July 6, 2006
Doc Holliday Gets a New Biography Posted by Allen Barra at 10:15 AM EST Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are joined together in American frontier mythology the way Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig are in baseball. Wyatt, a peace officer in the toughest cattle and mining towns of the Old West, is the one whom modern movie audiences most easily identify with, whether played by Burt Lancaster, Kurt Russell, or Kevin Costner. But Doc, the aristocratic son of a Georgia plantation owner, always seems to enter the Earp movies through a side door before stealing the film, as did Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Dennis Quaid in Wyatt Earp, and, most especially, Val Kilmer in Tombstone.
In the movies, Doc appears as a Western version of a Joseph Conrad character, a tarnished cavalier with a mysterious past whose strongest virtue is loyalty to Wyatt Earp. Happily, as revealed in Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend (Wiley, $30), a provocative and immensely readable new biography by Gary L. Roberts (an emeritus professor at Abraham Baldwin College), much of the legend is true, or at least is rooted in fact.
Born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1851, John Henry Holliday, like so many young Southern men of the period, found his life radically transformed by the Civil War in which his father served. Sent to a Philadelphia college to study the burgeoning trade of dentistry, young Holliday later contracted tuberculosis and left his native state never to return. Precisely why he left has never been explained; wisely, Roberts presents the evidence for all the theories—from fleeing authorities after a shooting to a doomed romance with his cousin to the supposedly curative powers of the Western climate—without leaning heavily toward any of them.
Frail and soft-spoken, Holliday drifted first to Texas and then to Kansas, drifting from dentistry to the profession best suited to an expatriate Southern gentleman, gambling. He finally reached the fabulous silver-mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, earning immortality in 1881 at the street fight in Tombstone (as it was called at the time) and its controversial and bloody aftermath, in which Wyatt, Doc, and their followers pursued a vendetta against the cattle-rustling faction who murdered Wyatt’s younger brother Morgan.
Along the way he became involved in just enough shootings (as with all gunfighters, Hollywood has exaggerated the number, of course) to establish a reputation. It wasn’t always positive. The mood swings provoked by tuberculosis and his increasing dependence on alcohol inspired a wide divergence of opinion: Wyatt Earp, whose life he saved in Dodge City, was quoted as calling him (in the highly polished words of a script writer) “a frontiersman and a vagabond . . . a philosopher, but he preferred to be a wag. He was . . . the quickest man with a six-shooter I ever knew.” Earp’s good friend Bat Masterson, himself a renowned peace officer and later a New York journalist, saw him as “hot headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling . . . [he] was very much disliked.” On the other hand, Wyatt’s older brother Virgil called him both “gentlemanly” and “a good dentist.”
The truth seems to be that he was all of these seemingly contradictory things and many more, depending upon who did the telling. Doc himself left us practically no primary documents; a stash of letters to his beloved cousin Melanie, who had become a nun in Georgia, was destroyed, perhaps shutting us out forever from the true nature of their relationship. (Melanie would inspire her good friend Margaret Mitchell to name a character after her in Gone With The Wind; some have speculated that Doc was the model for Ashley Wilkes.)
Disease finally did what bullets couldn’t. After years of flaunting his indifference to death, Doc succumbed to tuberculosis in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colorado; he died, according to a local paper, “with his boots off,” a fact that must have caused him great amusement. “He remains,” writes Roberts, “essentially, a man without a voice, a circumstance that makes him, at once, a compelling subject and a frustrating figure.” He is and probably always will be the eternal wild card in the deck of the Old West’s most enduring legend.
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