Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  To some he seemed cold blooded, but he was not a killer. His record never supported the claims of numerous homicides. His apparent willingness to kill was sufficient to build the reputation. Doubtless, he was skilled with firearms. Although he probably was not as proficient as Wyatt Earp claimed, even those who disliked him said that he was “noted for his coolness under fire as well as his skill as a dead shot.”2 In the street fight, Doc was cool, controlled, accurate, and deadly. In a few episodes, he seemed amateurish. Perhaps alcohol explained the difference. However, whether deadly accurate or grossly inaccurate, again, he was willing. He did not hesitate. His sense of honor would not allow it.

  Doc drank too much. That seems clear. Whether his drinking problem developed from a debauched lifestyle or efforts to forget his lost dreams, or as a treatment for his tuberculosis is immaterial. How it affected him was always the subject of disagreement. Some claimed that he grew steadier the more he drank, but there were episodes in his life that are explained best as the consequence of too much alco-hol. Some said that he was a mean drunk; others said he became more mellow. He may well have developed a high tolerance for alcohol, although a standard ration of two quarts a day is likely a tall tale.

  Holliday lived in a netherworld. True enough, in the boom camps of the West gambling and saloonkeeping were “respectable” in the sense that they were essential to the economic and political life of the towns, but contrary to much of the popular literature on the West, the gambler’s lifestyle did not enjoy the same level of respectability as other professions. It was, after all, the Victorian era, with all of its moralism and rigid standards of conduct. As the boom camps stabilized into more permanent communities, gambling and saloonkeeping were gradually pushed into their own districts if not eliminated entirely.3 Doc understood this fact of life and accepted it. By Victorian standards, he was not a “good man,” but accusations that he was a con man, capper, “top and bottom” man, or other tinhorn are largely the product of rumor mills and reform initiatives that assumed that all gamblers were crooked.

  Doc fell into the gambler’s life easily enough. He was likely introduced to the saloon world in Philadelphia, and he certainly experienced it in Atlanta in places like Lee Smith’s various enterprises. It was not uncommon for business and professional men to frequent saloons in those days. He “deviated from the path of rectitude” in Dallas and gradually cut ties with the life he had known at faro tables, bars, and cribs. Self-pity, disillusionment, and bitterness were the hounds that drove him, and yet somehow the values of his youth never allowed him to reach the depravity he might have fallen into. Even his relationship with Kate Elder, while stormy, never became the abusive tryst that was later “remembered” by those with reasons to portray him as wicked.4 His biggest battle was always with himself. That was why Mattie Holliday was so important to him; he needed her and what she stood for as anchors.

  Despite the reminiscences of several who knew Doc, it is hard to find the glib and urbane wag the legend favors in portrayals of him. He could be genial and even funny, but he struggled to maintain a pleasant demeanor, which accounts for the contradictory views of him as sour and friendly. The few interviews that he gave do reveal a wry sense of humor. Nor is it surprising, given his condition, that his humor had a sardonic and caustic edge. He was not above spinning a yarn or two—another Southern tradition—for the benefit of the press. Telling a “windy” gave the press what it wanted, but his interviews—and all of them came after Tombstone—make clear that he thought of himself as an honorable man.5

  “There is no doubt in my mind that Doc Holliday was loyal to his friends and a ‘dead game sport’—whether he was playing poker, or pulling the trigger,” John P. Clum wrote of Holliday in 1929. “I made a stage trip with him once from Tucson to Tombstone. He told me he came to Arizona, expecting to die from tuberculosis, and he intimated that this ailment often eliminated the joy of living and the fear of death, and that, while he would not deliberately provoke a gun fight, neither would he take the trouble to avoid it, as it might prove the boon that would end it all for him. You can understand that, in that frame of mind, he, doubtless, was a loyal friend and ‘game’ as a gambler, or in a gun fight, but he was not a constructive citizen.”

