My Friend Doc Holliday
By Wyatt Earp
Hello, my name is Wyatt Earp*. This is a book about my friend, Doc Holliday. It was dictated for transcription in the year 1887.
I was chasing outlaw Dirty Dave Rudabaugh across Texas in 1878 when I met Doc Holliday. He was twenty-seven years old — a lucky number, he told me, “a set of nines” — and I was thirty, when he first saved my life. First, but not last.
I went to see an old friend, John Shanssey, at his Bee Hive Saloon in Fort Griffin. I asked him if he’d seen Dirty Dave. He said, No, but that man might have, and so he introduced me to Doc, who had been playing the piano there in our company. Doc, you see, played cards with Dirty Dave, and though Doc shared no bad blood with the man, he was owed a tremendous amount of money in the form of poker debt; such a tremendous amount that Doc now considered him a liability. Sensing our shared interests, Doc directed me to Dodge City, where he knew Dirty Dave had gone off to. In fact, Doc offered to ride with me, in the hope of insuring his half of this new business venture.
We took to the hunt like two dogs on a doe until we found ourselves in the Long Branch Saloon, which was so named so for the great big tree which stood outside it, and it’s long and sturdy branch whereupon outlaws would commonly hang, and further whereupon dead cowboys had only just recently swung.
Ed Morrison and two dozen of his cowboys came rushing into town, shooting every window, harassing every person. I tried sneaking out the front door but there were five cowboys with guns drawn on me, standing there as if they had been waiting for me and me personally. They would have shot me, too, if it hadn’t been for Doc Holliday, who stepped out from the card room with his pistol drawn and aimed at Ed Morrison’s head. In doing so, Doc was able to sue for peace, and save my life.
That was when Doc Holliday became my friend.
Doc was born John Henry Holliday in 1851, in Georgia. He received a classical education in Valdosta before moving to Philadelphia to earn a degree in dentistry. He soon thereafter was diagnosed with tuberculosis and at twenty years old moved to Dallas, hoping a warm and dry climate would help relieve his symptoms.
Doc practiced dentistry in Dallas but soon found gambling more profitable. He left Dallas for Denver after exchanging gunfire with another card player, being indicted and arrested, but ultimately being found not guilty. Trouble followed him there, more fighting with guns and knives, drunks and deadbeats, and so Doc continued north to Wyoming and the gold rush there. He added Kansas to the circuit before eventually returning to Texas, Breckenridge, where he was shot and near-mortally wounded by a deadbeat. Finally, he moved to Fort Griffin, Texas where he met the love of his life, Kate Horony, and, eventually, me.
That was when we decided to ride out to Dodge together.
After the episode with Ed Morrison, I stayed in Dodge as a marshal and Doc cleaned up the poker table most nights, still practicing some dentistry during the days. We had our women and we had our fun and on many nights we would howl at the moon and practice shooting at animals which only came out in the dark. And Doc never missed a shot.
It was more about what we didn’t do, though. The nights just sitting around, drinking and playing cards, these were when I really got to know Doc. Doc tried to train me in Latin, and Greek, and Western classics, namely Homer. I didn’t do well with the foreign languages (I hardly remember but a few words of it) but the stories I will never forget. Doc’s demeanor changed in telling them, and my perspective on the world changed in hearing them, and our friendship grew stronger in contemplating them together.
Drinking and gambling and gunfighting picked up. Eventually Doc and Kate got out of Dodge and made their way to Las Vegas to open their own saloon, and another dentistry practice. Doc partook in the Royal Gorge War, and shootouts in his saloon, and stagecoach robberies. It was there in Las Vegas where he began to cement his reputation as an expert card player and pistoleer.
In 1880 Doc joined my family and me in Tombstone, Arizona, chasing the silver rush. After a run-in with Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brosius, and their cowboys, my brothers decided to sign up as marshals, despite my protests. The cowboys provoked us into a shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Doc hesitated not for one second in stepping up to provide support with the street howitzer. This was the second time Doc saved my life.
We escaped from that shootout with no casualties, but the cowboys soon thereafter ambushed my brothers. Morgan was murdered. Virgil escaped with wounds, and, when setting off to California to find rest and healing, the cowboys attempted to ambush him again, but Doc and I were waiting for them there with shotguns. Thus began our vendetta ride. We tracked down Curly Bill at Iron Springs, and I killed him with a shotgun at twenty yards. Then we found Johnny Ringo at West Turkey Creek Valley, and, well, my lawyer advises me against writing about what happened there, but I can tell you that Doc Holliday was charged for the murder, though not convicted, because my testimony helped to acquit him.
Doc and I then went our separate ways, chasing our own passions and riches, but though he left my side he never left my heart or mind.
