So think about the sound. Right. That is usually
where the legend of this guy starts. Not the
gunshot and not the jingle of spurs. Yeah. But
the cough. Yeah, that wet, hacking, persistent
cough. Exactly. The cough that signals a man
who is basically already a dead man walking.
I mean, you can picture the scene right now.
A smoky saloon somewhere in Arizona. Smells like
sawdust. Sawdust. Stale beer. And sitting there
right at the pharaoh table is this gaunt figure.
Pale skin, hollow cheeks, wearing a perfectly
tailored gray suit. He pulls out a fine linen
handkerchief. Coughs into it. And when he pulls
it away, it isn't just damp. It's spotted with
bright red arterial blood. It is the absolute
defining image of the American West's most tragic
antihero. Yeah. It's the image that literally
stops the piano music in the saloon. And immediately,
right now, I know exactly who you are picturing.
If you're listening to this, you are seeing Val
Kilmer. Oh, totally. You are hearing the I'm
your Huckleberry line. The tin cup spinning on
the finger. Yes, you are seeing the cool detached
killer. But today. On this deep dive, we are
doing something a little different. We are holstering
all those preconceived notions. Yeah. We are
taking that Hollywood caricature, which is brilliant,
by the way. It's incredible cinema. It is. But
we are putting it aside. Because the truth is
just stranger and, frankly, a lot darker. Exactly.
We are looking at a massive stack of source material
today. We have the definitive biographies by
Karen Holiday Tanner and Gary L. Roberts. Yep.
We have contemporary newspaper clippings from
the Dallas Weekly Hair. of the tombstone epitaph.
We even have court transcripts. And our mission
here, to find the actual human being buried under,
well, a century of myth. And the human being
we find in these sources is infinitely more complex
than the movie character. I mean, we aren't just
talking about a gunfighter here. We are talking
about a classically educated southern aristocrat,
a doctor of dental surgery, a man who spoke Latin
and French. And a man who was living on borrowed
time from the age of 22. Which is the most important
part. That is the core theme that kept jumping
out at me during the research for this deep dive.
Fatalism. Yeah. The psychology of a man who has
quite literally been given a death sentence.
That is the key to the whole lock right there.
So understand Doc Holliday, you have to understand
tuberculosis. It wasn't just a disease for him.
It was the engine that drove his entire personality.
It stripped him of fear because the worst thing
that could possibly happen to him, death. It
was already guaranteed. He was just waiting for
the date. So let's unpack this properly. Let's
go back to the very beginning, because usually
when we do these deep dives on Western figures,
we are talking about. Poverty. Broken home. Illiteracy.
We're talking about like Billy the Kid stealing
butter to survive. Right. But that is not John
Henry Holliday. Far from it. This is really a
story of lost potential. John Henry Holliday
was born on August 14th, 1851. In Griffin, Georgia.
Griffin, Georgia. This is the deep south pre
-Civil War. And the source material emphasizes
this heavily. He was born into the upper crust.
His father wasn't some frontier drifter. No,
Henry Burroughs Holliday was a man of significant
standing. He was a major in the Army, a veteran
of the Mexican -American War. And later an officer
in the Civil War. Exactly. He was a major landowner.
We're talking about a boy who was baptized in
the Presbyterian Church. He was raised in a home
with servants, and he was expected to carry on
a very proud family legacy. Which means young
John Henry was raised with a very specific...
Code of conduct. The Southern Honor Code. Right.
And this is crucial context for literally everything
that happens later in Tombstone. In that time
and place, your reputation, your family name,
it was worth more than your life. You didn't
back down from an insult? Never. You defended
your honor with violence if necessary. That was
the air he breathed growing up. He was a gentleman
first. And he was incredibly well educated. The
notes mentioned something called the Valdosta
Institute. Yeah. This wasn't a one room schoolhouse
situation where you just learn to sign your name
and maybe count cattle. Not at all. It was a
classical education that rivals what you'd get
at a high end prep school today. We're talking
rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, history. The
languages, though, they really stood out to me.
