Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (35 page)

 
Desperate Measures
 

Although it reads like an advertisement for a movie, this is a true story: The gunslinger Doc Holliday spent most of his life preparing to die, until he finally found a reason to live—and it almost killed him.

Without a doubt, John Henry Holliday was the meanest, toughest, and probably the most violent dentist in American history; although, truth be told, he definitely could fill a cavity. His close friend Wyatt Earp described him as “a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit … the most skillful gambler, and the nerviest, fastest, deadliest man with a six gun I ever saw.”

Unlike the other famous gunslingers of the Old West, John Holliday was a wealthy, well-educated man. His father, Henry Holliday, was a soldier, druggist, and planter who had fought the Indians in 1838, the Mexicans in 1846, and the Union army in 1861, rising to the rank of major before being forced by illness to resign his commission. His mother, Alice, was a classic Southern belle. His cousin, Mattie Holliday, who lived to be one hundred, served as the model for the character Melanie in Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind.
John Henry was born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1852, but a decade later, the family, fleeing General Sherman’s March to the Sea, moved to Valdosta, Georgia, where Henry Holliday eventually was elected mayor. When John Henry was fifteen years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, the same disease that would later kill his adopted brother and shape the course of his own life.

Nothing about his childhood suggested that he would one day wind up in the most famous gunfight in American history, the showdown at the O.K. Corral. John Henry received a classical education, studying grammar, mathematics, French, Latin, and ancient Greek. When it came time for him to pick a career, dentistry seemed an appropriate path to follow; his cousin had founded Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery. He graduated from there in 1872, after writing a thesis on diseases of the teeth, and joined a practice in Atlanta. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone on to have a fine life: He would have married a genteel woman and started a family; at night, he would sit by the parlor fire in his comfortable Georgia home; and he would die in old age, surrounded by loved ones.

Instead, he started coughing.

In 1873, when he was only twenty-two years old, John Holliday was diagnosed with tuberculosis, at that time a fatal disease. The cause wasn’t known, and there was no cure. He consulted the best doctors in Atlanta, and their opinion was unanimous: The only treatment was to move to a drier climate, which was believed to prolong life. As it turned out, he might well have had another reason to leave Georgia: It’s possible that he had shot his first victim.

According to the story, written years later by lawman-turned-journalist Bat Masterson, John Henry and some friends came upon a group of black teenagers enjoying a popular swimming hole on the Withlacoochee River. Supposedly the two groups got into an argument, and Holliday produced a double-barreled shotgun. He shot and killed two of them and wounded several others, although his family insisted the story wasn’t true and he had simply fired over their heads to scare them away.

Legends are born of reality, which is exaggerated and embellished until it shines brightly. Although the actual facts of that day are hazy, the meaning is clear: Even at a young age, there was a dark and dangerous side to John Henry Holliday.

Whatever the reason, Holliday moved to Dallas and opened a dental practice. His skills were obvious: At the Dallas County Fair, he won several awards, including “best set of teeth in gold.” Dallas was a booming cow town, the railroad making it a hub for shipping grain, cotton, and buffalo hides. It might have been a smart place for a skilled dentist to set up shop, but not too many people there were willing to risk their lives visiting a dentist infected with consumption. As he soon discovered, though, there was another trade at which he excelled: John Holliday was a gambling man. As Masterson wrote, “Gambling was not only the principal and best-paying industry of the town at the time, but it was also reckoned among its most respectable.”

The cards loved him. He possessed two traits that were essential for any gambler: intelligence and a poker face. If there was a single benefit to living with a death sentence, this was it: Nothing seemed to really make a difference to him. Win or lose, he was going to be dead in a few years. That knowledge made it easy for him to hide his emotions and draw the next card—or, when necessary, draw his gun.

When money and alcohol are put on the same table, tempers can get mighty thin. The first time a gambling man backed down in the Old West, he might just as well keep moving, because people would learn about it and wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage. In 1875, Holliday was arrested after trading wild shots with saloon keeper Charles Austin. He was acquitted but, supposedly, a few days later, got into another gunfight and this time killed “a prominent citizen.” There is at least some evidence that this incident was just a story Holliday concocted
to impress people. Apparently it worked, because by the time he settled in Jacksboro, Texas, in 1876, he was said to be carrying two guns and a knife and had become known as “the Deadly Dentist”! Allegedly he had to hightail it out of Jacksboro after killing a black soldier from nearby Fort Richardson—with the army, the Texas Rangers, the US marshal, the local sheriff, and a posse of citizens in hot pursuit, trying to collect the reward placed on his head. There actually may be some truth to that one, as there is a record of a Private Jacob Smith being shot around that time by an “unknown assailant.”

