Doctor John Henry Holliday – Not Your Huckleberry

By Gary Ledoux – Western History Author

Tombstone Epitaph  October 2006

I started my interview with Karen Holliday Tanner with a most inauspicious question, but one I had to ask, “Did Doc ever say, ‘I’m your huckleberry’?”  Enthusiasts will recognize the line from the cult movie classic, Tombstone starring Val Kilmer as “Doc”.

Karen laughed, “I don’t think so although in all my research I never found that quotation by Doc! However, it was a contemporary expression that was in use at least by 1883 according to the Dictionary of American Slang. One early usage that I found was in March 1889 when cowman Dan Harvick suggested to Matt Shaw (alias J. J. Smith), “Smithy, let’s go rob a train…” Smith replied, “I’m your huckleberry.”

Many books and stories have been written about Doc Holliday.  The bio written by Karen Holliday Tanner brought fresh insight to the consumptive, shot-gun toting dentist from Georgia because, being a descendant, Karen had access to a treasure trove of materials heretofore unavailable to the bevy of writers seeking it.

Karen wrote in her book, “Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait”, “In 1988 Mary Holliday Olson gave me my father’s ‘Doc box’ along with the request that I complete his work.  I am the great-granddaughter of Robert A. Holliday DDS, and Mary Fulton Holliday – and a cousin of Doc Holliday.  This is his story.”

Karen’s great-grandfather was Robert A. Holliday, a dentist.  Robert’s father was Dr. John Stiles Holliday who was a brother to Henry B. Holliday who was “Doc’s father.  This makes Karen a 1^st cousin, three generations removed.

The “Doc box” was a collection of Doc’s personal items that had been in the family for many years.  Among the items were notes written by a family member from interviews in the early 1930’s with Mary Fulton Holliday (Robert’s widow) and an aged Sophie Walton, a woman who had been born into slavery in Georgia and had been taken in by the Holliday family in 1864.  She helped around the Holliday household sewing and serving as a nanny for the younger children.  She got to watch a young John Henry grow into adulthood and finally leave his beloved Georgia on a Dallas-bound train. Sophie lived with a total of four generations of Hollidays.

Also of note in the “Doc box” was a device Karen had first seen as a young girl when she thought it to be an abacus. Later, she realized it was a faro casekeeper, a device used in faro – one of the most popular card games of chance in the west.  This made perfect sense to her.

I asked if receiving the “Doc box” was the only impetus for writing her book.  Karen explained that she was already involved in researching history and had a great interest in genealogy.  And to top it off, her husband, John D. Tanner, was a history professor at a local college.  The “box” just brought it all together for her.

As she and her husband started reviewing the box’s contents she thought she might have enough material for a magazine article.  As she dug further, it looked like there might be enough material for a pamphlet.  The more she dug and the deeper she got into the story she realized she had enough material for an entire book!

When asked how the OK Corral incident changed history Karen replied that she thought it didn’t change old-west history, just added to it.  It was what it was – a gunfight. Tombstone was another mining camp – with lawmen and outlaws.  “It did however put Tombstone on the map!” she noted.

To change the perspective, I asked what Karen thought would have evolved if the gunfight had never happened.  She replied, “It is likely that neither Doc nor Wyatt would have become famous.  Doc, as sick as he was, would have met his demise in the same manner although maybe not in the same place.  And Tombstone may not have been as famous as it is although, because of its colorful name, it might have been more that just a footnote in a history book.”

On the subject of fame, Karen noted that Wyatt emerged as more famous than Doc, perhaps only because he lived longer.  No doubt, they are both charismatic characters and each make fascinating character studies.

Despite whatever fame Doc Holliday may enjoy now, it may be related to current pop-culture and / or regional culture.  Karen noted that she grew up in Chicago.  When, as a young girl, it occurred to her that the family shared a name with an old-west icon she asked her mother if they were related to Doc. Her mother was evasive.  Later, when Karen told her Chicago friends that she was writing about Doc Holliday, few had heard of him.  She attributed the lack of knowledge to a mid-western culture.  (The same is true to large degree in the northeast where history classrooms are steeped in tales of colonial America, not icons of the southwest.)

