History Report for the General Meeting
March 21 2008 C.Y. 6013
As read by XNGH Kurt "Kurteous Maximus" Hexburg
"DOC"
Few names epitomize the old west more than the name of Doc Holliday. Born John Henry Holliday to Henry and Alice Holliday on August 14th 1851 in Griffin Georgia, young John Henry was the son of a wealthy planter and lawyer who had served as a major in the Confederate Army and eventually became the mayor of Valdosta, Georgia. In accordance with his father’s high station, young John Henry was expected to choose a profession bourne of higher learning. He chose dentistry and received his degree in dentistry from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1872.
Shortly after opening his practice as a junior partner to Dr. Arthur C. Ford he found out that he had contracted tuberculosis. Known as “consumption” at the time, it was essentially a death sentence. All of the physicians he consulted on his condition told him that his best hope was to move to a drier climate, so he headed west. Settling in Dallas, he tried to make a living at his chosen profession but his condition made this impossible and he had to find another way to make a living.
He soon found that he possessed an uncanny knack for playing cards. In those days, if you made a living with a deck of cards it was also important that you became a gunfighter as well. Doc embraced this aspect of his new calling because he thought that it would be much better to die from a bullet to the chest than to slowly waste away from the ravages of consumption. Simply put, his skill with a sixgun was a direct result of a fatalistic desire to die with his boots on. By the time he befriended Wyatt Earp he had already sent three men to an early grave and had taken up with one of the west’s more colorful women, a prostitute named Big Nosed Kate.
Doc Holliday’s reputation with pistol and bowie knife kept him on the move from Texas to Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico as each altercation he was involved in ended with someone else doing the dying. Eventually Doc met up with his old friend Wyatt in a boomtown known as Tombstone, Arizona. It was there that he met Wyatt’s brothers Morgan, James, and Virgil. There were several confrontations over a period of about one year, including the now infamous shootout at the OK Corral. These altercations left almost twenty men dead at the hands of the Earps and Doc Holliday, as well as the violent end to Morgan Earp, Wyatt’s younger brother.
Doc Holliday’s final weeks were spent laying in bed fighting the ravages of tuberculosis. He must have felt it was the height of irony for someone who had cheated death a total of nine times at the hands of others to finally lose his last battle to a disease that essentially chokes a person to death. Ironic indeed, for his last request was a glass of whiskey and his last words were, “This is funny”.
