Doc Holliday in Colorado

John Henry Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia on August 14, 1851, and trained as a dentist at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, from which he graduated in 1872. Within a year of opening a practice in Atlanta, he had a tuberculosis diagnosis and an understanding that the Georgia humidity was going to shorten whatever time he had considerably. He went west, as the advice of the period prescribed, seeking the dry air of the plains and mountains that physicians had been recommending to consumptive patients since the 1860s. He practiced dentistry in Dallas and Dodge City, Kansas, with decreasing frequency as the disease progressed and gambling became more reliably remunerative. He met Wyatt Earp in Dodge City in 1878, and the friendship that followed is better documented than most relationships in the historical record of the American frontier, which is to say it is documented enough to be argued about in perpetuity.

Holliday came to Colorado in 1879 and spent more of the remainder of his life there than anywhere else. The Colorado chapters — Denver, Pueblo, Leadville, Glenwood Springs — are typically compressed in biographical treatments to make room for the eighteen months in Tombstone, Arizona, which ended at the O.K. Corral in October 1881 and gave Holliday the public identity that has persisted in popular culture for more than a century. The archive is more interested in the Colorado record, which is longer, stranger, and more fully documented, and which ends at a specific grave in a Glenwood Springs cemetery above the confluence of two rivers.

Colorado Arrives: Denver, 1879

Holliday first arrived in Pueblo and then Denver in 1879, and like most arrivals in the Colorado boom economy of that period, he came for the money. Denver in 1879 was a city in the middle of its transformation from a mining supply depot into a real city with brick buildings and railroad connections and the full infrastructure of ambition. Larimer Street was the center of the gambling and saloon district. Holliday appears in the record as a faro dealer at establishments along this corridor — faro being the card game of choice in the period, a house-banked game with a relatively low house advantage that attracted serious gamblers and provided steady income for skilled dealers with a reputation for honesty.

He also opened a dental practice in Denver, an arrangement that his biographers treat with varying degrees of irony depending on their interpretation of his character. The archive notes that both activities are consistent with the same man: the tuberculosis was progressing, the uncertainty about how much time remained was real, and maintaining a professional identity alongside the gambling was not necessarily hypocritical. It was more likely the behavior of someone who had not entirely abandoned the life he trained for, even as the disease was steadily narrowing the options for pursuing it.

He spent time in Pueblo as well during this Colorado period, and the records are incomplete enough that reconstructing a precise itinerary is not possible. He was mobile in the way that the gambling economy required — moving between towns as the opportunities shifted, following the money along the railroad lines that were connecting Colorado's mining regions to each other and to the national economy. The Colorado mining boom of the late 1870s was producing wealth rapidly and distributing it unevenly, and the men with skills in separating wealth from its temporary holders were in continuous demand.

Tombstone and Return, 1880–1882

In the autumn of 1880, Holliday followed Wyatt Earp to Tombstone, Arizona, where Earp's brothers had established themselves and where the silver mining economy was generating the kind of concentrated wealth that attracted everyone from legitimate investors to confidence men to outlaws. Holliday's time in Tombstone occupies eighteen months in a life of thirty-six years and has generated more biographical and popular culture attention than the remaining thirty-four years combined. The archive treats this as a distortion produced by the specific drama of what happened there.

On October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and Holliday confronted a group of cowboys near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. The gunfight lasted approximately thirty seconds. Three men died: Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, and Billy Clanton. Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded. Holliday was superficially wounded. The legal and extralegal aftermath — the hearings, the vendetta campaign, the killings — extended through early 1882 and ended with Wyatt Earp leaving Arizona permanently. Holliday left with him.

They came back to Colorado.

The Extradition Fight, 1882

The return to Colorado in the spring of 1882 immediately produced a legal confrontation that is, in the archive's view, more consequential than anything that happened in Tombstone. Pima County, Arizona, had issued warrants for Holliday's arrest in connection with events during the Earp vendetta campaign, and Sheriff Bob Paul filed extradition papers with Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin. The legal mechanism was straightforward: Arizona wanted Holliday back, and the governor of Colorado had to decide whether to send him.

Pitkin refused. His stated reasoning was that Holliday could not receive a fair trial in Arizona, where the county and legal apparatus were hostile to the Earp faction and where, in Pitkin's assessment, extradition amounted to delivering Holliday to his enemies rather than to justice. Bat Masterson, the former Dodge City lawman, testified on Holliday's behalf in the Colorado hearing, as did others with knowledge of the Arizona situation. The combination of character testimony and Pitkin's skepticism about Arizona's judicial neutrality produced a ruling in Holliday's favor. He was not extradited. Arizona's attempt to try him never proceeded. He remained in Colorado for the rest of his life.