He was proficient in Latin. He knew French fluently
and he had even studied ancient Greek. It changes
the image completely, doesn't it? It really does.
When you picture him later in those dusty cow
towns arguing with illiterate cattle rustlers,
he's operating on a completely different intellectual
plane than everyone else in the room. He's probably
insulting them in Latin and they don't even know
it. Exactly. He was an intellectual elitist in
a world of roughnecks. And he followed that path
into a professional career. This is the part
of his life that usually gets glossed over in
the movies. In 1870, at just 19 years old, he
leaves Georgia. Heads north. Heads north to Philadelphia
to attend the Pennsylvania College of Dental
Surgery. Now, I think modern listeners might
hear a phrase like dentist in the 1870s. Think
of, I don't know, a guy with a pair of rusty
pliers and a bottle of whiskey in the back of
a barbershop. A lot of people do think that.
But this source material says otherwise. This
was a serious, legitimate medical degree. It
was the cutting edge of science at the time.
The Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery was
one of the premier institutions in the entire
country. Wow. This was a rigorous curriculum.
He had to write a thesis. He studied anatomy,
chemistry, physiology surgery. He graduated on
March 1st, 1872 as a doctor of dental surgery.
And here is a detail I absolutely love from the
Karen Holiday Tanner biography. He was actually
too young to graduate. Yeah, he was a prodigy.
He finished the coursework. Five months before
his 21st birthday. The college literally had
to hold his diploma in a vault until he turned
of legal age. That's amazing. So picture this.
It's 1872. You have a 21 -year -old Dr. Holliday
back in Atlanta. He's brilliant. He's respectable.
He's handsome. And he's setting up his dental
practice. The world is completely at his feet.
And then the floor drops out. The tragedy. And
to understand the weight of this, to really get
why it broke him, we have to look at his family
history, specifically his mother, Alice Jane
Holliday. The sources say he was incredibly close
to her. A mama's boy in the best possible sense
of the word. She was his absolute anchor. But
when he was 15, she died of tuberculosis. Consumption.
Consumption, exactly, as they called it then.
And it wasn't a quick death. It is a wasting
disease. It literally eats you from the inside
out. He watched her wither away. He tended to
her. He was at her bedside. And then he watched
his adopted brother, Francisco, die the exact
same way. So when Doc starts coughing in 1873,
shortly after starting his shiny new practice,
he isn't wondering what it is. No. He knows.
He coughs, he looks down, he sees the blood,
and he knows the script. He goes to the doctor
and the verdict is handed down. Pulmonary tuberculosis.
In 1873. Right. There are no antibiotics. There
is no streptomycin. It is almost 100 % fatal.
The doctor gives him months to live. Months.
He's 22 years old. 22. Imagine that. You are
listening to this right now. Put yourself in
his shoes. You've done everything right. You've
studied. You've graduated. You've started your
career. And the universe just tells you. It's
over. It's over. The medical advice at the time
was, well, it's questionable, right? Go west.
It was the standard palliative care of the Victorian
era. The doctor said, go to a drier climate.
The air in Georgia is too humid. It fills the
lungs with water. Go to the high desert of Texas
or Colorado. Maybe it will extend your life.
But let's be clear about the psychology here.
He isn't moving to Texas to start a fresh new
life full of hope. No. He isn't going west to
be a cowboy or an adventurer. He is going west
to die. That distinction is everything. He's
entering a hospice phase, essentially. Exactly.
He packs up his life and heads to Dallas, Texas.
And initially he tries to fight it. He tries
to keep the respectable dream alive. He partners
with a Dr. John A. Segar. He opens a dental practice.
And he was really good at it. I saw the note
about the Dallas County Fair. This actually made
me laugh out loud when I read it in the source
material. It's a fantastic detail. They enter
the dental competition at the fair. The dental
competition? Yeah. And Doc Holliday sweeps the
awards. They won Best Set of Teeth in Gold. Wow.