Gamblers are always chasing the next big pot, and Holliday moved often, usually carrying with him some tale of violence for which there was little evidence. Supposedly, for example, while dealing faro in Denver under the alias Tom Mackey in 1875, he slashed the throat of a bully named Buddy Ryan. He also is credited with three killings in Cheyenne. It is possible; Masterson was blunt in his assessment, pointing out, “Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man.” True or not, these stories served a purpose: Holliday had figured out pretty quickly that a reputation for being good with a gun would often make people hesitate before drawing on you.

While on the trail, John Henry hadn’t forgotten his dental training, and when he found himself staying in one place for more than a short spell, he’d hang out his shingle, which gave him the nickname by which he would eventually gain renown, “Doc” Holliday.

A gambler’s place of work is the saloon, and nobody ever claimed that Doc Holliday didn’t enjoy a drink or two or several more. Why not—one thing he knew for sure was that it wasn’t the whiskey that was going to kill him. He was what we’d now call a functioning alcoholic, with a hair-trigger temper. In a barroom fight in Breckenridge, Texas, he beat a gambler named Henry Kahn with his walking stick. Kahn returned later that day and shot Holliday. His wounds were so serious that the
Dallas Weekly Herald
quite prematurely reported his death. Upon his recovery, he settled in the rowdy town of Fort Griffin, where only a few years earlier a band of Kiowas had attacked a wagon train and killed seven men. But for Doc Holliday, that’s where the tall tales ended and his life as an American western legend took root.

While working as a card dealer at the pugilist John Shanssey’s saloon in 1877, he met a truly formidable woman named Mary Katherine Horony, a curvaceous twenty-six-year-old dance-hall girl and sometime prostitute better known as “Big Nose Kate,” who would be his primary female companion for the rest of his life. The Hungarian-born, well-bred, and well-educated Kate was a fine match for him: She didn’t seem to give two hoots about very much, either, especially what people thought of her. She was tough, stubborn, and hot tempered and often told people that she belonged to no man, nor to any madam—she worked as a prostitute because she liked both the benefits and the freedom. And, ironically, she had already been married once—to a dentist, who had died.

This portrait of thirty-one-year-old Doc Holliday was taken only months after the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

Soon after Holliday and Kate got together, she had an opportunity to show how much she cared for him: She got to break him out of prison. In one version of the story, Doc had been playing poker with a gambler named Ed Bailey, who insisted on sifting through the discards in violation of the rules of Western Poker. Doc finally had had enough and claimed the pot. Bailey pulled his revolver, but before he could fire, Holliday whipped out his knife and gutted him. In another version, Doc was actually arrested for “illegal gambling.” Whatever the reason for his arrest, he was put under guard in a locked hotel room because the town
didn’t have a jail. In the first version, a lynch mob was forming, and Kate was forced to take action to save his life. In both stories, she set fire to an old shed behind the hotel. When the fire threatened to engulf the town, everyone rushed to fight it. With their attention diverted, Kate broke Doc out of the hotel. Some say she pulled two six-shooters on the jailer and forced him to open the door. Guns or no, she got him out, and they took off for Dodge City.

John Shanssey also introduced Doc Holliday to deputy US marshal Wyatt Earp. Shanssey and Earp had met several years earlier, when the future lawman had refereed one of the future saloon man’s bouts. This time, Earp had come to “the Flats,” as the town near Fort Griffin was called, hunting a train robber named “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh. Perhaps at Shanssey’s request, Doc told Earp what he knew: While playing cards with Rudabaugh a few days earlier, he’d heard the man say something about going back to Dodge City. Earp sent that information by telegraph to Dodge City’s assistant deputy, Bat Masterson, who eventually made the arrest. But that encounter marked the beginning of the most important relationship of Doc Holliday’s life.

Wyatt Earp was himself an ornery character. He’d been a boxer and a gambler; he’d worked on the railroads, as a constable, and as a horse thief. There were a lot of men like him in the Old West, people who just flowed with the opportunities life presented to them. For the previous few years, he’d been working mostly as a strongman, keeping the peace in brothels. He’d moved to Wichita in ’74 to keep the peace in his brother Virgil’s house of ill repute, while also working as a part-time peace officer for the city. When Earp first crossed paths with Doc Holliday in ’77, he had recently been named Dodge City’s chief deputy marshal.

Presumably, Earp welcomed the Doc and Kate, who found lodging at Deacon Cox’s boardinghouse when they arrived in Dodge. If it wasn’t the roughest town in the West, it definitely was high on the list. As a letter that appeared in the
Washington Evening Star
complained, “Dodge City is a wicked little town. Its character is so clearly and egregiously bad that one might conclude … that it was marked for special Providential punishment.”