Doc Holliday was the Robin to Wyatt Earp’s Batman; by his side whenever the going got tough, pistol in hand, ready to go out in a blaze of glory. Their friendship became a legendary tale of the Wild West, depicted in many books and westerns.
Holliday didn’t necessarily act this way out of sheer bravery or an undying sense of loyalty, but for a more tragic reason – he knew that he was a doomed man, anyway. Stricken with tuberculosis from an early age, before he even met Wyatt Earp, Holliday understood that he was living on borrowed time, so he chose to live it like a man with nothing to lose. In the process, he became one of the greatest icons of the Wild West.
Early Years
John Henry “Doc” Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia, on…umm, we’re not sure actually. His birth records were lost in a fire, but his baptism record was not and it shows that Holliday was baptized as an infant at the Griffin Presbyterian Church on March 21, 1852, so, presumably, he was born earlier that year. His parents were Henry B. Holliday and Alice Jane McKey, both of Scottish descent. Doc had an older sister named Martha who died in infancy and an adopted Mexican brother named Francisco, who also died before reaching adulthood.
Henry Holliday did a little bit of everything. He was a lawyer and a planter before joining the military and going off to fight in the Mexican-American War. Afterward, he fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, where he reached the rank of major. He was one of the first people to settle in Griffin, which also meant that he could buy a lot of land on the cheap. Holliday owned around 46 pieces of property in and around Griffin covering several hundred acres and later would also enter politics, serving one term as Mayor of Valdosta, Georgia.
The family had moved there in 1864, more out of necessity than desire. You see, Holliday Sr. was a true believer in the Confederacy and invested in Confederate dollars to support the cause…the cause, of course, being slavery. These dollars were not backed by hard assets but by the promise of repaying the bearer once the South won the war and became independent. You may recall that didn’t happen and the value of this currency plunged into the toilet, leaving Henry Holliday almost bankrupt. One of his few remaining possessions of any value was some property in Valdosta, a new little town built on the railroad, so the Hollidays packed up and relocated there.
In the new town, Doc enrolled in a private school called the Valdosta Institute which provided him with a classical education that included not only subjects such as reading, writing, and mathematics, but also French, astronomy, history, and even Latin. We can’t say how much book learning stuck to Doc Holliday, though. There wasn’t much demand for Latin-speaking astronomers back in the Old West.
His time in Valdosta was not a happy one. In 1866, his mother died of tuberculosis, or consumption, as it was called back then, the same disease that would kill him two decades later. Deeply devoted to his mother, Doc was heartbroken by the sudden loss and then felt a deep sense of betrayal when his father remarried a young war widow just a few months later. This caused a rift between father and son that never healed and created a more bitter, angrier Doc.
This led to probably the first incident when Holliday used his pistols against other people and it happened when he got into an argument with a group of Black men who wanted to use their swimming hole, leading to Doc firing a few shots to scare them off.
This event, which is referred to as the “swimming hole incident,” has become part of Valdosta’s history, but it has been retold and exaggerated many times, to the point where the truth has become quite murky, especially since some versions were told by people like Bat Masterson who had an open dislike of Doc Holliday. Some say it happened before Doc became a dentist; others say it was after. Some say the Black men were teenagers; others that they were soldiers. Some say that Holliday shot in the air, others that he killed two of them. According to the account given by Thomas McKey, Doc’s uncle and the only witness, Doc and his friends had built that swimming hole and it was on McKey’s land so the strangers were trespassing. He added that Holliday fired over their heads, never intending to hit anyone, and historians have failed to find any mentions of any killings taking place at the time, so this seems like the most plausible scenario. The seriousness of the event is only lessened by the fact that it happened in a place with a funny name called Withlacoochee.
The family feared that such incidents would only increase in frequency and severity so they wanted to send Doc somewhere far away. This was a good time since he had finished school and needed to find a profession, anyway, so it was decided – in 1870, off he went to study dentistry.
John Holliday, DDS
There seems to be a bit of controversy as to where exactly Doc Holliday studied to become a dentist, with some sources claiming he went to Baltimore, Maryland, to attend the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, while others say it was the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in Philadelphia. It’s not too important. Both were considered top-of-the-line schools and Holliday graduated in 1872 without much hullabaloo. Of course, while he was there, Holliday also developed other “talents” such as drinking, playing cards, and shooting pool, which, ultimately, he would put to much greater use than his dental skills.