They won Best in Vulcanized Rubber. They won
Best Set of Artificial Teeth in Dental Wear.
So he was a real craftsman. He was a skilled
artisan. He could construct complex dental appliances.
But you can't be a dentist with active TB. No.
It's a completely visceral problem. Imagine you
are a patient in the chair. Right. You have your
mouth wide open and your dentist leans over and
has a violent, bloody coughing fit right in your
face. Yeah, I'm never going back to that dentist.
I don't care how good his gold teeth are. Exactly.
It's terrifying and it's unhygienic even by 1870s
standards. His patients stop coming. His practice
just collapses. So the income dries up. He needs
money to live, even if he's dying. He has to
eat. He has to pay for his hotel room. And he
discovers he has another talent. He has a highly
mathematical mind. Remember, he was a student
of logic and math back in Georgia. He turns to
cards, specifically Pharaoh. We should pause
on Pharaoh for a second because it's not really
a game played anymore. It's not like poker where
you're bluffing against other players. No, Pharaoh
was the absolute dominant game of the Old West.
It was basically betting on the order that cards
would be drawn from a dealing box by the dealer,
who is called the bank. Okay. It had better odds
for the player than most casino games, but to
be really good at it, it required intense concentration
and a perfect, most photographic memory for what
cards had already been played. And Doc was a
natural. He was brilliant at it. And in the West...
Professional gambler was a recognized trade.
It wasn't just a hobby. Right. It wasn't necessarily
respectable like being a banker or a lawyer,
but it was a real profession. You paid taxes
on it. You listed it on the census. So he trades
the fine dental drill for the deck of cards.
And this is where the violence starts to creep
into his life. But we need to do some myth busting
here. There is a persistent story about why he
left George in the first place. The swimming
hole incident. Right. If you read the old dime
novels or even some of the early biographies
from the mid 20th century, they say he grabbed
a shotgun and killed two or three black soldiers
who were swimming in his favorite spot in Georgia.
It's painted as this massive act of racial violence
that forced him to flee the state ahead of the
law. But the modern historians aren't buying
it at all. Gary Roberts and Alan Barr did the
legwork on this, right? They did. They scoured
the historical records. There are no police reports.
There are no army records of missing soldiers
in that area. No newspaper accounts. And in a
small southern town during Reconstruction, killing
federal soldiers would have been massive front
page news. It would have brought the entire Union
Army down on the town. It simply didn't happen.
So where does this story come from? Did he invent
it? Likely, Bat Masterson invented it. Later
in life, Masterson wrote a series of articles
about famous gunfighters for a magazine, and
he loved to embellish. He probably invented it
to give Doc a dark badman origin story. So we
can scratch that off the list. The swimming hole
incident is a miss. But the trouble in Dallas,
that was real. That was highly documented. In
January 1875, he gets indicted for illegal gambling.
But then he gets into a serious disagreement
with a saloon keeper named Charles Austin. They
trade gunfire in the street. Nobody is hit. And
Doc is eventually acquitted. But it's the start
of a pattern. He gets fined. He gets arrested.
And he moves on. He becomes a wanderer. The typical
frontier drifter. He goes to Denver, Cheyenne,
Deadwood. He's hitting all the legendary boomtown
spots. And he's getting meaner. Well, the disease
is progressing. He's in chronic pain every day.
He's drinking heavily to manage the symptoms.
He's medicating. Exactly. And his temper is shortening.
In Denver, he's dealing Pharaoh. He gets into
an argument with a guy named Bud Ryan. Doc doesn't
just punch him. He pulls a knife and nearly cuts
Ryan's head off. He leaves him seriously wounded.
Right. And then there's the incident in Breckenridge,
Texas. This one sounds brutal because Doc actually
loses this fight. The Henry Kahn incident. Doc
beats this gambler, Kahn, with his walking stick
during an argument. He just humiliates him in
front of everyone. But the feud doesn't end there.
