56. Conway, Reconstruction of Georgia, 156–161.
57. Valdosta South Georgia Times, April 8, 1868; Wisenbaker, “First Impressions,” 54. The Quitman (Georgia) Banner, April 10, 1868, even suggested that the Republicans were themselves responsible, saying, “The negroes fled precipitately in every direction upon learning the discovery, but the leaders appeared perfectly unconcerned. It is the opinion of the majority of the citizens here that it was placed there designedly for political purposes. It was unquestionably a fine stroke for party capital, but they took every possible care for their safety by placing the smallest possible quantity of powder in the keg.” See also the Savannah (Georgia) News and Herald, April 7, 10, 1868.
58. South Georgia Times, April 8, 1868.
59. Shelton, Pines and Pioneers, 160–161; Savannah News and Herald, April 7, 10, 1868. On April 10, the News and Herald, while condemning the incident, added, “The idea that the young men of Valdosta would attempt with a handful of powder to blow up such a mass of villainy, ignorance, and vagabondism as must have composed Booby’s auditory, is perfectly absurd—especially when it is considered that the Guy Fawkes of the enterprise in exploding the powder to which no train or fuse was set, must necessarily have blown himself up with the rest. However fearless and self sacrificing the projector of such a plot might be, it is utterly preposterous to suppose that any white man would be willing to be blown to Ballahack or anywhere else in such company.”.
60. South Georgia Times, April 15, 1868; Savannah News and Herald, April 15, 20, 1868; see also Shelton, Pines and Pioneers, 161–162.
61. Savannah News and Herald, May 9, 1868; South Georgia Times, May 13, 1868; Shelton, Pines and Pioneers, 162–163; Bench Docket, May Term, 1868, Lowndes County Superior Court, bearing the notation “May Term, 1873, Indictment missing—probably disposed of heretofore.” Some of the critical military records appear to have been destroyed. See records, Third Military District, 1867–1868, LR, Box 6, RG 393, NARA. No additional information has been found on Henry Holliday. Only Henry Burroughs Holliday appears in the 1870 census for Lowndes County.
62. Wisenbaker, “First Impressions,” 54, says that “several of the young men who were at the head of this movement left town but returned later on,” and Zan Griffith, Doc’s friend, said, “[H]e, along with several others, endeavored to blow up the courthouse when the Freedmen’s Bureau had its headquarters there,” quoted in Pendleton and Thomas, “Doc’s Georgia Background,” 192; South Georgia Times, May 20, 1868; Wilcox, “Mischievous Minor,” 20. Tanner, Family Portrait, 60–61, places John Henry’s trip to Jonesboro after the celebrated shooting at the Withlacoochee (discussed in chapter 2) rather than after the courthouse incident. For reasons explored in chapter 3, the courthouse episode seems a more likely cause.
63. Tanner, Family Portrait, 61.
64. James E. Sefton, The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 198–205.
65. April 17, 1869, Deed Book Q, pp. 393, 394, OCSC, Lowndes County, Georgia.
66. Helen S. Haines and Robert Thorburn, 75 Years of Dentistry: Diamond Jubilee Volume of the Florida State Dental Association (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960), 45–46; Lake City (Florida) Citizen-Recorder, May 1, 1903; Wisenbaker, “First Impressions,” 50; Susan McKey Thomas to the author, November 24, 1974, author’s files; “List of Matriculants, March 1, 1867,” Dental Times: A Quarterly Journal of Dental Science (Spring 1867): 162.
67. George Holliday was married to Mary E. Wright on November 2, 1869. See Atlanta Constitution, December 21, 1915, and “Resolutions Passed in Honor of George Henry Holliday by the Board of Stewards of the First M. E. Church, Atlanta, Georgia, February 14, 1916,” copy in the McKellar Collection. Tanner, Family Portrait, 60–61, says that, based on the M. F. Holliday manuscript, John Henry’s uncle, Dr. John Stiles Holliday, had urged his nephew to go into dentistry during the time of his earlier Jonesboro stay.
68. J. Thomas Sharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 2:1662–1663; Milton B. Asbell, A Century of Dentistry: A History of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, 1878–1978 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 8; “Seventeenth Annual Announcement of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery” (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, 1872), 2, 4, 5, 10, 11. The announcement may also be found in the Dental Times 8 (April 1872): 186–189. The detailed accounting of John Henry’s curriculum is found in the Dental Times 8 (April 1872): 148–150.
