Big Nose Kate

Portrait from 1890

Big Nose Kate , actually Mary Katharine Haroney (also known as Kate Fisher , Kate Elder and Mary Cummings , born November 7, 1849 in Pest , Austrian Empire , † November 2, 1940 in Prescott , Arizona , USA ), was an American Prostitute . She became known as the longtime companion of gunslinger John Henry "Doc" Holliday . As a figure in American folklore, her life was processed in various works.

Childhood and death of parents

Kate was the oldest of eleven children of doctor Michael Haroney and his second wife Katharina Baldizar Haroney. She received extensive training, so she mastered Hungarian , French , Spanish and English . From 1862, her father was the personal physician of the future Mexican Emperor Maximilian I. She lived in Mexico City until 1865 . Her mother died on March 26, 1865, and her father two months later. The remaining family fled after Maximilian's disempowerment and execution in 1867 to Davenport , Iowa .

Kate and her siblings came to different nursing homes . In 1867 she was taken care of by Otto Smith. However, she fled that same year by ship to St. Louis , Missouri . Although she was discovered by the captain of the ship as a stowaway , she was allowed to continue her journey. In St. Louis she came under the surname of the captain as Kate Fisher in a convent school and completed an education there in 1869.

Kate and Doc Holliday

Around 1874 Kate moved to Dodge City , Kansas , where she performed as Kate Elder . She worked as a prostitute in a brothel run by Nellie "Bessie" Earp, the wife of James Earp , a lesser known brother of Wyatt Earp , Virgil Earp and Morgan Earp . It is controversial whether Kate met Wyatt Earp at that time or even had a relationship with him. She later stated that she saw him for the first time years later.

Kate then went to Fort Griffin, Texas , where she met Wyatt Earp and John Henry "Doc" Holliday . She and Doc Holliday traveled to Dodge City , where Wyatt Earp had settled, and resided with him at the Dodge House Hotel . She spent the next several years with Doc Holliday, first in Dodge, later in Deadwood , South Dakota , in Las Vegas , in New Mexico and in Prescott, Arizona. She ran a brothel in the Globe area under the name Big Nose Kate . In 1880 she lived for a while in the then "booming" silver town of Tombstone in Arizona. There she became quite prosperous as a brothel operator. Doc Holliday joined her in September of the same year after a lucky streak in Faro and poker in Tucson .

When Doc Holliday was suspected to have been involved in a mail robbery near Tombstone on March 15, 1881, she made a testimony against him after an argument. It is said that Doc Holliday's enemies first made her drunk and then persuaded her to make the statement. On the basis of this statement, Doc Holliday was arrested and only released again when the sober Kate recanted the statement the next day.

Big Nose Kate went back to the Globe but kept in touch with Holliday. In Tombstone, in 1881, she witnessed the shooting at OK Corral . After the murder of Morgan Earp, she followed Doc Holliday to Colorado , where he died in Glenwood Springs .

Next life

After Holliday's death, Big Nose Kate married the farrier George Cummings, but their marriage lasted only a year. She later went back to Arizona, where she worked as a housekeeper until 1930 . She spent her final years in a retirement home in Prescott. She died in 1940 and was buried in Prescott under the name Mary K. Cummings.

Kate on the shooting at the OK Corral

Many reporters have tried to ask Kate about her life with Doc Holliday and the shooting at OK Corral , as it was reported that she did not want to pay anything, so she kept her knowledge to herself. A letter she wrote in 1889 contained some clues. There she describes how she was with Doc Holliday at Fly's Boarding House near the O. K. Corral until shortly before the shooting and witnessed the shooting. Kate's accounts in this letter contain details which, through historical research, coincide with the events, so that her explanations can be judged as credible.

Representation in films

Big Nose Kate appears in several Hollywood films about the shooting at OK Corral: Jo Van Fleet played her in 1957 in Zwei reckoning , Faye Dunaway portrayed her in 1971 in the film Doc , Joanna Pacuła in 1993 in Tombstone and Isabella Rossellini in 1994 in Wyatt Earp - The life of a legend .

In the John Wayne - Western The Sons of Katie Elder was the titular character whose sons appear to her funeral of a deceased elderly lady, named after Kate Elder. Otherwise the plot of the film has little to do with her life.

literature

• Glenn G. Boyer, "Who Was Big Nose Kate?" (Wyatt Earp, Family Friends and Foes, Volume I) . Arizona University Press, Historical Research Associates, Rodeo (New Mexico / USA) 1997, ISBN 1-890670-06-5 . (engl.)
• Karen Holliday Tanner: Doc Holliday: a family portrait . University of Oklahoma Press, Norman (Oklahoma / USA) 1998, ISBN 0-8061-3036-9 . (engl.)

Web links

• Biography of the Ford County Historical Society (Engl.)
• Texas Escapes Online Magazine for biography (Engl.)
• Online biography of thenaturalamerican (Engl.)