Later that day, Kahn finds Doc, who happens to
be completely unarmed at the time, and shoots
him. Just shoots him in the street. Yeah. It
was a very serious wound. How serious? Serious
enough that the Dallas Weekly Herald actually
printed his obituary. What way? They reported
Doc Holliday dead. He really was the cat with
nine lives. Or just incredibly hard to kill.
His cousin actually had to come out west to help
him recover. But recover he did. And eventually
he drifts down into Fort Griffin, Texas. And
this is where the cast of characters really assembles
for the main event of his life. Enter Big Nose
Kate. Mary Catherine Horney. A fascinating figure
in her own right. She really is. I feel like
she often gets reduced in pop culture to just
Doc's girlfriend or the prostitute. But the source
material paints a much more vivid, complex picture.
And first, can we clarify the nickname Big Nose?
Yes. Contrary to the playground insults, the
sources suggest it wasn't about the physical
size of her nose at all. Oh, really? It was because
she was nosy. She was intensely curious. She
got into other people's business. She wanted
to know everything going on in the saloon. Kate
was Hungarian by birth, highly educated and spoke
multiple languages. So she was smart. Very smart.
She ran away from home to avoid being put into
the foster system after her parents died. She
worked the dance halls and the brothels because
she wanted independence. She didn't want to be
owned by a husband or controlled by a father.
And she and Doc, it was exactly a standard romance
novel. It was volatile, incredibly toxic at times.
They fought bitterly. They broke up. They got
back together. But they were intellectual equals.
That makes sense. They were both outsiders. You
have the educated European woman. and the dying
Southern aristocrat, both stuck in this gritty,
unwashed frontier world. They understood each
other in a way no one else did. And Fort Griffin
is also where the most important friendship of
his life begins, the fateful meeting with Wyatt
Earp. It's a legendary moment in Western history.
Wyatt Earp is a deputy U .S. marshal at the time,
and he's tracking an outlaw named Dave Rudabaugh.
He ends up at Shancie Saloon in Fort Griffin.
The owner, John Shanzey, tells Wyatt, if you
want to know where Rudabaugh went, you should
talk to the gambler over there. He played cards
with him last night. And that gambler was Doc
Holliday. It's an odd pairing from the very start.
Wyatt is a teetotaler. He doesn't drink. He's
stoic. He's a dedicated lawman. Doc is a drunk,
a dying man, a highly volatile gambler. But Doc
helps him. He does. He tells Wyatt that Rudabaugh
headed back to Kansas. And that favor sparks
something between them. But the bond really solidifies
a bit later in Dodge City, right? The life -saving
incident. Dodge City, 1878. Doc and Kate are
there. They're posing as Dr. and Mrs. Holliday.
He's actually trying to practice dentistry again.
He really wanted that respectable life back.
He did, but the coughing stops it again, so he's
back to dealing cards. The story, and I have
to put a caveat here, this comes largely from
Josephine Earp's memoirs written much later,
so we have to take it with a grain of salt. Right.
Memoirs are notoriously generous to their authors.
Exactly. The story is that Wyatt was surrounded
by a bunch of cowboys, led by a guy named Ed
Morrison. They had their guns drawn on Wyatt.
They had him dead to rights. And Doc steps in.
The story goes that Doc was playing cards in
the back room, saw the trouble, kicked over the
table, and put his pistol right to Morrison's
head, forcing the whole gang to drop their guns.
I'll be your Huckleberry. Wait, did he actually
say that then? Probably not. And honestly, Historians
heavily debate if the event happened exactly
that way at all. Contemporary newspapers in Dodge
City didn't report a big dramatic showdown like
that. But, and this is the key to the whole relationship,
Wyatt Earp believed it happened. Or at least
he publicly credited Doc with saving his life
that night. Exactly. Even if the details were
embellished by Wyatt over time, that moment cemented
a loyalty that baffled literally everyone else
in their circle. Virgil Earp, Wyatt's brother,
later said that aside from the Earps, he didn't
think Doc had a single real friend in the entire
territory. Wow. But for Wyatt, that loyalty to
Doc was absolute and unbraidable. So the stage
is set. We have the friendship. We have the dangerous
reputation. And now they all move to the place
that will define them forever in history. Tombstone,
Arizona. September 1880. Doc follows the Earps
to Tombstone. The silver boom is on. Money is
flowing. But the trouble starts almost immediately.
