Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  60. Leadville Daily Herald, August 26, 1884.

  61. Tucson Daily Citizen, April 4, 1885. Notably, the paper mentioned that “Tyler was a Pacific and Holliday an easterner. There was an indistinguishable rivalry and animosity existing between the factions.”

  62. Leadville (Colorado) Daily Democrat, July 22, 1884.

  63. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 20, 1884.

  64. Leadville Carbonate Chronicle, July 24, 1884.

  65. Leadville Evening Chronicle, August 20, 1884; Leadville Carbonate Chronicle, April 4, 1885.

  66. Leadville Evening Chronicle, August 20, 1884.

  67. The author is especially grateful to Robin Andrews, who is researching Tombstone’s William Allen, and to Regina Andrus, who is researching Leadville’s William Allen, for critical information that makes it clear that they were not the same man.

  68. Leadville Evening Chronicle, August 20, 1884.

  69. Leadville Daily Herald, August 26, 1884.

  70. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 9, 1884.

  71. Leadville Evening Chronicle, August 26, 1884.

  72. Testimony of William Allen, Patrick Sweeney, and Frank Lomeister, Leadville Daily Herald, August 26, 1884.

  73. Testimony of Ed Doude, Patrick Lorden, and James Ryan, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  74. Testimony of Charles Robinson and J. H. Holliday, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  75. Testimony of Lomeister, Sweeney, H. S. Faucett, Edmund Bradbury, and Holliday, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  76. Denver Daily Rocky Mountain News, October 23, 1898.

  77. Testimony of Holliday, Leadville Daily Herald, August 26, 1884.

  78. Testimony of Patrick Lorden, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  79. Testimony of Bradbury and Kellerman, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  80. Testimony of Dr. F. F. D’Avignon, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  81. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 20, 1884.

  82. Leadville Evening Chronicle, August 20, 1884.

  83. Ibid.

  84. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 23, 1884.

  85. Ibid.

  86. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 21, 22, 1884.

  87. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 22, 1884.

  88. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 24, 1884; Leadville Daily Herald, August 26, 1884.

  89. Testimony of Henry Kellerman, Sweeney, William Reynolds, Charles Robinson, Ryan, and Lorden, Leadville Daily Herald, August 26, 1884.

  90. Testimony of Lomeister, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  91. Testimony of Kellerman, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  92. Testimony of Lomeister, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  93. Testimony of Reynolds, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  94. Testimony of Robinson, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  95. Testimony of Ryan and Lorden, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  96. Testimony of Mannie Hyman, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  97. Testimony of J. H. Holliday, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  98. Testimony of Cy Allen, ibid., August 26, 1884.

  99. Ibid., August 26, 1884. In this account of the fight, Roberts used materials other than the testimony from the preliminary hearing cited, including newspaper accounts and testimony from the trial in March 1885, as described in Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 2:1608–1611.

  100. Leadville Daily Democrat, August 26, 1884.

  101. Leadville Evening Chronicle, August 26, 1884; Leadville Daily Herald, August 27, 1884. The Leadville Daily Democrat, August 30, 1884, reported: “Two sureties have qualified on Doc Holliday’s bond, and several more will be necessary before the court will approve it. These his friends have been unable thus far to procure, and the chances of his being released become a trifle more gloomy every day.”

  102. Leadville Daily Democrat, September 3, 1884.

  103. Case No. 258, The People of the State of Colorado v. John Holliday, alias Doc Holliday, Records of the Criminal Court, Lake County, Colorado.

  104. Leadville Daily Democrat, September 7, 1884.

  105. Leadville Daily Democrat, September 9, 1884.

  106. Leadville Daily Democrat, September 2, 3, 11, 1884.

  107. Yuma Arizona Sentinel, September 13, 1884. The item was also picked up by other Arizona papers.

  108. Leadville Evening Chronicle, October 27, 1884.

  109. Leadville Evening Chronicle, October 28, 1884.

  110. Leadville Carbonate Chronicle, March 22, 1885.

  111. Leadville Evening Chronicle, December 19, 1884; Leadville Daily Democrat, December 16, 23, 1884.

  112. Leadville Daily Democrat, December 20, 1884.

  113. Leadville Evening Chronicle, February 28, 1885.

  114. Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 2:1587.

