For most of his grownup life, the Outdated West gambler and gunslinger John Henry ‘Doc’ Holliday (1851-87) had a status for violence. When he died of persistent pulmonary tuberculosis on 8 November 1887, aged 36, he was popularly reported as having killed wherever between eight, 17 and 30 males. Journalists, although, have been amazed to seek out him ‘as completely different as may very well be from the widely conceived thought of a killer’. Holliday was a ‘frail and innocent trying specimen’ not within the least ‘resembling the flowery caricature of a border desperado’. Small, ‘childlike’ and ‘virtually fragile in look’, he was additionally ‘scrupulously neat’ and ‘superbly’ dressed within the ‘newest model’. Confronted with such a puzzling mixture of waif-like frailty and chilly ferocity, the Omaha Every day Bee tried to sum him up as ‘a mild-mannered frontier angel, who has began a graveyard in each frontier city he has graced together with his presence’.
Each throughout his lifetime and after his dying, Holliday was a mysterious, contradictory determine. None of his personal letters survived him and he was very reticent (generally even actively deceptive) within the few public interviews he gave. Consequently, whereas the fundamental form of Holliday’s life was simple to ascertain, the fantastic particulars of his motives and feelings have been rather more open to interpretation or outright invention. Even whereas he was alive he was, because the Colorado-based Carbonate Chronicle put it, ‘the topic of multiple fancy author of the day’. The results of all this fancy writing was that, virtually as quickly as he entered the general public eye, Holliday started to be mythologised and fictionalised. Journalists and authors rewrote the scanty particulars of his actual life into the melodramatic conventions of Victorian fiction, reimagining him as a tragic invalid, the archetypal sidekick and a moody anti-hero.
Holliday was born within the US state of Georgia. As a younger man he educated to be a dentist – giving him his later nickname of ‘Doc’ – however he in the end deserted his observe and left his house state for good in 1873. Round this time, he was identified with the tuberculosis which might finally declare his life, and which can have already killed his mom, Alice. He was catapulted to celeb in Tombstone, Arizona, in October 1881, when he stood alongside Wyatt Earp within the gunfight on the O.Ok. Corral, in all probability essentially the most well-known shootout of the Wild West. Simply over six years later, he handed away quietly on the Lodge Glenwood in Colorado.
The earliest writers to painting Holliday appear to have struggled to know what to make of him – learn how to match this ‘smooth’, ‘gentlemanly’, however ‘cruel’ particular person into the sort of tales that the American public needed to listen to about their nation’s western growth? Some experimented with casting him within the function of hero, however this by no means fairly caught on. Holliday was an excessive amount of of ‘a misfit in his environments’, because the Kansas Metropolis Journal described him in 1899, to unproblematically settle into the place of fundamental character. As an alternative, most writers discovered that it labored finest to solid him because the devoted sidekick of another, extra straightforwardly heroic protagonist.
The obvious candidate was Wyatt Earp, Holliday’s good friend and deputy marshal for Tombstone on the time of the shootout on the O.Ok. Corral. Within the early 1900s the previous lawman Bartholomew ‘Bat’ Masterson (who had identified each males in his youth, although he claimed to have at all times strongly disliked Holliday) wrote a sequence of articles for the Washington Submit on ‘Well-known Gun Fighters of the Western Frontier’. Masterson maintained that Holliday’s ‘complete coronary heart and soul was wrapped up in Wyatt Earp, and he was at all times able to stake his life in defence of any trigger wherein Wyatt was ’. Different authors latched onto this portrayal, turning Holliday into the ‘disciple’ and right-hand-man of any variety of different Western heroes, from the well-known Wild Invoice Hickok to the now all-but-forgotten Mart Duggan. On this manner, Holliday’s violent status may very well be partly redeemed, even given a tragic tinge. Holliday might need, because the San Francisco Chronicle put it, ‘left a path of blood throughout each state and territory between the Mississippi and the Sierras’, however he was additionally a person selflessly dedicated to the service of different – and implicitly higher – males than himself.
Holliday’s tuberculosis was one other supply of tragic potential for vibrant depictions. Till the invention of antibiotics, TB was tough to deal with successfully and was often assumed to be deadly. Victorian observers tended to deal with these with the illness with a wierd mixture of fatalism and spirituality, as in the event that they have been already doomed and disconnected from the world of the dwelling. This, coupled with Holliday’s well-known status as a harmful man, may very well be used to lend him a brooding, Byronic high quality. The 12 months earlier than his dying the Rocky Mountain Information revealed a personality sketch of him, observing that: ‘“Doc” Holliday impresses the stranger by his gloom and taciturnity and stalks amongst males a silent and much-dreaded notable’.
Totally different accounts solid Holliday’s sickness as each the explanation why he was so keen to say the lives of others and why he appeared so morbidly heedless of his personal life. Not lengthy after Holliday’s dying, his lawyer, John T. Deweese, supposedly recalled how: ‘The physician had simply as lief kill a person as not. I stated to him someday: “Physician, don’t your conscience ever bother you?” “No,” he replied with that peculiar cough of his, “I coughed that up with my lungs way back.”’ Different observers took the view that it was Holliday’s secret hope to die from a bullet earlier than consumption caught up with him. ‘The horizon of his future’, speculated one paper, ‘didn’t attain past the small cemetery on the mesa … He laughed at dying, whereas courting its embrace.’
Finally, how John Henry Holliday actually felt about himself, his buddies and the sickness that he lived with is nearly inconceivable to know. Earlier than his dying, he was already encircled with supposition and hypothesis, and his ultimate legacy as part of ‘the hectic, mad romance of the outdated western border’ reveals how simply historical past can change into mingled with fable and fiction.
Douglas R.J. Small is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Edge Hill College.