And we really need to explain the politics here
because it's so often missed in the movies. This
wasn't just lawmen versus outlaws. This was highly
political. Right. It was basically Republicans
versus Democrats, wasn't it? Right. It was basically
Republicans versus Democrats, wasn't it? Exactly.
The Earps were Northerners. They were Republicans,
representing federal control, town building,
and business interests from the North. The Cowboys,
the Clantons, the McClories, they were Southerners.
They were Democrats, representing the rural,
agrarian resentment against the townsfolk. Many
of them were former Confederate sympathizers.
So Doc, a refined Southern aristocrat, is actually
siding with the Northern faction here. Which
made him a massive traitor in the eyes of the
cowboys. He was a southerner who had turned his
back on his people to run with these northern
badge wearers. That added a deeply personal layer
of hatred to the conflict. And the cowboys try
to use his weak spot against him. They go after
Kate. The stagecoach robbery accusation. This
is a crazy, messy story. In March 1881, the Kinnear
and Company stagecoach is attacked. The driver,
a guy named Bud Philpott, and a passenger are
killed. It's a botched robbery. Rumors immediately
start flying around town that Doc Holliday was
one of the masked robbers. Which begs the question,
why would a dentist -turned -gambler who makes
good money at Faro need to rob a stagecoach?
Well, he liked money, potentially. But mostly,
the Earps had powerful enemies in town. Sheriff
Behan and a saloon owner named Milt Joyce. They
desperately wanted to get at the Earps to ruin
their reputation, and Doc was the obvious weak
link. So what do they do? They find Big Nose
Kate, they get her incredibly drunk, I mean dangerously
blackout drunk, and they have her sign an affidavit
implicating Doc in the murders. That is incredibly
low. weaponizing his own partner against him.
It's rough politics, tombstone style. Doc is
arrested for murder, but the Earps scramble.
They do the legwork and find witnesses who completely
prove Doc was elsewhere during the robbery. And
once Kate sobers up, she realizes what she's
done. She recants everything. She says she was
manipulated and intimidated by the sheriff. The
charges against Doc are dropped, but the damage
is done. The tension with the Cowboys, the Clantons,
and McClory's just boils over. It pushes everything
toward the breaking point. You have the Earps
and Doc on one side, the Cowboys on the other.
Which brings us to the most famous date in Western
history, October 26, 1881. The gunfight at the
O .K. Corral. Or, more accurately, the gunfight
in the vacant lot on Fremont Street near the
OK Corral. Right. It's not as catchy for a movie
title, though. True. Now, I want to focus specifically
on Doc's role here. Because Virgil Earp, who
is the town marshal, makes a very specific tactical
decision regarding Doc right before they walk
down that street. Virgil deputizes Doc. Think
about the gravity of that. He takes this volatile,
sick, unpredictable gambler and pins a badge
on his chest, but he also does something strategic
with their weapons. He trades weapons with Doc.
The cane for the shotgun. Right. Doc usually
carried a walking stick. Virgil takes the stick
to appear less threatening as he approaches the
cowboys as a lawman, and he gives Doc a short
coach gun, a sawed -off shotgun. Doc hides it
under his long overcoat. So Doc is walking into
this confrontation with a literal handheld cannon
concealed under his jacket. They meet the cowboys,
Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury.
It's a very small, narrow space between two buildings,
15, maybe 20 feet wide. It's cold. The wind is
blowing dust everywhere. Words are exchanged.