  115. Denver Daily Tribune-Republican, March 28, 1885.

  116. For the trial, Roberts relied chiefly on the Leadville Carbonate Chronicle, as presented in Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 2:1608–1611, but the authors note, “Because of the tremendous amount of repetitious material published in the weekly Carbonate Chronicle, some deletions have been made in the account of the trial quoted.” For this reason, and this reason alone, citations of testimony will be given from Griswold and Griswold rather than the newspaper itself.

  117. Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 2:1609–1610.

  118. Ibid., 2:1610.

  119. Ibid., 2:1610.

  120. Ibid., 2:1611. Unfortunately, the Leadville Carbonate Chronicle summarized his testimony very briefly in contrast to a more detailed review of the testimony of most other witnesses.

  121. Copies of the instructions to the jury as presented by the judge are found in Case No. 258, Colorado v. Holliday, Records of the Criminal Court.

  122. Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 2:1611.

  123. Ibid., 2:1611. The defense’s case rested on the principle that if Holliday believed that he had been threatened, he was justified in shooting Allen. The jury bought the argument.

  124. New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 16, 1885, and Valdosta Daily Times, April 18, 1885, confirm Henry Holliday’s attendance at the reunion of Mexican War veterans. Zan Griffith told Charles R. Dasher, an old-time Valdosta newspaperman, that he had gone with Major Holliday to take care of him and that he was present at the reunion of father and son. See Albert Pendleton Jr. and Susan McKey Thomas, “Doc Holliday’s Georgia Background,” Journal of Arizona History 14 (Autumn 1973): 202– 203. Even Pendleton and Thomas describe the story of a reunion as gossip. Susan McKey Thomas to Gary L. Roberts, August 24, 1994, relates the story of Kathryn H. Gardner, regarding Griffith’s visits with Doc in the West as a young man of seventeen or eighteen. Griffith’s obituary, Valdosta Daily Times, December 21, 1943, states, “As a young man he spent some time in Texas and Arizona. While there he was associated more or less intimately with the late ‘Doc’ Holliday.” Griffith was living at the Valdes Hotel at the time, but he lost all of his belongings, including his correspondence with Doc and a saddle Doc had given him on one of his trips west, when the hotel burned in the 1920s. He left no record of his Western adventures. 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), 34.

  In my own conversation with Joe Davis, another Valdosta reporter, in 1961, he mentioned an elderly gentleman who had gone West as a boy and spent some time with Doc. He said that the man had shown him things that Doc had given Doc. J. P. Johnson of High Point, North Carolina, also recalled Griffith and his stories about Doc. Johnson to Albert S. Pendleton Jr., July 8, 1998. It is plausible that Griffith might have traveled with Major Holliday to New Orleans and possible, at least, that they could have met Doc there. Several facts argue against Doc being there, however. First, Doc was not flush with money at the time. Second, his health was deteriorating rapidly. Finally, as the Wyatt Earp biographer Casey Tefertiller argues, and Doc himself appeared to confirm at the time of the Allen shooting, be
cause of the warrant issued for him in Arizona, he was afraid to leave Colorado for fear of another extradition attempt. The story is intriguing, but for now, Pendleton and Thomas, In Search of the Hollidays, 30, state the situation well: “A meeting might well have been arranged; but, of course, there is no known proof that such a meeting ever did take place.”

  125. Gene Carlisle, Why Doc Holliday Left Georgia (Macon, GA: Carl Isle, 2004), 150–154, takes the combination of events in New Orleans and the registration of one A. J. Holliday at the Hotel Royal on April 2, 1885, and makes a highly speculative argument that Doc was in New Orleans.

  126. Aspen (Colorado) Daily Times, June 12, 1885.

  127. Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 2:1611.

  128. Jay, “Holliday’s Last Stand,” 45, summarizes most of the known data.

  129. Leadville Herald-Democrat, April 4, 1876; Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 2:2223.

  130. Clipping from a Cripple Creek, Colorado, newspaper, circa 1897, from a notebook in the possession of Regina Andrus, the great-granddaughter of Billy Allen.

  131. Regina Andrus to Gary L. Roberts, August 15, 2001. City records indicate that while in Nome, Allen, who was acting as a deputy U.S. marshal, arrested Wyatt Earp on July 6, 1900. The case, U.S. v. W. S. Erp [sic], apparently concerned operating a saloon without a liquor license. Earp paid a fine of $50 and costs of $13.50 on July 7, 1900. He and his partner, Charles Hoxie, applied for and were granted the license later in the month. Copies of Nome City Records provided to Roberts by Tatyana Stepanova, Alaska State Archives, Juneau, Alaska, August 24, 2001.

