Doc Holliday

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Doc Holliday in Tombstone (around 1882)

John Henry Holliday (born August 14, 1851 or early 1852 in Griffin , Georgia , † November 8, 1887 in Glenwood Springs , Colorado ), known by his nickname Doc Holliday , was a dentist and one of the most famous gunslingers of the Wild West . Holliday was involved in nine shootings and killed between three and seven people.

Life

Doc Holliday was the son of Henry Burroughs Holliday, a major in the US Army, and Alice Jane McKay. His date of birth, August 14, 1851, is recorded in the father's family Bible. He was born with a cleft lip . Two doctors from his family corrected this malformation, whereupon he could speak unhindered. His mother Alice died of tuberculosis on September 16, 1866 . Three months later, his father married a woman named Rachel Martin.

Shortly after the wedding, the family moved to Valdosta , Georgia , where John attended the Valdosta Institute . He was trained in rhetoric , grammar , math , history , and languages ​​such as Latin , French and Greek . In 1870 he moved to the Philadelphia College of Dental Surgery , the forerunner of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in Philadelphia , where he received his doctorate on March 1, 1872 . He practiced as a dentist in Atlanta for a short time until he contracted tuberculosis at the age of 21. He hoped to get relief from his illness through dry climates, which is why he moved to the west. In 1873 he settled in Dallas on Elm Street. It was there that he began to drink excessively and to play poker professionally, which he saw as a welcome source of income. In January 1875, he was arrested for the first time after a shootout in a saloon . However, nobody was injured and he was acquitted. He left Texas after repeatedly convicted of gambling .

Now a professional gamer, he moved further west, where gambling was legal. Holliday always settled in gold rush cities, including Denver , Cheyenne and Deadwood , where he met Wyatt Earp in 1876 . In 1877 he stopped at Fort Griffin , where he met Mary K. Haroney (Big Nose Kate) and served Earp. Their friendship solidified in 1878 when they both settled in Dodge City . In September of that year, Doc Holliday Earp saved the life of an ambush. In 1880 he took part in Earp's silver mining business and became very wealthy. However, he was drawn into a conflict that culminated in the most famous shootout in Tombstone : At the side of his friend Wyatt and his brothers, Virgil Earp and Morgan Earp , he took part in the legendary shooting at OK Corral on October 26, 1881. The whole fight, in which the two McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton were killed, is said to have lasted only 30 seconds.

After the subsequent revenge murder of Morgan Earp, he fled with the Earp and Mary Haroney family to Colton , California. On the way there, Earp started his vendetta and shot and killed one of the men at the train station in Tucson who he blamed for the murder of Morgan. More deaths followed, so Holliday finally turned away from him and from then on they went their separate ways. They last saw each other in Denver in 1885.

Doc Holliday spent the rest of his life in Colorado with Mary Haroney. In 1884 he shot a man named Billy Allen in the arm in an argument over five dollars he couldn't pay. Since his opponent was armed, he was found not guilty in court. In early 1887 his health deteriorated dramatically and he went to the health resort of Glenwood Springs . He led a quiet and withdrawn life there until his death in November 1887 and converted to Catholicism through his friend Martha Anne "Mattie" Holliday, a cousin and nun.

In an 1896 interview, Wyatt Earp said of him:

“Doc was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whose disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whose life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a gun that I ever knew. "

“Doc was a dentist who necessity turned into a gamer; a gentleman whom illness had made a vagabond of the western frontier; a philosopher whom life had made a vicious cynic; a tall, thin ash-blond guy, almost dead from tuberculosis , and at the same time the most skilled player and the boldest, fastest, deadliest man with a gun I have ever known. "

Films about Doc Holliday (selection)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gary L. Roberts: Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2006, p. 415. ISBN 0-471-26291-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Holliday, Doc
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holliday, John Henry (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American dentist and gunslinger of the Wild West
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1851 or 1852
PLACE OF BIRTH Griffin , Georgia
DATE OF DEATH November 8, 1887
Place of death Glenwood Springs , Colorado