And then complete chaos. The witnesses disagree
on who fired the very first shot, but we know
exactly what Doc did. Doc immediately closes
in on Tom McClory. Tom is trying to get a gun,
maybe from his horse's scabbard, maybe from his
belt. Doc pulls that short shotgun from under
his coat and fires point blank. The blast hits
Tom dead in the chest. It was devastating. He
was killed almost instantly. And then the pistol
fight ensues in this tiny, smoky space. Frank
McClory, who is already wounded but still fighting
hard, challenges Doc. He reportedly yells at
him, I've got you now. And this is the line.
The famous line. Doc's reputed reply as he stands
there, blaze away, you're a daisy if you have.
You're a daisy if you have. What does that even
mean in 1881? We really need to unpack this Victorian
slang because it sounds weird to us now. A daisy
meant the best of something. A humdinger. A real
pro. He is basically saying to Frank McClory,
you're a champion if you can actually kill me.
It is the ultimate expression of that fatalism
we talked about at the start. He is standing
in a narrow alley in a hail of lead bullets,
staring death right in the face, and he is taunting
it. He is basically saying, take your best shot.
I've been dying for years anyway. He does get
hit, right? A bullet grazes his hip, cuts right
through his holster. He yells out, I'm shot right
through. But he survives. When the smoke clears,
the cowboys, Billy Clanton and both McClory's
are dead. And you'd think that would be the end
of it. The bad guys are dead. The lawman won
the day. But it actually just starts a massive
bloody war. The vendetta. This is where the story
shifts from a standard law and order frontier
tale to a full blown revenge tragedy. The remaining
cowboys retaliate. Virgil Earp is ambushed at
night and maimed for life. His arm is shattered.
Then Morgan Earp is assassinated, shot through
the back while playing billiards. The legal system
completely fails the Earps. So Wyatt takes the
law into his own hands and launches the vendetta
ride. And Doc is right there. He is deputized
federally this time. He is right there beside
Wyatt, sick, coughing up blood, barely able to
sit on a horse some days because of the pain.
But he rides. And this leads to the killing of
Frank Stilwell at the Tucson train station. The
sources say Stilwell was found. Full of buckshot
and bullets. It was an execution, pure and simple.
They found him lying in wait for Virgil, who
was trying to leave town on a train, and they
finished him. But this entirely turns the tables
on them. Now, a warrant is issued for Doc and
the Earps for murder. They are technically fugitives
from justice. They are hunting cowboys while
simultaneously being hunted by the local sheriff's
posse. And this leads to the Iron Springs shootout.
This is a scene right out of a modern action
movie. The Earp posse is ambushed by Curly Bill
Brocious and a group of cowboys near a watering
hole. Wyatt Earp performs a miracle, essentially.
He walks directly through a storm of gunfire
to kill Curly Bill with a shotgun. But Doc is
there, too. Doc is under heavy fire. Doc, along
with the others, has to retreat rapidly because
they have absolutely no cover. But notice what
he does. Another member of their posse, a guy
named Texas Jack Vermillion, has his horse shot
out from under him. He's pinned to the ground.
Doc Holliday turns his horse around, riding back
under intense fire to help rescue him. Again,
that fierce loyalty. Always the loyalty. He wouldn't
leave a man behind, even if it cost him his life.
But... And here is where it gets really interesting
and, frankly, a little uncomfortable. That loyalty
has a limit, or at least the famous friendship
has a breaking point. The split. This happens
in Albuquerque, 1882. The group has finally fled
Arizona. They're safely in New Mexico. And something
happens between Wyatt and Doc at a place called
Fat Charlie's The Retreat Restaurant. This detail
really surprised me. I had never heard this part
of the story in any of the movies. It's often
left out of the pop culture retellings because
it makes our heroes look, well, deeply flawed.
They have a massive falling out. The cause, according
to a letter written much later by the future
governor Otero, who witnessed it, was a slur
that Doc made. Unpack that for us. What happened?
Wyatt was staying with a prominent local businessman
named Henry N. Jaffa. Jaffa was Jewish. Wyatt
was honoring his host's religious traditions.