  132. Eugene Parsons to Stuart N. Lake, June 30, 1930, Stuart N. Lake Collection, Box 10, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Tanner, Family Portrait, 213–214.

  133. Lynn R. Bailey and Don Chaput, Cochise County Stalwarts: A Who’s Who of the Territorial Years (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore, 2000), 1:206–210. Lynn R. Bailey, The Valiants: The Tombstone Rangers and Apache War Frivolities (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore, 1999), covers Joyce’s life in more detail.

  134. San Francisco Examiner, November 30, December 1, 1899.

  135. Aspen Daily Times, May 5, 1885. Earp and his “wife,” Josephine Sarah Marcus, arrived in Aspen from Texas and joined H. C. Hughes, who moved down from Montana, to open the Fashion Saloon. Earp had seen Dan G. Tipton in El Paso, where they had witnessed the gunfight at the Gem Saloon in which William Rayner had been killed. See Gary L. Roberts, “The Gem Saloon Shootout,” Wild West (June 1992): 22–28. Reports that Holliday was also there are unfounded. Earp remained in Aspen through the summer and fall. He must have chuckled when he read in the local paper about Doc collecting a debt from Curly Mack at Leadville. He and Hughes apparently had a good operation; they hosted a dance there in August as reported in the Aspen Daily Times, August 12, 1885. It was from Aspen that Earp wrote to Arizona about his financial dealings with Marshal Dake in 1882, during the time that Leigh Chalmers, the Department of Justice’s special investigator, was reviewing the financial affairs of former U.S. Marshal Crawley P. Dake. See Leigh Chalmers, Special Examiner, to A. H. Garland, U.S. Attorney General, September 8, 1885, Year File 2725-1885, Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Archives and Records Service, Washington, DC. The Aspen Daily Times, September 19, 1885, reported that Curtis C. Bean, Arizona’s first Republican delegate to the U.S. Congress in a decade, “spent Sunday in Aspen, on important business with Ex-Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp.”

  On October 14, 1885, the Times reported that Earp assisted Arizona deputy U.S. Marshal E. M. Miles in the arrest of James Crothers, who was one of two men who had robbed a stage near Phoenix, Arizona, and stole money from the Wells, Fargo & Company box. Earp’s connections in Arizona appear to have still been strong. Then on November 30, 1885, the Times reported that Earp and Hughes had left Aspen. So far, no evidence has come to light to show that Holliday visited Earp in Aspen while he was there.

  136. Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, Mabel Earp Cason, and Vinnolia Earp Ackerman, “She Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Earp” unpublished manuscript, circa 1938, C. Lee Simmons Collection, Sonoita, Arizona.

  137. Ibid.; Denver Republican, May 22, 1882.

  138. Tanner, Family Portrait, 299n.

  139. Denver Tribune-Republican, May 13, 1886; Jahns, Frontier World, 278– 279.

  140. The Silverton article was widely published, appearing in the Denver Daily Times, June 15, 1886, Valdosta Daily Times, June 19, 1886, and San Francisco Morning Call, June 20, 1886, among others. Oddly, on May 26, 1886, the Dallas Morning News reported that a man named John Holliday, “who lives a few miles south of this city,” was arrested on a “writ of lunacy.” On June 2, 1886, the Morning News reported that “Dock [sic] Holliday was tried a second time on a writ of lunacy today before a jury and was a second time pronounced sane and released.” This report is testimony to the reputation that the real Doc Holliday had by the time the Silverton article was published.

  141. Denver Tribune-Republican, August 4, 1886; Jahns, Frontier World, 279.

  142. Denver Tribune-Republican, August 4, 1886; Tanner, Family Portrait, 215–216.

  143. Denver Tribune-Republican, August 4, 5, 1886.

  144. Ibid., August 4, 1886.

  145. Tanner, Family Portrait, 216.

  146. Angela K. Parkison, Hope and Hot Water, Glenwood Springs from 1878 to 1891 (Glenwood Springs, CO: Glenwood Springs Legacy, 2000), 93.

  147. Gunnison (Colorado) News-Champion, July 17, 1930.

  148. Glenwood Springs (Colorado) Ute Chief, November 12, 1887.

  149. Parkison, Hope and Hot Water, 100–103, 106–109.

  150. W. W. Crook to W. T. Moyers, May 23, 1943, Lake Collection, Box 10. Dr. Crook knew Doc in Leadville, and he claimed to have been in the bar at the time Doc shot Billy Allen, although he mistakenly said that Doc had killed Allen. Griswold and Griswold, History of Leadville, 1169–1170, 1266, 1372, 1542, 2151, affirm his presence in Leadville. See also Parkison, Hope and Hot Water, 111.