  Clum’s appraisal was a fair one. His recollection provides a plausible explanation for Doc’s behavior in Tombstone by a man who disliked Holliday and blamed him for much of the trouble there. Clum was right, too, when he said that Holliday was not a “constructive citizen.” By almost any standard, he was not a “good man.” No one understood that better than he. Yet Doc was a man with admirable qualities, and his struggle with ancient core values that he himself questioned made his a tragic life, not merely a wasted one, and this perhaps explains why he remains such a compelling figure.6

  There was an anger, amounting to an essence, in John Henry Holliday long before the doctor proclaimed him dying from a disease he already knew and understood and detested from experience. Blame it on the absence—or distance—of his father, the sickness and loss of his mother, the bloody times in which he reached puberty, or hopeless love. Whatever it was, it was there before he ever set foot outside of Georgia for the first time, and it made it unlikely that he could have lived his life peacefully as a partner in a Georgia dental practice, with or without consumption. Robert Alexander Holliday was what he should have been—respectable, successful, and prosperous. Doc could not have been those things. He was consumed by an inner fire that would not let him be.

  What is most remarkable is the extent to which he kept his anger at bay. It was held in check by a code he could not expunge, no matter how much his cynicism told him that it was false and meaningless, until at last he recovered hope in a bloody exorcism that banished the rage and validated the code. He discovered meaning on the back trails of southeastern Arizona and, ironically, calmed the fury inside him in the violent exigency of vendetta. He found release in the meaning of an experience that restored his desire to live. Afterward, though, he was left with nothing but the emptiness of notoriety, and it drained away the power that had renewed his passion for life, until, at last, he lost the hope he had so recently found. Ironically, at the very moment he recovered the will to live, he lost all the reasons for wanting to live. Other men found in the image of him the very thing that he himself could not find. The legend failed only the man behind the legend.

  This piecemeal and incomplete portrait does suggest several critical things about Doc Holliday. He was not a robber. Efforts to link him to the Benson stage robbery and the murder of Bud Philpott were always strained simply because these acts were so inconsistent with the rest of his life. Moreover, he would not have done such a thing because it would have jeopardized his friendship with Wyatt Earp. Doc’s anger with Ike Clanton was due as much to Ike’s willingness to betray his friends as to Ike’s allegations against him and Wyatt. Similarly, his respect for Wyatt and his position in the community were enough to have prevented him from firing the first shot in the street fight. Once his friendship with Wyatt was sealed in Tombstone—and that likely came later than generally supposed—Doc honored it.

  That did not mean that he was Wyatt Earp’s lapdog, however. Wyatt did watch over him, but Doc had a mind of his own and went his own way most of the time. He was Wyatt’s business partner in Tombstone. He respected Earp’s position, and after the Joyce fiasco he tried to stay clear of trouble. He stood with his friend in the street fight, and he was loyal to Wyatt during the vendetta. Even Kate’s bitterness over Wyatt’s “hold” on Doc may well have had more to do with some previous animosity toward Wyatt than Doc’s infatuation with Earp. During the Tombstone years, Holliday clearly moved about freely, in and out of Tombstone, following gambling opportunities, and once the vendetta posse was out of Arizona and Wyatt did not need him anymore, he once again went his own way.

  Still, enough mystery, uncertainty, and controversy encompass John Henry Holliday’s life that it would be foolhardy to claim that any statem
ent about him is definitive. He was a complicated, troubled man, living in a difficult time, involved in events that were even then controversial. His life was eventually further obscured by his own notoriety long before he took the stage to Glenwood Springs and the end of the trail. He left impressions more than evidence.7 Arguably, his story was not significant historically, but it was the stuff of high drama that continues to make him irresistible to novelists, screenwriters, and historians.

  After all this time, nobody has truly dropped the loop on John Henry Holliday. Perhaps it is fitting that Black Jack, one of the characters of Alfred Henry Lewis, that spinner of tales from Doc’s own time, should have the last word. Reflecting on Doc Holliday’s life to Mr. Masterson over a drink following Doc’s funeral, Black Jack declared, “We’ll shorely miss him from our midst. An’ when I think on his career, sort o’ run over it hittin’ the high places, I’m here to observe that Mr. Holliday was the vividest invalid an’ the busiest, bar none, with which I ever crossed up. He certainly was an in-dee-fat-ig-a-ble sick man; an’ that goes as it lays.”8

  It is hard to argue with that.

