of the reporter’s informants were the Denver detective Charles T. Linton, who had been the deputy sheriff assigned to the case when Doc was arrested in Denver in 1882, and John T. DeWeese, one of the attorneys who had represented him during the extradition process.
Linton regretted having helped Mallon arrest Doc. He deplored Mallon’s “abuse” of Doc and believed “that the crazy-headed actions of the Arizona deputy [Mallon] precipitated the troubles that followed and which resulted in Holliday’s never seeing Arizona again, but in making Colorado his personal residence.” Mallon’s imprudence stood in sharp contrast to Bob Paul’s cool and determined manner. “Had he come here first instead of the imprudent Arizona deputy, Mr. Linton believes things might have ended differently,” the Republican reported. The article also confirmed that Bob Paul had tried to convince Governor Frederick W. Pitkin that he could protect Doc if the requisition was granted, but that in the end, the influence of Doc’s friends on the governor was simply too great.
DeWeese, who provided some of the details about the extradition proceedings, was also cited as the source of another memorable quote attributed to Doc: “‘The doctor,’ says Colonel Deweese, ‘had just as lief kill a man as not. All he looked out for usually was to have the law on his side. I said to him one day: “Doctor, don’t your conscience ever trouble you?” “No,” he replied, with that peculiar cough of his, “I coughed that up with my lungs long ago.”’”12
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