He was reportedly touching the mezuzah on the
doorpost when he entered. Doc. who was drunk,
saw this and made a nasty comment about Wyatt
becoming a damn Jew boy. Oof, that is rough.
Wyatt was absolutely furious. He walked out,
and that was effectively the end of their close
daily association. It's a stark reminder that
Doc was a man of his time, a Southern aristocrat
from the 1850s with all the prejudices and bigotry
that came with that upbringing. Exactly. We can
admire his bravery and his loyalty in a gunfight,
but we absolutely cannot ignore the ugliness
of his character. He was a complex high... flawed
human being. They remain friends from a distance
after that, but the legendary dynamic duo is
broken for good. So Doc is now on his own. He
drifts up into Colorado, and this is where his
luck, or maybe just his terrifying reputation,
starts to catch up with him in some really weird
ways. He's arrested in Denver. The Arizona warrant
for the Frank Stilwell murder is still active.
Arizona wants him extradited immediately. And
Doc knows if he goes back to Arizona, he will
be murdered by the cowboy faction in his jail
cell before he ever stands trial. But then an
old friend shows up. Bat Masterson. This is one
of my favorite Old West legal maneuvers. Bat
Masterson is now the police chief in Trinidad,
Colorado. He hears about Doc's trouble in Denver.
He wants to help him, but he can't just break
him out of jail with guns blazing, so he fabricates
charges. He makes up a fake crime. Entirely.
He claims Doc ran a bunco game, which is a gambling
fraud, in Trinidad, Colorado. He argues to the
governor that Colorado has a prior claim to prosecute
Doc before Arizona can take him across state
lines. The governor agrees, refuses the extradition
to Arizona, and keeps Doc in Colorado to face
these fake charges. Which eventually just magically
disappear. Precisely. They evaporate. It was
a brilliant legal sleight of hand to save his
friend's life. Amazing. But Doc is deteriorating
rapidly now. The TB is destroying his lungs.
He's drinking incredibly heavily and using laudanum
to manage the daily pain. But he's not done with
shooting people quite yet. The Billy Allen shooting
in Leadville, Colorado in 1884. This one is tragic
in its sheer pettiness. Doc is completely destitute.
His health is gone. His money is gone. He borrows
$5 from a bartender named Billy Allen. $5. Which
is equivalent to maybe $180 today. Doc can't
pay it back. Allen, who is a big, tough guy,
he outweighs Doc by 50 pounds at this point,
threatens him. He says, pay me. Or else, he is
actively hunting Doc through town. So what does
Doc do? He can't fight him physically. He goes
to Hyman's saloon, sits down, waits for Alan,
and when Alan walks through the door, Doc just
shoots him. Over $5. He hits him in the arm,
severs an artery. Alan survives, but he never
uses that arm properly right again. Doc is arrested,
goes to trial. And to everyone's shock, he is
acquitted. On what grounds? How do you shoot
a guy over a $5 debt and walk away? the no -duty
-to -retreat law, and the fact that Allen was
undeniably hunting him, making threats, the jury
looked at this dying, 116 -pound, frail dentist
coughing up blood and this big bully who was
threatening him, and they sided with the dentist.
Now, we have to address one big mystery before
we get to the very end of his life. Johnny Ringo.
Ah, yes, the great movie myth. The climax of
the film Tombstone, where Doc shows up in the
forest, surprises Ringo, says, I'm your huckleberry,
and shoots him dead. It's such a good scene.
My hypocrisy knows no bounds. I mean, it's iconic.
It is excellent top -tier cinema. It is absolutely
terrible history. Break our hearts. Let's hear
the truth. Johnny Ringo was indeed found dead
in Arizona in July 1882, shot through the temple.
It was officially ruled a suicide. However, theories
have persisted for decades that Doc went back
across state lines and killed him for Wyatt.
But the court records are explicitly clear. At
the exact time Ringo died in Arizona, Doc Holliday
was standing in a courtroom in Colorado answering
for larceny charges. So he literally has a rock
-solid alibi in the state court records. He does.