69. John Henry’s early biographers, Myers, Doc Holliday, 21, and Jahns, Frontier World, 31, stated that he attended dental school in Baltimore, and this was the standard view. Joseph W. Looper, “John Henry Holliday, DDS: Georgia’s Most Famous Dentist,” Journal of the American Dental Association 87 (August 1973), 252, continued this view. However, the discovery of the photograph of young John Henry taken at the time of his graduation and bearing the name of a Philadelphia photographer raised the possibility that he attended school there. Dr. L. C. Holtzendorff, a dentist from Valdosta, Georgia, who had worked with Pendleton and Thomas during their research for In Search of the Hollidays, pursued the matter and first uncovered the Philadelphia connection. See Holtzendorff’s letter to the editor, Journal of the American Dental Association 88 (January 1974): 30. It is supposed that the reason for the Baltimore connection is the report that Holliday sailed from Savannah to Baltimore en route to dental school. Later, other, more contemporary references to Philadelphia would be found in newspaper accounts of Holliday’s life and career.
70. Tanner, Family Portrait, 63, 252n, reports that John Henry prepared a crown of pure swaged gold for a six-year-old girl that remained intact until the child died at the age of 102 in 1967. Dr. D. D. Allison confirmed her story with the Pierre Fouchard Academy in 1963, and later, on July 25, 1995, was interviewed by Tanner. The best evidence that John Henry practiced with Dr. Frink is found in the records of the Estate of Henry J. Morgan, Voucher 32, which show payment of $21 to John H. Holliday for filling six teeth and extracting three for Corinthia Morgan, on October 18, 1871, OCSC, p. 765. The Valdosta Daily Times, March 14, 1934, acknowledged Miss Morgan as one of the earliest settlers and an important source of information on early Valdosta. Unfortunately, she apparently recorded little of what she knew.
71. “Seventeenth Annual Announcement of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery,” 12; Philadelphia Inquirer, March 2, 1872; see also “Qualifications for Graduation,” Dental Times 8 (January 1871): 150.
72. Conway, Reconstruction of Georgia, 201–202.
73. Wisenbaker, “First Impressions,” 50; February 6, 1872, Deed Book C, pp. 654–655, OCSC, Lowndes County, Georgia.
74. Mary Katharine Harony Cummings, née Kate Elder, the woman with whom John Henry was involved during much of his Western career, wrote of John Henry, “After his graduation he remained in Philadelphia for a while, then went to St. Louis where he opened his office near the Planter’s Hotel on Fourth Street.” Typescript of Recollections of Mary Katharine Cummings as Given to Anton Mazzonovich, p. 1, original in the Kevin J. Mulkins Collection. John Henry had no office on Fourth, but August Jameson Fuches Jr. did. Dr. Fuches, John Henry’s classmate, was from St. Louis. His thesis was on the same topic as John Henry’s, diseases of the teeth. Fuches’s preceptor was Dr. Homer Judd, who had his office at 819 Locust Street, St. Louis. The 1873 St. Louis City directory also indicates that Judd was the president of the Missouri Dental College. With this connection, the new Dr. Fuches immediately opened an office at 722 South Fourth Street. The Fourth Street reference in Kate’s recollections is thus more than striking.
75. The first significant Hungarian immigration to Iowa came as the result of the 1848–1850 revolution, which attempted to separate Hungary from the Hapsburg empire. Laslo Ujhazi led a group of refugees to Decatur County in southern Iowa, where they acquired thousands of acres and formed New Buda. The colony did n
ot last, but Hungarian immigrants continued to move into Iowa, with a sizable number settling in Davenport. See Bela Vassady, “A Colony of Hungarian Forty-eighters in Iowa,” The Annals of Iowa 51 (Summer 1991): 26–52; Hildegard Binder Johnson, German Forty-eighters in Davenport (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1946). Michael Harony and his wife, Katharina Baldizar Harony and their children, including the daughter who would become Kate Elder, settled in Davenport in 1863; just when the family arrived in the United States is less clear. Mrs. Ernest L. Beckwith to Glenn G. Boyer, January 22, 1977, quoted in Glenn G. Boyer, “On the Trail of Big Nosed Kate,” Real West 24 (March 1981): 17–18, and verified with Arthur W. Bork. See also Patrick A. Bowmaster, “A Fresh Look at ‘Big Nose Kate,’” Quarterly of the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History 22 (July–September 1998): 12–24.
76. Papers relating to the Estate of Dr. Michael Harony, Case File No. 0453, County Court, Scott County, Iowa, contain the details of the guardianship of the Harony minor children under both Gustavus Susemihl and Otto Smith. Susemihl was married to Dr. Harony’s half-sister, Amelia; Otto Smith was the family attorney.