The extradition refusal is not frequently discussed in popular treatments of Holliday, which tend to end at Tombstone or skip to the death scene in Glenwood Springs. The archive notes it because it is a significant legal event, because it demonstrates that Holliday had accumulated enough standing and credible advocates in Colorado that the state's governor would act on his behalf, and because without it his story probably ends in Arizona rather than Glenwood Springs, under very different circumstances.

Leadville, 1882–1886

Leadville was a mining city at ten thousand feet elevation in Lake County, Colorado, and in the early 1880s it was one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the United States. Silver had been discovered there in 1877, and the mining wealth had funded a civic infrastructure of unusual ambition for a mountain town: the Tabor Opera House, fine hotels, a population that had grown from nothing to twenty thousand in five years. It had also funded an extensive gambling and saloon district, which is where Holliday spent his time.

The Leadville period is documented in court records as well as in the town newspapers. In August 1884, Holliday shot a bartender named Billy Allen at Hyman's Saloon. The circumstances were disputed at trial: Allen claimed Holliday shot him without adequate provocation; Holliday's defense argued that Allen had been systematically harassing and threatening him, that the shooting was self-defense, and that Holliday had reason to believe Allen intended to harm him. The jury acquitted Holliday in March 1885 after deliberating briefly. The verdict was consistent with the general disposition of Colorado juries toward self-defense arguments in this period, and with the weight of character testimony that Holliday's advocates — by now a well-established group — were able to provide.

His health continued to deteriorate through the Leadville years. The altitude, which physicians had initially recommended for tuberculosis patients, produced its own complications as the disease progressed. He was thinner and more frequently ill by the mid-1880s. He continued to gamble because it was what he knew and because the alternative — whatever the alternative was — was harder to identify. He was in correspondence with Wyatt Earp, who was elsewhere in the West in this period. He was in contact with his family in Georgia intermittently. The letters that survive from this period suggest a man who had made peace with his situation in a way that did not require optimism.

Glenwood Springs, 1887

He arrived in Glenwood Springs in May 1887 on the advice of a physician who believed the hot sulfur springs and the lower (relative to Leadville) altitude might slow what the higher altitude had not helped. Glenwood Springs had opened its eponymous hot springs complex the previous year, and the Hotel Glenwood on the bluff above the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers had positioned itself as a destination resort for exactly the category of patient who was looking for a setting in which to be ill with some dignity.

Holliday was thirty-five years old when he arrived and weighed substantially less than he had in his prime years. He took the baths and sat in the vapor caves. He dealt cards at one or more establishments in town during the summer months. He received visitors and wrote letters. The disease progressed regardless.

By October he was confined largely to his room at the Hotel Glenwood. He died on the morning of November 8, 1887. He was thirty-six years old. Multiple accounts record his last words as a comment upon looking at his bare feet — the boots he had expected to die with were not on. The remark was characteristically precise. He had been precise about everything throughout his life: the value of a hand, the distance of a threat, the loyalty owed and expected. Precision was what he had in place of the certainty about duration that the tuberculosis had taken away in 1873, and he maintained it to the end.

He is buried at Linwood Cemetery in Glenwood Springs, on a hill above the river confluence. The location of his actual grave within the cemetery has been disputed by researchers for decades — flooding and erosion have shifted markers, and the original burial record is less precise than subsequent legend requires. A marker exists. Whether it marks the precise location is a question the archive cannot resolve. He is there in some form, in a Colorado mountain town, in a grave overlooking a river, which is a reasonable ending for a man who spent most of his adult life moving toward one mountain range or another looking for air that would let him breathe.

What Colorado Was to Him

The popular accounting of Doc Holliday's life organizes it around Tombstone. The archive's accounting organizes it around Colorado, because Colorado is where most of it happened. He came here in 1879, returned from Arizona in 1882, stayed through Leadville and Glenwood Springs, and died here in 1887. In between were the years in which he was tried and acquitted, refused extradition by a governor who believed him, maintained correspondence with his closest friend across the distance of the western territories, and continued to deal cards in establishments that ranged from respectable to otherwise in a succession of Colorado mining towns.

What the tuberculosis gave him, in a perverse sense, was Colorado. The disease drove him west, and west turned out to be here — the altitude, the dry air, the succession of mining boom towns with enough money flowing through them to support a skilled gambler and occasional dentist. He was not a romantic figure in his own estimation, the archive suspects, but he was a precise one, and precision in a landscape as large and unforgiving as this one is its own form of heroism. He measured what he had correctly. He spent it accordingly. The boots were off at the end, and the ending was in a bed in a Colorado resort hotel, which is not the ending the dime novels would have written for him, and which is, for that reason, more interesting than any of them.