The Deadly Dentist’s malign reputation had grown larger as the man himself dwindled, but people in Glenwood Springs would remember Doc Holliday with respect. As the hotel bellhop told a reporter, “We all liked him. He bore his illness with fortitude, and he was grateful for the slightest kindness. Doc was a very fine gentleman, and he was always generous when he tipped.”
It was his hands that Kate would remember.
After that autumn back in Dodge, Kate was always aware of how loose Doc’s grip on life was, of how easily life could be pulled away from that frail, fierce, proud man. For years, she had feared that one day he might simply let go of life, or fling it away in a moment of disgust or despair, but to the very end, those skillful, talented, beautiful hands remained the strongest part of him. It was only as he lay dying that she understood just how much John Henry Holliday had wanted to live.
After Kate’s own death in 1940, scraps of notes were found in her belongings. Several appeared to be part of what might have become a longer account of her life with Doc. He was considered a handsome man, she wrote. He was a gentleman in manners to the Ladies and everyone. He was a neat dresser and saw to it that I was dressed as nicely as himself. On another page she wrote, Being quiet, he never hunted trouble. If he was crowded he knew how to take care of himself. He was not a Drunkard, she insisted. He always kept a bottle near, but when he needed something for his Pain, he would only take a small drink.
Other notes were more philosophical. Doc Holliday learned to live without fear the year he met me, but Hope tormented him. And another read, Doc was the only American I ever met who was better educated than me. There was also the start of a letter to Sophie Walton, an elderly woman herself by then, still living with members of the Holliday family. Kate wanted to tell her that Doc always drank a toast “To Sophie” whenever he won big; the letter was never sent, probably because Kate didn’t know Sophie’s address.
So there is reason to believe that Kate was planning to write a memoir, though she was nearing ninety when she started and didn’t get far. Perhaps she simply didn’t have time to see the project through. Perhaps she found it too difficult to write in English, never her strongest language. Magyar and German were both wrong for the task. Her French and Latin were good; either might have fit her story.
Ultimately, she may have settled upon Greek. There was a short but complete essay about the derivation of the name Odysseus, which Kate translated as “One who, being wounded, wounds.” And then there was this.
O divine Poesy, goddess-daughter of Zeus!
Help me sing the story of
A various-minded vagabond:
Forced by the Fates into far exile,
Made sport of by heartless Hope
When, all the while,
His heart hungered for home.
Thus sang Blind Homer of Odysseus,
who was wily to begin with
and made more so
by his wanderings.
And that was the Doc Holliday I knew.
At the bottom of the page, there was one last line in an elderly woman’s wavering, spidery script.
Calypso did the best she could.
Author’s Note
When Homer sang of Troy and Vergil wrote of Carthage and Rome, no one expected a bright line to divide myth from history. Arriving at the end of historical fiction today, the modern reader is likely to wonder, “How much of that was real?” In this case, the answer is: not all of it but a lot more than you might think.
To simplify the narrative in the first chapter, I have taken liberties with the details of John Henry Holliday’s childhood, but the portrayal of his character and personality is firmly based on Karen Holliday Tanner’s biography Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1998). A member of Doc’s own family, Tanner had unprecedented access to private records and family documents, including one that recorded Sophie Walton’s memories of John Henry before he went west for his health. Tanner took care to verify or debunk the many claims of murder and mayhem made against the man; her research has allowed me to write about Alice McKey Holliday’s son, and not about the many fictional characters who have borne John Henry Holliday’s name.
Tanner’s biography also provides genealogical charts showing the relationship between John Henry’s first cousin Martha Anne Holliday and the novelist Margaret Mitchell. Mitchell grew up hearing family stories about the war and later used them as background for Gone with the Wind; anyone familiar with Tanner’s Doc Holliday will notice many elements of Holliday family history in the Mitchell novel.
A great deal has been written about the Earp brothers; both the quality of research and the opinions expressed vary widely. Nearly all of the literature is about Wyatt; hardly any of it deals with the Earps prior to the 1881 shoot-out in Tombstone, Arizona. For example, Casey Tefertiller’s biography Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1997) is nearly four hundred pages long, but only its first thirty-three pages deal with Wyatt’s first thirty-three years. Even less is known about his brothers prior to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. And even less is known about the women the Earps lived with. Bessie Bartlett Earp may have been born in either Illinois or in New York State. I placed her in Tennessee in order to address the theme of regulated versus prohibited vice.
In my portraits of James, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, I tried to stay as close to the facts as possible while allowing myself enough latitude to account for the seeming contradictions in their lives. For my purposes, the telling document is one that barely mentions the boys. In 1864, long before the Fighting Earps were famous, Sarah Jane Rousseau traveled from Iowa to California as part of a wagon train led by their father, Nicholas Earp. Her diary of that journey was recently published by Earl Chafin (The Sarah Jane Rousseau Diary, Earl Chafin Press, Riverside, California, 2002). Rousseau provided a contemporary description of Nicholas Earp as a volatile, bad-tempered, profane, and violent man who did not spare the rod. This confirmed suspicions I had already developed regarding the relationship between Nicholas and his sons.
Wyatt’s fictional observation about the making of bullies rests on the insight of Edward Nolan. Eddie and his wife, Chrissie, raised their family in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the latter half of the twentieth century, when Belfast was as dangerous as Dodge in the 1870s. Belfast boys had to be tough without inviting conflict, and Eddie taught his sons that bullies were boys who’d been beaten by their fathers. “Look at them with scorn, the way their fathers did, and they’re small and powerless again, just like their fathers wanted them to be.” (I do not recommend this tactic, even if you are as physically imposing as the Nolan brothers and the Earps. My advice is: Run.) Eddie’s son Art Nolan convinced me that I should write this story. Art and his father provided endless encouragement while I worked on the novel, even as Eddie himself was facing down a lung disease as lethal as John Henry Holliday’s tuberculosis. Eddie lived long enough to read the complete manuscript and to express his joy in it; I only wish I’d flown to Belfast to hand it to him. Too late now.