  151. Eugene Parsons to Stuart N. Lake, July 25, 1930, Lake Collection, Box 10.

  152. Parsons to Lake, June 30, 1930, reporting a conversation with a Glenwood Springs old-timer, Lake Collection, Box 10.

  153. Rothman, Shadow of Death, 16; Parsons to Lake, June 30, 1930, Lake Collection, Box 10. Parsons was interviewing people who claimed to have known or at least seen Holliday in the early days.

  154. Parkison, Hope and Hot Water, 109–110.

  155. Glenwood Springs (Colorado) Post, August 23, 1985.

  156. Typescript of Recollections of Mary Katharine Cummings as Given to Anton Mazzanovich, 16–17, Kevin J. Mulkins Collection. She made similar claims to Dr. Arthur W. Bork, Notes of Interview with Mary Katharine Cummings, Thanksgiving, 1935, typescript provided to Roberts by Dr. Bork. Tanner, Family Portrait, 216, based on information that came from the Harony family through Glenn G. Boyer, says that Kate’s brother lived in Colorado at the time. In 2001–2002, further confirmation of her presence was provided with the publication of what appeared to be a reminiscence by Oregin Charles Smith, a friend of the Earps from Tombstone, which claimed that both Smith and Kate were present at Doc’s death. This document was published in Karen Holliday Tanner and Clifton Brewer, “Doc Holliday’s Last Days,” True West 48 (November–December 2001): 75–79, and Karen Holliday Tanner, “The Last Days of Doc Holliday,” WOLA Journal 10 (Winter 2002): 4–9. However, when a series of alleged “Charlie Smith letters” began to be published in the Tombstone Tumbleweed that clearly were not contemporary documents, the original source was reexamined with the result that it appeared that Tanner and others, including Roberts, had been misled. For a full discussion of the Charlie Smith story, see Gary L. Roberts, “The Charlie Smith Papers: Real or Fake?” WOLA Journal 12 (Spring 2004): 29–48. So far, no contemporary evidence has surfaced that would indicate that Kate or any other person from Holliday’s past was with him at the time of his death. To the contrary, the contemporary accounts are emphati
c that he died alone except for the charity of local caretakers. Given Victoria journalism’s sentimentality, it seems highly unlikely that the press would have failed to mention the presence of a wife or old friend.

  157. Glenwood Springs Ute Chief, November 12, 1887. Father Downey was responsible for several mining towns. Susan McKey Thomas has done extensive research on both Father Downey and Reverend Rudolph, which she shared with me. Both had long and successful careers in the service of their faiths, but apparently neither left any reflections on John Henry.

  158. Glenwood Springs Ute Chief, November 12, 1887.

  159. Denver Evening Times, November 10, 1887.

  12. The Anatomy of a Western Legend

  1. Lorenzo Walters, Tombstone’s Yesterday (Tucson, AZ: Acme, 1928), 86–87.

  2. This bombast, originally printed in the Cincinnati (Ohio) Enquirer, was called “the funniest part of the story” of Perry Mallon’s arrest of Doc Holliday by the Denver Republican, June 2, 1882, a story that “round[s] off the hideous tale with a burst of laughter and turns what was nearly a tragedy into a roaring farce.”.

  3. New York Sun, June 3, 1886. This article was widely reprinted as previously noted.

  4. Such articles are not “reliable” in the sense of providing historical data, but they are important because they show the perception of contemporaries and the workings of the popular mind. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), is essential for understanding effects of the frontier myth not only on the public mind but also on the actions of people. Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1998), explores the continuing infatuation with the theme.

  5. Richard White, “Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits,” Western Historical Quarterly 12 (1981): 387–408, while not specifically directed at Doc Holliday or other icons of the “gunfighter West,” does offer keen insight into the “decisive allure” that nineteenth-century Americans (and their descendants for that matter) found “in strong men who defended themselves, righted their own wrongs, and took vengeance on their enemies despite the corruption of the existing order.” Beyond White, an extensive literature exists that reinforces the points he makes and helps to explain the continuing popularity of frontier legends like Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and more, whether formatted as “hero worship,” debunking, or “setting the record straight.”.