Thus recounts the deeds and milestones of John “Doc” Holliday’s life. But let me tell you more now about the man himself — not what he did, but how he did it, and, more importantly, why.
Doc was on track to be a “civilized man”, but God had other plans. I think the tuberculosis was a gift, in the end, because but for it he would have stayed in Philadelphia. He would never have achieved his destiny. There was something about the west, something about the frontier, the lawlessness, the brutality, hell, even the great wide open space itself, something that unlocked a spirit within Doc. If not for the TB he would have never gone west, and who would remember his name, then? Achilles, he said, thought it better to die young with the fame of great deeds, than to expire after a long and quiet life as a laborer. To leave behind a beautiful corpse, and a legacy. To make your life a legend. “To be welcomed into the company of Saint Michael, in Heaven, and become a captain in his eternal war with Satan,” this, Doc said, would be his fate. This was the ultimate aim of a “Man of the West,” be that man a Spartan or a Pistoleer. Doc said that he came to know these things from his education, and yet…
If the American west was the soil that Doc needed to flower into his destiny, then perhaps I was the spring rain which catalyzed the germination. That may sound silly, or proud, but it need not have been me in particular. No, to find a friend, a real friend, that was what was needed to finally weave his thread of fate. Doc preached about the meaning of fraternity. “Friendship is everything,” he said. “It’s more important than skill with a gun. It’s more important than government, too. Friendship only pales in comparison to blood, to family, but even that… you can’t choose your family. But you can choose your friends.” Doc chose me, and I him. And I think that broke something open, in both of us, like a chemical reaction. Doc had the fire in him all along, the fire of Herodotus, he called it, and Zeus’s lightning, and if you don’t have a friend to ground that lightning to, then it all just fizzles out, and a man may never achieve his grand calling. Great men accomplish great things, but great friendships accomplish legendary things.
Doc never accepted the rules of society, but now he had found the strength to face them down and overcome them. Cops were on the take from the gambling and prostitution rings. Judges gave unjust mercy to criminals, if the criminals possessed strength enough as the cowboys did. The “powers that be” were no more than pimps in those days, and so why should he let those men rule him? Their rules would have condemned him to a certain kind of life that was, frankly, just not acceptable to Doc, a man of force, and of character. Though Doc was physically short of stature and slight of frame, he considered himself equal to Great Men of history, certainly the cowboys and cops of the west; and so how could he accept rules set up by those others? Rules which condemned him to the mere life of a laborer? He had his own code of ethics, and this code was a higher authority even than the President of the United States. It was as high as God the Almighty.
And so, Doc Holliday became ungovernable. He was mean, ill-tempered, and when he had gotten into his cups he was downright devilish. Due to his slight build and his TB, he likely could not have taken even a teenager in a fist-fight, and yet he became, arguably, the most dangerous man in the west.
And my truest friend.
What makes a true friend?
A true friend is always there for you, no matter what. If you are facing certain death, a true friend sets his own life aside to face it with you.
A true friend is loyal. You know, they say that “love is blind,” which suggests perhaps a lover will ignore your faults and vices; well, if that’s the case, then a true friend is one who closes his eyes.
A true friend is generous. His roof is your roof. His bread is your bread. Your enemies, he makes his own. A true friend gives, expecting no payment or particular deed in return.
A true friend is a man of respect. He says what he means and he means what he says out of mutual admiration and trust. A man of respect is loved by friends and feared by enemies. He will not be servile, but he will serve a friend. He will not be trampled upon, but he will humble himself before a friend. He knows when and how to lead, and to follow.
Aristotle said that a friend is one soul sharing two bodies. Thus, a true friend is a man who shares your dreams and desires, your loves and your fears. Sometimes, on rare occasions, two men come together on earth who share love’s hungry appetite for an idea far above them. This is true friendship.
A true friend is a river. Though seasons or years may change its ways of running, you can always return to it because you know precisely where to find it. It is always there to refresh you, to clean away the dirt of sin from one’s soul. And, when all is still, you can gaze into it and it will show you a reflection of yourself.
A true friend is a treasure which exceeds the value of all gold and silver any man may ever come to possess. He cannot be bought or sold, and it should be no other way.
I’ve had plenty of acquaintances in my life — men with whom I was friendly — but I’ve had precious few true friends.
Doc Holliday was a true friend to me, and I will never forget him.
*This was not written by Wyatt Earp. This is a personal interpretation of what might be inside the pamphlet given to Doc by Wyatt at the end of the film TOMBSTONE. Details of John “Doc” Holliday’s life are mostly accurate; interactions and ruminations with Wyatt Earp are my own artistic interpretations of the man.
This one hit me hard. Well done.
Very well written, I'm sure Wyatt would be proud!!!