Painting of Wyatt courtesy of Bob Boze Bell
Painting of Wyatt courtesy of Bob Boze Bell
Doc Holliday: From Son of the South to Wild Gun of the WestPart OneBy Claudia FunkSome say the first assassination Doc Holliday committed was on himself - John Henry Holliday, born August 14, 1851 in Griffin, Georgia to Henry Burroughs Holliday and Alice Jane McKey. A doctor of dental surgery and a landed gentleman by the time he was 21, Holliday had everything a Son of the South required for a rich life, even in the midst of Reconstruction. Like many of his peers, Holliday also had more than his share of disappointment and grief by then too. He was left home with his mother, while Major Henry Holliday was fighting for the Confederacy. Like many of the luckier southern families of the time, Mrs. Holliday and young John were untouched by Union soldiers, but were surrounded by death and destruction just the same. His beloved mother (the true gentry in the family, as the Hollidays were middle class) died of tuberculosis just a year after the war ended and only a month after her son's 15th birthday. Alice Jane is said to have taught her John Henry about the finer things a gentleman's life offered. According to Karen Holliday Tanner, a relative of Doc's, The family credited [Mrs. Holliday] with instilling in him his gentle qualities -- his respect for women, love of animals, fine manners, and strong faith. (Tanner 5) Tanner also discusses a birth defect John Henry had. He was allegedly born with a cleft palate and a partially cleft lip. It was his namesake and uncle, John, one of the finest surgeons in Georgia, who would deliver John Henry and also perform the surgery required to correct his nephew's palate and lip. If not fed properly and carefully, the newborn could quickly choke to death. When the baby gained some weight he would be able to drink from a shot glass. (It is ironic that John Henry started off his life sustained by a shot glass since excessive use of a shot glass may have hastened his death many years later.) (Tanner 13) This condition required extensive speech therapy as well, and another act that bonded mother and son was one found in her role as speech therapist to John Henry. The sadness of his mother's death was compounded by his father's remarrying a scandalous three months later to a woman closer to John Henry's age than his father's. The standard grieving time in this era was one year, and this shocking disregard on the part of Holliday's father provoked an uncle into challenging the first Mrs. Holliday's will. John Henry's uncle Tom McKey (an alias Doc would use occasionally later on), fought Henry Holliday over a building that had belonged to the McKeys. John Henry was 16 when the legal battle was settled, splitting the building's ownership in half - one side to Tom McKey and the other to Henry Holliday in trust for his son, who sold it almost as soon as he came of age. Aside from his mother's early death, friction between father and son (and the Hollidays and McKeys), and martial law having been declared in the ravaged South, John Henry lost two more close family members to the devasting cough that eventually claimed him. His adopted older brother, Francisco Hidalgo, an orphan Henry Holliday returned home with after the Mexican War, died of consumption in January of 1873 eight months before John Henry's 22nd birthday, and nine months before he left Georgia under the advice of his physician uncle for a warmer climate. Francisco died less than a month after their Uncle Robert Holliday. Uncle Robert was someone with whom John Henry had spent time with and to whose daughter he was very close. Now an only child (there was also a sister Holliday never knew - Martha Eleanor Holliday died in infancy) whose tensions between him and his father were apparent to many, embraced his father out of custom and respect, adjusted his new (and would-be a famous detail in the dapper Doc's appearance later) diamond stickpin - a gift from his Uncle John, and boarded the train to Dallas, Texas in September 1873. He was never to see his home again. However, before we join him in that ride, let us just understand that there is no reason to assume that John Henry was free of trouble before leaving Georgia. There were reports of various scrapes - some more serious than others - that Holliday was a part of, but his father was a connected man politically and knew when to have his son leave town and be quiet. This was a dangerous time for young men in the South, especially young men of society, and a frightening time for everyone else too. During one of these periods Holliday was sent to stay with his Uncle Robert's family in Northern Georgia. According to several sources John Henry started up a romance with his cousin Melanie "Mattie" Holliday. She is said by some to have been the inspiration for the character of Melanie in the film Gone With the Wind, and interestingly enough, Melanie eventually joined a convent later in life and became Sister Melanie. She was a Catholic, and had she not been bound by religious law, she and John Henry may have married. This was not an unusual custom in the culture of the South, but it was unacceptable for Catholics to marry a first cousin. It is said that the pair kept a strong correspondence throughout their lives, and John Henry gave his cousin his graduation photo (pictured above), which she kept with his letters close to her. There is also a story of Holliday's shooting at some local black boys one summer. This is recounted by the prolific Bat Masterson in one of his many essays: It was the indiscriminate killing of some of the negroes in the little Georgia village in which he lived was what first caused him to leave his home. Near the little town in which Holliday was raised, there flowed a small river in which the white boys of the village, as well as the black ones, used to go in swimming together. The white boys finally decided that the negroes would have to find a swimming place elsewhere, and notified them to that effect...One beautiful Sunday afternoon, while an unusually large number of negroes were swimming at the point of dispute, Holliday appeared on the river bank with a double-barrelled shot-gun in his hands, and, pointing it in the direction of the swimmers, ordered them out of the river. "Get out and be quick about it," was his preemptory command...Holliday waited until he got a bunch of them together, and then turned loose with both barrels, killing two outright, and wounding several others. Most people understand that there is some tall-telling in some of Masterson's stories, but this is one that hung around Doc in various versions forever. There was an incident like this about the time Masterson claims, and there are records of an inquest involving the McKeys. All evidence also points to the land being family-owned which oddly puts Holliday within his rights, to an extent. Again, with race relations being a focus then like now, one can only ponder the strength of Holliday's father's political affiliations. Holliday may have had a fierce temper, but he also had a fierce loyalty, especially to a group of brothers named Earp. His transformation into the consumptive dentist called Doc will be explored in the next installment. Sources: Jahns, Patricia, The Frontier World of Doc Holliday |
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The title image uses a painting of Wyatt Earp by Bob Boze Bell and is reproduced here with kind permission of the artist. Last Updated on 10/07/06
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