  NOTES

  Prologue: The Measure of a Man

  1. Glenwood Springs (Colorado) Ute Chief, November 9, 1887.

  2. Denver Republican, November 10, 1887.

  3. San Francisco Examiner, August 2, 1896.

  4. William Barclay Masterson, “Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier: Doc Holliday,” Human Life (May 1907): 5.

  5. San Francisco Examiner, May 27, 1882.

  6. Las Vegas Daily Optic, July 20, 1881.

  7. Valdosta (Georgia) Daily Times, February 11, 1888.

  8. Gunnison (Colorado) Daily News-Democrat, June 18, 1882.

  9. San Francisco Examiner, May 11, 1882.

  10. Denver Rocky Mountain News, October 23, 1898.

  11. Tombstone (Arizona) Daily Epitaph, July 29, 1882.

  12. At the time of Holliday’s death, the Glenwood Springs Ute Chief reported that Doc had corresponded with only one member of his family through the years and that that correspondence was apparently destroyed. In fact, he appears to have had at least sporadic correspondence with others, so it is still possible that some Holliday papers may be found.

  1. Child of the Southern Frontier

  1. Sylvia D. Lynch, Aristocracy’s Outlaw: The Doc Holliday Story (New Tazewell, TN: Iris, 1994).

  2. Kenneth Coleman, ed., A History of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 126.

  3. Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988).

  4. John W. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 3–57.

  5. E. Merton Coulter, Georgia: A Short History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1947), 220.

  6. The literature is extensive. One of the best summaries is also one of the older accounts reprinted from the Bureau of American Ethnology Reports of the Smithsonian Institution: James Mooney, Historical Sketch of the Cherokee (Chicago: Aldine, 1975), 110–124. Another valuable perspective is provided in Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1922), 1:729–779.

  7. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 254–271.

  8. See Theda Perdue and Michael D. Greene, eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995); Stan Hoig, Night of the Cruel Moon: Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears (New York: Facts on File, 1996); John Ehle, The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

  9. For an interesting examination of the “Jacksonian character,” see Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1969), 5–38.

  10. Martha Anne Holliday (Sister Mary Melanie), “Memoirs of the Holliday Family in Georgia,” unpublished family papers, Catherine Holliday Neuhoff Collection; Henry Burroughs Holliday to Robert Alexander Holliday, May 7, 1884, Constance Knowles McKellar Collection; Karen Holliday Tanner, Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 235–238.

  11. Rachel Martin Holliday, Widow’s Pension Claim File, Veteran’s Bureau Records, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

  12. Tanner, Family Portrait, 237.

  13. Henry B. Holliday, Military Service Record, Captain Stell’s Company, First Georgia Volunteers, United States Army Command, RG 393, NARA; Rachel Holliday, Widow’s Pension Claim File, VBR, RG 15, NARA.

  14. From an anonymous letter published in Niles’ Register, July 24, 1838, quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 166–167.

  15. Mooney, Historical Sketch, 124.

  16. Henry Holliday, MSR, USAC, RG 393, NARA; see also Albert Pendleton Jr. and Susan McKey Thomas, “Doc Holliday’s Georgia Background,” Journal of Arizona History 14 (Autumn 1973): 194–195.

  17. Coulter, Georgia, 265.

  18. Clement Eaton, History of the Old South, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 52–67, 388–415; Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992); Mark M. Smith, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); William Kaufmann Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: Norton, 2003).

  19. W. J. Cash, Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1941), 3–60, challenged the “cavalier tradition” in a bold way, although others would later claim that it was already a straw man by the time he wrote. Perhaps, but it is still a part of popular history, and Cash’s ideas have always stimulated controversy. Especially critical of his work was Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Vintage, 1969), 137–143, who reasserted the aristocratic pretensions of Southern slaveholders. C. Vann Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 261–283, offered a balanced review of Cash. More recent literature suggests that the debate is not over, but Cash’s point is especially relevant for the purposes of this work, and his critics merely underscore it. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), passim, explores Southern notions of honor in depth, and McWhiney, Cracker Culture, is valuable to this general topic.

