| DOC
HOLLIDAY |
Doc had but three redeeming traits. One was
his courage... The second was his sterling loyalty... The third was his
affection for Wyatt Earp.
Bat Masterson
John Henry Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia to Henry Burroughs, a
Confederate Army major, and Alice Jane Holliday on August 14, 1851.
Holliday worked as a dentist in the East until 1872 when tuberculosis
forced him to move to the West for its dry climate. He traveled
throughout the West and soon earned a reputation as a gambler and a
gunfighter. In 1881 Virgil Earp, the U.S. Deputy Marshal and City
Marshal of Tombstone, Arizona, deputized two of his brothers along with
Doc Holliday.
Holliday had a wife named Mary Katherine Harony, who was commonly
referred to as "Big Nosed Kate." He met her while he was
playing cards at John Shanssey's saloon in Fort Griffin, Texas. It was
there that he also met Wyatt Earp. Earp rode in from Dodge City on the
trail of Dave Rudabaugh, who was wanted for a train robbery. While
Holliday was helping Wyatt gain the information he needed, they
developed a special friendship.
That friendship lasted until Holliday's death a decade after they met.
After they met Wyatt wrote, "I found him a loyal friend and good
company. He was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman
whom disease had made a vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a
caustic wit; a long, lean blonde fellow nearly dead with consumption and
at the same time the most skillful gambler and nerviest, speediest,
deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew."
On October 26, 1881, Holliday joined the Earp brothers, including Wyatt
Earp, in the famous shootout at the O.K. Corral against members of the
Clanton gang of suspected cattle rustlers. The gunfight at the O.K.
Corral, involving Holliday and the Earps, became a part of the legend of
the American West. Holliday died on November 8, 1887.
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