But that’s still a few years off. For now, even though Holliday could call himself a doctor, it was still customary to apprentice for a while with an experienced dentist before trying to open his own practice. Where exactly he did this and in what order is, again, a matter of uncertainty. It’s possible he went to his hometown of Griffin before trying to set up shop in Atlanta, which was quickly becoming Georgia’s grandest city. Or maybe it was the other way around – Holliday apprenticed for a while with Dr. Arthur C. Ford of Atlanta; might have even tried to open a practice there before finding the competition a bit too stiff and returning to Griffin to try it there. Some even say he was in St. Louis, Missouri, for a bit.
Doc Holliday’s history is a bit speculative because he ended up becoming a famous icon of the Wild West despite the odds being against him. Unlike guys like Wild Bill Hickok, he wasn’t too well-known in his own time, so magazines and newspapers didn’t cover his exploits. Most of the main accounts and profiles on Doc Holliday came out decades after his death. Unlike guys like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, he didn’t live into old age so he’d have time to tell his story to historians and journalists. He didn’t leave behind a widow, children, or siblings to tell his tale. He didn’t keep a diary or write letters to brag about his adventures. Doc Holliday seemed destined to become just another forgotten gunslinger of the Wild West…and yet, here we are talking about him a century-and-a-half later.
Whatever the timeline of his dental career might be, it wasn’t very relevant in the end because Holliday received a diagnosis that turned his life upside-down completely – he had tuberculosis. He’d had it for a while, in fact. Likely caught it from his mother but it took a few years for the symptoms to appear, which is a condition known as latent tuberculosis. But, eventually, they caught up to him – fever, tiredness, night sweats, coughing, choking, spitting up blood. Doc Holliday was a doomed man and the Georgia weather wasn’t doing him any favors. The winters were cold and rainy and the summers were hot and muggy. His doctor gave Doc six months to live tops if he stayed in Georgia. But if he went somewhere with a warmer climate, he could last another year or two. So whatever plans and goals Doc Holliday had were immediately shelved, and he headed to start a new life, whatever was left of it, out west.
Trouble in Texas
Doc Holliday made his way to Dallas, Texas, in 1873, where he intended to resume his dental career. At first, he partnered up with a dentist named John A. Seegar, who was also from Georgia and an acquaintance of his father. According to Dallas records, the two had an office on Elm Street, in one of the busiest parts of town. There’s not a lot of info on Doc’s prowess with a dental drill, but it seems that he was good enough to win awards, at least when he teamed together with Seegar. During the 1873 Annual Fair of the North Texas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Blood Stock Association at the Dallas County Fair, the team of Seegar and Holliday took home three awards – “the best set of teeth in gold, “the best in vulcanized rubber,” and the big one that all the dentists covet, “the best set of artificial teeth and dental ware.”
Eventually, Holliday felt confident enough to open his own practice, but it didn’t last. Remember that he came to Texas with a death sentence looming over his head. That sort of thing tends to change a man and Doc took to heavy drinking to cope with his impending demise. On the increasingly rare occasions when he was sober, he could be quite a mean bastard, and these weren’t really the type of qualities that people looked for in their dentist.
Fortunately for Holliday, while he was frequenting the many watering holes that Dallas had to offer, he also took to gambling and he was pretty good at it. Poker was popular in those days, but even more popular was Faro, the game that Doc favored. Nowadays, Faro has all but disappeared from the gambling tables and that’s mainly because the rules did not give the house the advantage as much as other card games, so casinos wanted to get rid of it.
Anyway, with Doc’s practice dwindling but his faro skills sharpening, it didn’t take long before gambling became his main source of income. And then 1875 came…and Holliday was still around. The two years that his doctor gave him were up and he was still alive. And yet…he knew that he was on borrowed time and Doc wasn’t really the “glass half full” kind of guy, so each day he became more nervous and ornery. Eventually, this led to Holliday getting into a fight with a saloonkeeper named Austin, and pistols were drawn and fired. This was Doc’s only shootout incident in Dallas and nobody was hurt, but he was still told to leave town.
Holliday settled in Jacksboro, Texas, for a while, where, according to some reports of dubious veracity, he killed two men on separate occasions, both over gambling arguments. His second victim was a soldier with the Sixth Cavalry Regiment and this put him in serious hot water with the government. Doc had no choice but to flee Texas and go to Colorado. For the next few years, he spent life on the road – Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, the Dakota Territory – traveling from town to town under the alias of “Tom Mackey or McKey” and making money from gambling, faro dealing, and even the occasional back-alley dentistry.
