John Henry Holliday arrived in Glenwood Springs in May of 1887 on the advice of a physician who told him the hot sulfur springs and the dry mountain air might slow what nothing could stop. He had been told variations of this before — in Georgia, where the tuberculosis first announced itself, and in New Mexico, and in Leadville, where the altitude was supposed to accomplish what the lower elevations had failed to do. None of it had accomplished much. He was thirty-five years old and weighed, by some accounts, a hundred and twenty pounds. He had lived past every reasonable expectation and he knew it.
Glenwood Springs in 1887 was a resort town in the early stages of becoming one, which is to say it was a construction site with a hotel. The Hotel Glenwood had opened the previous year, a frame building overlooking the confluence of the Grand and Roaring Fork rivers, positioned to capture the carriage trade that the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad was beginning to deposit in quantity. The springs themselves had been known to the Ute people for generations under other names and had been known to the surrounding white population for roughly a decade. They were understood in that period to have curative properties for respiratory complaints, skin conditions, and the general deterioration of constitution that accompanied outdoor life in the territories. Holliday was there for the respiratory complaint. He took the baths. He sat in the vapor caves cut into the limestone above the river. He watched the river.
He also dealt cards. This is documented in the account books of at least one Glenwood establishment from that summer and in the recollections of a man named Thomas Campbell who played against him in what Campbell would later describe as the only hand of faro he ever lost money on without feeling he had been cheated. Campbell’s description of Holliday in this period is one of the better ones: thin as a fence post, eyes that counted everything they rested on, hands that never shook even when the rest of him did. He dealt from the shoe with the efficiency of someone who had made peace with the fact that this was what he was good at and had decided it was enough to be good at something.
The tuberculosis had entered its final phase by midsummer. He had difficulty breathing at altitude, which was an irony he did not appear to appreciate publicly. The hot springs reduced his inflammation but the walks to and from them exhausted him in ways that became harder to hide through the summer months. By September he was largely confined to his room at the Hotel Glenwood, taking his meals there when he could eat, which was not always. He received visitors. He sent letters. The letters have not all survived, but enough have to establish that in his final months he was in contact with Wyatt Earp, that the contact was friendly, and that Holliday was not under any illusion about his condition or the timeline it implied.
What he thought about in that room above the confluence of two rivers, in the last weeks of October and the first week of November 1887, no account reliably records. He had killed men, which is established. He had been loyal, which is also established, and which in the vocabulary of the frontier period carried a weight that is difficult to fully translate into later usage — loyalty in that context being not sentiment but a specific form of professional commitment that could get you killed and sometimes did. He had been sick for most of his adult life and had done everything he did while being sick, which is worth noting because it is not always noted. The tuberculosis was not background to his story. It was the condition in which the story occurred.
He died on the morning of November 8, 1887, in his room at the Hotel Glenwood. He was thirty-six years old. The attending physician noted that he was coherent near the end and that his last recorded words, upon looking at his bare feet, were to the effect that he had expected to die with his boots on. The sentiment was variously reported in the newspapers of the period as ironic, as funny, as sad, as characteristically precise. All of these readings are defensible. Holliday was consistently precise, and consistency in a man is worth honoring even when the subject is death.
He was buried in Linwood Cemetery, on a hill above the town, in a grave that was at the time marked and later was not and later still was marked again in a location that may or may not correspond to the original. The cemetery at Glenwood Springs has experienced flooding, erosion, and the general indignity of time, and the precise location of Holliday’s remains has been a subject of dispute among researchers for decades. A marker exists. Whether it marks the correct location is a question this archive cannot resolve and which Holliday, if asked, would probably have found amusing. He had a clear appreciation for the comedy of unresolvable situations. It may be that is what he meant by funny at the end — not the boots, but all of it, the whole unresolvable situation of being John Henry Holliday, concluded at last in a bed in a resort town in the mountains, without his boots, with the problem of his exact location remaining open.
Silas Creed — Archive Note, Added 1888 I was not in Glenwood Springs when Holliday died. I was told of it three weeks later by a man passing through on other business, who mentioned it the way one mentions a weather report — factually, without apparent weight. I added the weight myself, later, thinking about the winter of 1879 in Trinidad. He had seemed, in that brief conversation at the faro table, like a man who had already decided what everything was worth and priced it accordingly. I do not know if that made his dying easier or harder. I suspect he did not know either, and that the not-knowing was itself a kind of precision he would have approved of.
Cards Room — Now Open
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