The geography and the timeline just don't work
at all. It's almost certainly a complete myth.
Okay, so we're in the final act of Doc's life.
He moves to Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Why there?
The natural hot springs. He desperately hoped
the sulfur vapors rising from the springs would
heal his lungs. Did they? Probably the exact
opposite. The harsh sulfur fumes likely irritated
his damaged lungs even more. He is only 36 years
old, but his hair is prematurely white, and he
is entirely bedridden. He works as a pharaoh
pit boss for a tiny bit, but his body just completely
gives out. November 8, 1887. The deathbed scene.
It's a very quiet end for such a loud, violent
life. He wakes up in his bed at the Hotel Glenwood.
He asks the attending nurse for a glass of whiskey.
She refuses because he is actively dying. He
looks down at his feet. His boots are off. He
says his last words. This is funny. This is funny.
What did he mean by that? Think about his entire
adult life. The gunfights, the ambushes, the
knife fights, the fatalism. He always assumed,
he knew deep down, that he would die violently.
He would die with his boots on in the dirt of
some street. probably shot to death. To die in
a clean bed, bootless, just looking at his bare
toes, that was the ultimate irony. The universe
played a massive joke on him at the very end.
And even his burial is a bit of a mystery, isn't
it? It is. He was buried in Linwood Cemetery
up on the hill in Glenwood Springs. But because
the ground was deeply frozen that November, it
was a very difficult burial. Some say they had
to bury him elsewhere temporarily. Records were
lost over the years. Today, no one knows exactly
where his physical body lies in that cemetery.
He just faded into the landscape. So let's zoom
out here at the end. We have unpacked the real
life. Now let's look at the tally. The myth says
he killed dozens of men. The body count. If you
believe the dime novels and the whispers, he
killed over a dozen, maybe 20 men. But when you
look at the verified historical record. What's
the real number? Between one and three. That's
it. One to three people. Mike Gordon, maybe.
Tom McClory, definitely. And possibly Frank Stilwell,
though he wasn't alone in that shooting. That's
it. That is shockingly low for a guy with his
terrifying reputation. But that was the sheer
genius of Doc Holliday. His reputation was his
actual shield. He didn't need to kill people
if everyone firmly thought he was crazy enough
to do it. He was erratic. He was dying. He was
completely fearless. Most people just backed
down before a gun was even drawn. Wyatt Earp
summed him up best in his eulogy years later.
He did. It's a beautiful quote. He said, A dentist
whom necessity had made a gambler. A gentleman
whom disease had made a vagabond. The most skillful
gambler and nerviest, speediest, deadliest man
with the sixth gun I ever knew. That loyalty
again. It survived everything. It never wavered.
Wyatt defended Doc to the day he died. It's really
interesting how pop culture has evolved on him.
He used to be portrayed strictly as the villain
in early movies. Now, especially after Val Kilmer,
he's the intensely loyal sidekick, the tragic
romantic hero. We like him today because he represents
a very specific kind of freedom. He was liberated
from the consequences of life because he had
the ultimate consequence, his own death, hanging
right over him every single day. Which brings
us to our final thought for the listener. We
so often view Doc Holliday as a tragic figure,
a life cut short, a brilliant medical talent
wasted at the card table. But I want to flip
that narrative for a second. Was he actually
the most free man in the entire West? Because
he had absolutely nothing to lose. Exactly. Most
of us live our lives in fear, fear of failure,
fear of injury, fear of what people think, fear
of death. Doc Holliday had faced his absolute
worst fear at age 22 in that doctor's office.
The diagnosis. Once he accepted that death was
coming soon, he was untouchable by fear. So here's
the question for you listening right now. If
you knew the clock was ticking, really knew it,
would you play it safe? Or would you be a daisy?
Would you stand in the street and say, blaze
away? Something to think about. Thanks for diving
deep into the sources with us today. We'll see
you next time.