77. Beckwith to Boyer, January 22, 1977, quoted in Boyer, “Big Nosed Kate,” p. 17, stated emphatically that Kate said that she assumed the name Kate Fisher. The same information from the family was also provided to Arthur W. Bork, as outlined in Bork to Susan McKey Thomas, May 26, 1977, copy in the author’s files. Kate Fisher was well known as the “best of ‘Mazeppas’” in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Mazeppa, or the Wild Horse of Tartary was a popular and scandalous play at the time. See the Brooklyn (New York) Eagle, July 15, 1918.
78. In U.S. Census, 1870, St. Louis, Ward Five, p. 821, M593, Reel 814, NARA. Kate is listed as “about 23,” which would be older than she actually was if reported accurately. She also lists her birthplace as “Baden” rather than Hungary, but this does not seem farfetched for a runaway with an accent in a community where Germans were plentiful.
79. Several different reminiscences by Kate exist. Cummings, Mazzanovich typescript, 1, is critical for the St. Louis period. Mazzanovich also prepared a series of columns based on her recollections for the Bisbee (Arizona) Brewery Gulch Gazette, April 15, 22, 29, June 3, 1932. The April 22 column “John H. (Doc) Holliday” and the June 3 column “Big Nosed Kate” are the most relevant to this portion of the story. Joe Chisholm’s unpublished manuscript, “Tombstone’s Tale (The Truth of Helldorado),” typescript in the Jack Burrows Collection, included much of the Mazzanovich material, but Chisholm added some information from his interviews with her. Arthur W. Bork also took down Kate’s story, which was eventually published as Arthur W. Bork and Glenn G. Boyer, “The O.K. Corral Fight at Tombstone: A Footnote by Kate Elder,” Arizona and the West 19 (Spring 1977): 75–84, but it did not mention the early years, nor did her letter to her niece, Lillie Raffert, March 18, 1940, copy in the author’s file. The Raffert letter was published in Bob Boze Bell, The Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday (Phoenix, AZ: Tri Star–Boze Publications, 1994), 107–110.
80. In all her various accounts cited earlier, and in a few other fragments, Kate misremembered dates (not an uncommon failing in old-timer reminiscences). Her accounts are sometimes inaccurate and seem duplicitous at times, as if she wished to cover up parts of her past or vent decades-old anger, but, even with the confusion she reveals knowledge that could not be chance. In this case, for instance, she said that John Henry went home to claim his grandmother’s inheritance, rather than his mother’s, but the inheritance is a milestone hard to dismiss. See Cummings Mazzanovich typescript.
81. Tanner, Family Portrait, 67–72.
82. H. Herbert Johnson, ed., Biographies of Past Presidents of the Georgia State Dental Society (Atlanta: Georgia State Dental Society, 1926), 20; Georgia Dental Association, History of Dentistry in Georgia (Macon, GA: Southern Press, 1962), 23–26, 34–35, 37, 40.
83. Tanner, Family Portrait, 72–74. “John H. Haliday, Atlanta” was listed as practicing dentistry in Georgia before August 24, 1872, in the Columbus Daily Sun, April 2, 1873.
84. Deed Book F, p. 95, OCSC, Spalding County, Georgia.
85. Tanner, Family Portrait, 69.
3. Gone to Texas
1. Atlanta Constitution, January 4, 1873. Dr. Ford announced his return to the city in the Constitution, April 11, 1873. In May, he was elected president of the Georgia State Dental Society, and in his opening address, he announced that he had made the treatment of children’s teeth a specialty, see Georgia Dental Association, History of Dentistry in Georgia (Macon, GA: Southern Press, 1962), 47. He later moved his office from Whitehall to the corner of Broad and Alabama, Atlanta Constitution, June 1, 1873. That summer he went north to attend yet another convention and returned in September. Atlanta Constitution, September 28, 1873. But his health continued to deteriorate.
2. See also Atlanta Constitution, December 29, 1872.
3. Martha Anne Holliday (Sister Mary Melanie), “Memoirs of the Holliday Family in Georgia,” unpublished manuscript, Catherine Holliday Neuhoff Collection, 3.
4. Mrs. Martha E’Dalgo, Affidavit, April 17, 1891, and supporting documents, Francisco E’Dalgo, Widow’s Pension File, Confederate Service Records, Civil War Records Section, Georgia State Department of Archives and History, Atlanta, Georgia; Victoria Wilcox, “Mischievous Minor: From Lad to Lunger, True West 48 (November–December 2001): 21; Angeline Delegal to Susan McKey Thomas, January 10, 28, 1995. E’Dalgo’s gravestone indicates that he was a Mason.