After a while, Holliday decided that the law was no longer after him and he went back to Texas and even started using his own name again. His return to the Lone Star State was not an auspicious one. In Breckenridge, he got into a gambling fight again with a man named Henry Kahn. Trying to be a bit more even-tempered, Holliday didn’t go for his gun. Instead, he picked up his walking stick and gave Kahn a damn good thrashing. Both men were arrested, fined, and released, but that was not the end of the matter. Khan approached Holliday in the street and, even though Doc wasn’t armed, the other man shot him. Days later, the Dallas Weekly Herald wrote that Doc Holliday had died, which wasn’t true. But although the report of his death had been exaggerated, it wasn’t by much. The gunshot injury compounded by Holliday’s tuberculosis made recovery a toss of the coin. Fortunately, Doc did recover but he felt that a change of scenery might be in order.
He traveled to Fort Griffin where several important events occurred. First, he met Katherine Horony, better known as Big Nose Kate. They began a relationship that lasted about five years, on and off, as a common-law marriage. But even more significantly, Doc Holliday made the acquaintance of a fellow gunslinger whose name would become inexorably linked to his.
When Doc Met Wyatt
Let’s set the scene: it was November 1877, in Fort Griffin, Texas. A tired and dusty Deputy U.S. Marshal entered through the doors of the Bee Hive Saloon owned by an acquaintance of his called John Shanssey. His name was Wyatt Earp and he was in pursuit of a no-good outlaw named “Dirty” Dave Rudabaugh. Back in October, Rudabaugh and his gang robbed a Santa Fe railroad construction camp and, ever since then, Earp had been on their trail for hundreds of miles, chasing them through Kansas and the Texas panhandle. He got word that they passed through Fort Griffin. Shanssey confirmed this, saying that Rudabaugh and his men stopped by his bar but that he didn’t know where they went afterward. However, there was a quiet guy in a dark corner of the saloon who played cards with them. Maybe he had a better idea.
Wyatt Earp walked up to this man. Doc Holliday invited him to sit down, but the marshal refused. He only wanted information. Doc knew the fellas Earp was talking about but wasn’t certain where they went. He thought, based on a few off-the-cuff remarks they made, that they intended to double back and return to Kansas.
Wyatt Earp’s instincts told him to trust this stranger so he sent a message to Dodge City, Kansas, to tell them that Rudabaugh was back in their neck of the woods. And Doc’s information was correct. A few days later, a posse led by Dodge City lawman Charlie Bassett set an ambush for the robbers outside a ranch on the Cherokee Strip and caught the whole gang without firing a shot.
Both Earp and Holliday probably assumed that would be their last interaction, but that was not to be. In January 1878, Holliday wore out his welcome in Fort Griffin, to put it mildly. After yet another gambling argument, Doc sliced open a guy named Ed Bailey when the latter started reaching for his gun. Bailey bled out on the poker table and Holliday surrendered peacefully to the authorities. Going by frontier law, Doc should have been okay since it was self-defense, but Bailey had a lot of friends, and the only justice they were looking for was at the end of a noose.
Kate really came through in the clutch on this one and saved Holliday’s life as he was just a few moments from getting lynched by an angry mob. First, she set fire to an old shanty to cause a distraction. Then, she snuck into the place where Doc was being kept, held the deputy at gunpoint, and got him to release the prisoner. Doc and Kate then made off into the night. Their destination – Dodge City.
“I’m Your Huckleberry”
We’re not saying Holliday went to Dodge City expecting to partner up with Earp. In fact, he wanted to resume his dental practice because he posted this announcement in the June 28 edition of the Dodge City Times:
H. Holliday, Dentist, very respectfully offers his professional services to the citizens of Dodge City and surrounding county during the summer. Office at Room No. 24, Dodge House. Where satisfaction is not given money will be refunded.
But it seems that fate was determined to let Holliday be anything but a dentist and his friendship with Earp was permanently cemented one day when Doc saved Wyatt’s life. Annoyingly, we’re not completely sure how it happened since multiple stories are floating around. In one version, Holliday saw a man reach for his gun to shoot Earp in the back, so he reached and shot first. In the most common version, retold by Earp himself, he entered a saloon looking to get the drop on two wanted men named Tobe Driscoll and Ed Morrison. Unfortunately for him, they were there with friends and, before Wyatt knew it, he had about a dozen guns pointed at him. As luck would have it, Holliday was in the back of the saloon playing cards. When he heard the commotion and recognized Earp, Doc sneaked up behind Morrison, put a gun to his head, and told everyone to drop their weapons. The newly-formed crimefighting duo then arrested the lot of them and took them to jail.
We’re going to say there is some artistic license in this story, mainly because there was no mention of this event in the Dodge City papers or the arrest records. Later, while testifying in court following the shootout at the O.K. Corral, Earp was a bit vaguer on the origin of their friendship, simply stating that Doc “saved [his] life when [he] was surrounded by desperadoes.”