  20. Cash, Mind of the South, 40.

  21. Ibid., 30–49; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 88–114.

  22. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 33–34, 89–92.

  23. Sheldon Hackney, “Southern Violence,” American Historical Review 74 (1969): 906–925; Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 368–369; McWhiney, Cracker Culture, 146–170.

  24. Cash, Mind of the South, 44. Cash adds, “However careful they might be to walk softly, such men as these of the South were bound to come into conflict. And being what they were—simple, direct, and immensely personal—and their world being what it was—conflict with them could only mean immediate physical clashing, could only mean fisticuffs, the gouging ring, and knife and gun play.”

  25. Henry Holliday, MSR, USAC, RG 393, NARA.

  26. Ibid.; Pendleton and Thomas, “Doc’s Georgia Background,” 202n.

  27. Affidavit of witnesses, W. H. Powell and W. H. McKey, February 25, 1887, Mexican War Pensions, VA, RG 15, NARA.

  28. License and Marriage Bond, Marriage Book C., p. 11; Minute Book A, pp. 62, 100, 132, Records of the Ordinary’s Office, Spaldin
g County, Georgia; Albert S. Pendleton Jr. and Susan McKey Thomas, In Search of the Hollidays: The Story of Doc Holliday and His Holliday and McKey Families (Valdosta, GA: Little River, 1973), 4, 13.

  29. Pendleton and Thomas, In Search of the Hollidays, 13–14; Victoria Wilcox, “Mischievous Minor: From Lad to Lunger,” True West 48 (November–December 2001): 19; Susan McKey Thomas Genealogical Notes. In 1838, Aaron Cloud constructed “Cloud’s Tower,” a 165-foot-high observation platform on Stone Mountain to attract attention to the area and to Andrew Johnson’s hotel after the construction of a railroad west from Augusta. In 1849, the tower blew over in a windstorm and was replaced by a smaller edifice. David B. Freeman, Carved in Stone: The History of Stone Mountain (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 28–29.

  30. Pendleton and Thomas, In Search of the Hollidays, 4; Deed Book A, pp. 52, 53, 56, 62, 457, 458, 615; Deed Book B, p. 167, Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, Spalding County, Georgia; Quimby Melton Jr., History of Griffin (Griffin, GA: Griffin Daily News, 1959), 43–50.

  31. Alice Jane Holliday’s obituary, written by Reverend N. B. Ousley for the Valdosta South Georgia Watchman in September 1866, clipping in the scrapbook of Anabelle Myddelton, a Valdosta school teacher, in the possession of Helen Hightower, Valdosta, Georgia.

  32. Henry Burroughs Holliday Family Bible, Collections of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Virginia Beach, Virginia.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid.; Baptismal Records, First Presbyterian Church, Griffin, Georgia; see also Wilcox, “Mischievous Minor,” 19.

  35. “Recollections of Mary Cowperwaite Fulton Holliday (Mrs. Robert Alexander Holliday, D.D.S.) Concerning John Henry Holliday, D.D.S., Collected and Transcribed by Carl Birger Olson between 1935 and 1940,” typed manuscript, quoted in Tanner, Family Portrait, 13–14. This manuscript has been placed in the Karen Holliday Tanner Collection of Holliday family memorabilia and research materials at the Nita Stewart Haley Memorial Library and J. Evetts Haley History Center, Midland, Texas, which is under restriction for a period of ten years (from 1999) to allow Tanner to complete additional work on Holliday. As a result, the author has been unable to examine the Mary Fulton Holliday manuscript directly. However, letters from John T. Tanner to the author, January 1, 1999, and from Karen Holliday Tanner to the author, February 6, 1999, provided quotes from the document related to the cleft palate and other matters.