5. Deed Book F, pp. 95–96, Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, Spalding County, Georgia.
6. Griffin (Georgia) News, August 10, 1872.
7. Griffin News, August 4, 1872.
8. Judge L. P. Goodrich wrote in a 1940 article for the Griffin News that his father had told him that John Henry practiced dentistry in Griffin, copy of undated article provided to the author by Bill Dunn, and Quimby Melton Jr., History of Griffin (Griffin, GA: Griffin Daily News, 1959), 45, also says that he did. Jackie Kennedy, “Uncovering the Myth: Doc Holliday and His Griffin, GA Home,” Georgia Backroads 2 (Winter 2003): 39, details the evidence of a dental office in the building. John Henry was certainly in Griffin in November when he registered his deed to his portion of the Iron Front Building, Deed Book F, p. 1, OCSC, Spalding County, Georgia. He was almost certainly not living with John Stiles Holliday at this point, because on December 20, 1872, he was registered at the National Hotel. Atlanta Constitution, December 21, 1872. He therefore had time to have practiced in Griffin briefly. However, when Henry conveyed the property held under guardianship to John Henry in September, he was listed as a resident of the “County of Fulton” and when John Henry registered at the National in December, he gave his address as “the city.” If he did practice in Griffin, then he most likely did so between September and December 1872, or after he sold his property there in January 1873.
9. Griffin News, December 13, 1872.
10. The State of Georgia v. Lee Smith, Keeping a Gaming Table, April Term, 1872, Fulton County Superior Court. Lee Smith, age twenty-six, was keeping a saloon in Ward One when the census taker came in 1870. U.S. Census, 1870, p. 188, M593, Reel 151, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. His saloon was at 13 Peachtree, according to the 1870 Atlanta City Directory. A summary of Smith’s employment is found in Gene Carlisle, Why Doc Holliday Left Georgia (Macon, GA: Carl Isle, 2004), 115–118; see also Atlanta Constitution, March 10, August 24, 1872; Griffin News, September 11, 1872.
11. Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 21.
12. Ibid. Jonathan Harrington Green, An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, Designed Especially As a Warning to the Youthful and Inexperienced against the Evils of That Odious and Destructive Vice (Philadelphia: N.p., 1847), 217–219, warned that a man “would act more rationally and correctly to burn his money than to bet it on faro.” The problem, nineteenth-centu
ry observers noted, was that it was virtually impossible to find an honest faro game. Nevertheless, it remained very popular.
13. John R. Sanders, “Faro: Favorite Gambling Game of the Frontier,” Wild West (October 1996).
14. Atlanta Daily Sun, May 28, 1872; State v. Lee Smith, Assault with Intent to Murder, Fulton County Superior Court; Carlisle, Why Doc Left, 116–117.
15. Carlisle, Why Doc Left, 117–118.
16. Karen Holliday Tanner, Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 48–49, 58–60, 70–71, 88–89, 92, based on Sophie Walton Murphy, “Recollections of Sophie Walton, 1930–32, as told to Carl Birger Olson,” typed manuscript, in the Karen Holliday Tanner Collection, Nita Stewart Haley Memorial Library and J. Evetts Haley History Center, Midland, Texas (restricted collection), says that Sophie Walton, a mulatto servant in the John Stiles Holliday household, taught the Holliday children, including John Henry after he moved into his uncle’s household, to play cards. This is also detailed in Tanner to Susan McKey Thomas, July 17, 1994. Walton reportedly joined the Holliday household in 1864, after her owner, “Mr. Walton,” could no longer care for her. She was eight years old at the time, which would make her five years younger than John Henry, and only sixteen when he moved into his uncle’s house. Since she joined the family at eight, some question does arise as to where she learned the games she taught the boys. While she could have picked up the games and even shared them with the Holliday boys, John Henry, at twenty-one, was almost certainly a gambler by the time he arrived at John Stiles Holliday’s home. Basic gambling games were a part of the education of boys in the South at the time. Also troubling is that Sophie Walton does not appear in the household of John Stiles Holliday in the U.S. census for 1870 or for 1880. “M[artha] A. Fuller,” a black female servant, age twenty-five, and a twelve-year-old male mulatto servant named “Jno. Jones” are listed in the Holliday household in 1870, U.S. Census, 1870, Fourth Ward, Atlanta, Georgia, p. 96, M593, Reel 151, NARA; Martha Fuller and B. F. Charles, a seven-year-old black female appear in the 1880 census, U.S. Census for 1880, Fourth Ward, Atlanta, Georgia, T-9–148, p. 2. Much appreciated was Karen Tanner to the author, February 6, 18, 2004, for more information on the Walton recollections. For information on Robert A. Holliday, see “Nineteenth Annual Announcement of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery” (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, 1874), 12; Tanner, Family Portrait, 75–77. Robert was older than John Henry and had worked in his father’s grocery business.
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