However it happened, Doc and Wyatt were now BFFs, but they still lived separate lives. In fact, Doc and Kate soon left Dodge City and moved to Las Vegas. Not the famous one, the one in New Mexico. Holliday gambled, practiced dentistry, and even opened his own saloon. But once again, he got into trouble following a shootout, this time with a guy called Charley White, so in 1880, the two packed up their things again and traveled to Tombstone, Arizona.
This is where the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral happened on October 26, 1881, probably the most famous shootout in Wild West history. And we’ve covered it extensively in our bio for Wyatt Earp, so if you want to hear all the nitty-gritty details, it’s there for your viewing pleasure.
Here’s the Reader’s Digest version. U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp had been sent to Tombstone to deal with a group of outlaws called the Cowboys. He brought along his brothers, Wyatt and Morgan, and Doc Holliday. Tensions between the two sides kept growing. They started with taunts and veiled threats but everyone knew that it would eventually turn bloody.
On that fateful morning, one of the Cowboys, Ike Clanton, after an entire night of drinking and cardplaying, had been arrested for causing trouble and for carrying a gun within city limits which was against the law. The Earps arrested him and Virgil also gave him a pistol-whipping for good measure.
While Ike was in court, a few other Cowboys arrived to back him up – his brother Billy Clanton plus Frank and Tom McLaury. Another guy named Billy Claiborne was also present, but he was unarmed and made a run for it when the shooting started. Word reached the Earps that the Cowboys were in town, packing heat and refusing to disarm, so they picked up Doc Holliday and went to confront them.
Despite the name, the gunfight didn’t actually happen at the O.K. Corral, but near it. Virgil Earp told the Cowboys to drop their weapons which, predictably, they refused to do. Who shot first remains a mystery due to different eyewitness accounts, so anyway, they started blasting. When the dust settled, the tally was three dead and three wounded: Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers had been killed. Morgan and Virgil Earp took a bullet each but survived. Doc Holliday likely killed Tom McLaury and received a grazing wound for his troubles. Wyatt Earp was the only one unhurt.
The feud hardly stopped there. Two assassination attempts were made on the Earps in the months that followed, one that killed Morgan Earp and another that left Virgil permanently maimed. As revenge, Wyatt Earp formed a posse which, of course, included Doc Holliday, and set off on his infamous vendetta ride which resulted in four more Cowboy deaths. Again, watch the Wyatt Earp bio for the full story.
Final Years
Since the vendetta ride was extrajudicial vigilantism, arrest warrants were issued for all participants, so Holliday fled Arizona after it was over in April 1882, only to be arrested in Denver two months later. However, Wyatt Earp and a few other influential friends persuaded Colorado Governor Pitkin to refuse the extradition request to the Arizona Territory, eventually leading to Holliday getting released on a bond. Doc and Wyatt Earp then parted ways, thus ending one of the Old West’s most iconic partnerships. Although, according to Earp, he did see Doc one more time a few years later, shortly before the latter’s death.
Truth be told, Holliday’s final years were pretty rough. Kate left him and he wandered from town to town, getting whatever work he could find as his tuberculosis kept getting worse and worse. To ease the symptoms, Holliday turned not only to alcohol but also laudanum. By the time he ended up in Leadville, Colorado, in 1883, he was a shell of his former self. However, he did have one final shootout in this town with a bartender and former policeman named Billy Allen.
Allen was in cahoots with a few wrong’uns who hated Holliday and wanted him dead. Doc also owed Allen $5, but he was convinced that the latter was going to use the debt as a pretext to kill him. That’s why when Allen confronted him, Doc opened fire right away. He shot twice, hitting Allen once below his right shoulder. Although an artery was severed, Allen survived the encounter, and Holliday was arrested and sent to trial.
The legal ordeal lasted almost a year, but on April 4, 1885, Doc Holliday was acquitted. Thanks to multiple testimonies, his lawyers had convinced the jury that Allen went to Holliday intending to do him harm and that Doc was right to protect himself. He might have evaded a prison sentence, but by now, Holliday was on his last legs due to his tuberculosis. He feared leaving Colorado because he risked extradition to Arizona again, so, instead, he moved around the state for a while before finally settling in Glenwood Springs in May 1887, hoping that the hot springs there would ease his suffering.
They didn’t do much. Doc Holliday passed away on November 8, 1887, aged 36. Allegedly, as he lay in bed dying, he looked at his shoeless feet and, amused by the idea that he wasn’t killed with his boots on, his last words were “This is funny.”
