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Doc Holliday (1851-1887)

DocJohn Henry Holliday was born in Georgia in 1851. An educated man, John learned mathematics, the sciences, and earned a degree in dentistry (hence his nickname, “Doc”). He disliked the teeth trade, preferring to spend his time playing poker, and after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, he went west to partake of the dry climate.

Despite his genteel upbringing, what Doc really liked to do was have a good time. His idea of a good time involved gambling on cards, drinking whiskey, and enjoying the attentions of a lady or two. A really good time featured all three at once. It has been said that he drank three quarts of whiskey on an average day, and when he got serious about the job, could kill five or six.

Together with his occasional paramour, “Big Nose” Kate Elder, Holliday went on a violent, lucrative, and whiskey-soaked spree through the territories. He tended to leave town under threat of arrest or one step ahead of a posse, and at one time was wanted for various crimes in Kansas, Texas, Missouri and Arizona. He holed up for a time in Tombstone, Arizona, arriving shortly before the Earp brothers, with whom he became embroiled in the animosity which led to the gunfight at the OK Corral.

His TB worsened, causing him to regularly cough up blood. Strong whiskey seemed to stem the hacking, so Doc drank from dawn to dusk. He checked into a hospital for consumptives in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where, as a wealthy man, he bribed nurses to bring him his self-prescribed medicine. Otherwise, he remained a model patient until he died. He was 36 years old.

Big Nose Kate (1850-1940)

Known at various times as Kate Fisher, Kate Elder, or Kate Cummings, Mary Katherine Haroney was born in Budapest, Hungary, the oldest child of a wealthy physician. Her father moved to Mexico in 1862 to act as the personal physician for Emperor Maximilian I. In 1865, when the Mexican government imploded, the Haroney family relocated to Davenport, Iowa, where Dr. and Mrs. Haroney managed to die within the year, leaving Kate an orphan.

The intervening years are a blur, but by 1874 Kate was living in Dodge City, Kansas, where she sold her charms in a brothel owned by Nellie Earp, wife of James Earp, the less famous older brother of Virgil, Morgan and Wyatt. While living in Dodge, Kate met Doc Holliday, who would be part of her life for many years.

Kate could match Doc drink for drink, and her temper was, if anything, even more volatile than his. She carried a derringer in an ankle holster, and when crossed, could curse a trailhand back into church. After she’d had a few, her verbal tirades took on a cosmopolitan flavor as she assaulted her opponents in a hair-raising potpourri of Hungarian, French and English. Many times, sadly, when Kate slipped into banshee-mode, her target was Doc Holliday.

They were quite the couple. The phrase “love birds” can share space in the same sentence as the words “Doc” and “Kate” only as a means of defining what they absolutely were not. We’ve all had friends like Holliday and Big Nose (hopefully without the shootings and stabbings), or witnessed their like. You know, they start the night acting like Siamese twins attached at the lips, drinking and dancing without a care in the world, then, for reasons even they probably don’t understand, they spend the next few hours auditioning for the Springer show—yelling, chasing, crying, slapping, pouting—until, just at the very apogee of ugliness, they make up and sneak off to screw in the laundry room. Such was the daily reality of Kate’s relationship with Doc Holliday.

Kate’s epic drinking habits once got her and Holliday in a whole hill of trouble. They had been fighting and Kate, in a cloud of rage, went to a saloon, where she encountered Tombstone sheriff Johnny Behan. He was sitting with members of the feared outlaw gang, the Cowboys, lead by a rancid little psycho called Curley Bill Brocious and his frequent partner in crime, the gunman Johnny Ringo. (At a saloon in Prescott, Arizona, Ringo, a specialist at shooting unarmed men, offered to buy a man a whiskey, but when the man ordered a beer instead, Ringo shot him dead.)

The Cowboys were involved in a feud with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, a feud that Sheriff Behan encouraged because he was a weasel and felt threatened by the Earps’ influence in “his” town. When Kate thundered into the saloon, the boys saw an opportunity. Someone, surely one or more of the Cowboys, had recently robbed a Wells-Fargo wagon and murdered the driver. The Cowboys and Behan bought Kate as much whiskey as she could drink and persuaded her to swear that it was Doc Holliday who had done the deed, which she did right on the spot.

Kate recanted after she sobered up. Doc forgave her, and their relationship continued along its usual tempestuous course until Doc finally became so ill he required hospitalization. They never saw each other again, and Kate returned to Arizona, where she lived well into her 90s.

The building that was once the Grand Hotel in Tombstone is, today, Big Nose Kate’s Saloon. Numerous visitors have claimed that Kate’s ghost haunts its back rooms and corridors. Big Nose Kate was a hellion in life, a free spirit, an ass kicker and a name taker, so her lingering spirit is likely one spitfire of a spook.
-Modern Drunkard

"You know, Frederick-fucking-Chopin." His portrayal of Doc Holiday is timeless.