Doc Holliday: The Perennial Sidekick

For most of his adult life, the Old West gambler and gunslinger John Henry ‘Doc’ Holliday (1851-87) had a reputation for violence. When he died of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis on 8 November 1887, aged 36, he was popularly reported as having killed anywhere between eight, 17 and 30 men. Journalists, though, were amazed to find him ‘as different as could be from the generally conceived idea of a killer’. Holliday was a ‘frail and harmless looking specimen’ not in the least ‘resembling the fancy caricature of a border desperado’. Small, ‘childlike’ and ‘almost fragile in appearance’, he was also ‘scrupulously neat’ and ‘beautifully’ dressed in the ‘latest style’. Confronted with such a puzzling combination of waif-like frailty and cold ferocity, the Omaha Daily Bee tried to sum him up as ‘a mild-mannered frontier angel, who has started a graveyard in every frontier town he has graced with his presence’.