As she asked other family members, she realized that most members of the family had been shielded from knowledge of the “notorious lead-throwing dentist”. Some family members tried to discount Doc as a myth, a legend that never really existed.  “Not unlike Robin Hood” Karen’s uncle lamented.

John Henry Holliday was a southern aristocrat – a man of station – who had attended dental college and could plan for a genteel life as a dentist; a professional man.  The Holliday family was involved in agriculture, real estate and other business and professional pursuits.  They had social status.  Southern men of those times were normally destined to make their family proud of them – not shun them.

Karen explains in her book:

Within a few short years, he would become a man whose character was not recognizable to his aristocratic family.  Fortunately, his relatives were spared the lurid details of his new life on the frontier.

When the family learned of John Henry’s participation in the gunfight in Tombstone, it is probable that he himself masterminded the effort to ensure that they also learned that he had acted under the badge of authority and that he had been exonerated of any crime.  Pacified, they refused to believe in the stories that were occasionally published.  Imagine the family’s shame in 1927 when Walter Noble Burns published his “Tombstone:  An Iliad of the Southwest” and stated unequivocally that Doctor Holliday was “the fighting ace of the Earp faction and considered by connoisseurs in deadliness the coldest-blooded killer in Tombstone”  The socially prominent and always proper Hollidays found it convenient to avoid all discussion of John Henry, who had died forty years earlier.

“I ran across this same concept researching other so-called bad-men.” Karen explained.  “Early descendents often covered up their relationships, while third and forth generations of these families found the relationships to be Intriguing and entertaining.”

While on the subject of fame, I noted that there had been many movies made about the Tombstone saga in general and about Doc in particular.  The movie “Doc” starring actor Stacey Keach came to mind.  Karen laughed, “No matter what the movie, Doc always seemed to steal the show!”

When asked who her favorite “celluloid Doc” was she asked me to define “favorite”--the most accurate or the most entertaining. We then had to go through all the actors who had portrayed the gun-toting dentist.  There was Kirk Douglas playing Doc to Burt Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp in “Gunfight at the OK Corral”.  Cesar Romero played a fairly robust Doc to Randolph Scott’s Wyatt Earp in 1939’s “Frontier Marshal”.  Of course, Stacy Keach played a very stolid Doc to Harris Yulin portraying a dour Wyatt Earp in the movie, “Doc”.  Inevitably, we came around to the two most recent stories of the Tombstone legend, Wyatt Earp with actor Kevin Costner in the lead role and actor Dennis Quaid as Doc and Tombstone with Kurt Russell as Wyatt and Val Kilmer as Doc. 

We both agreed – Val Kilmer played the part as charming and charismatic and was an overall favorite.  “He was the most entertaining” noted Karen, “although at times, he came across as kind of wimpy.”  However, Dennis Quaid did the better job portraying the dentist as family members believe he really was.  Mr. Quaid really captured the essence of man dying the horrific death of a consumptive and he amply portrayed the deep friendship between the two frontiersmen.

No matter who played Doc on-screen however, Karen objected to the violence Doc directed toward his often-time paramour, Mary Katherine Cummings (Horony) aka Kate Elder aka  – Big Nose Kate.  Karen commented of the seemingly ubiquitous mayhem, “Doc was a southern gentleman raised to respect women.  It was not in his upbringing to strike a woman or ill-treat a woman.  Despite the legend, I just don’t think that would have happened.”

When asked how the gunfight affected her personally Karen became very animated.  “If it had not been for that 30 second street fight, I would not be doing what I’m doing today.  I would not have traveled all over the country researching my ancestral cousin.”

I asked Karen to share some of the “gems” she found in her travels.  She noted that poring through microfilmed records and old newspapers she had found evidence of Doc being in Dennison, Texas, and other places in Texas that heretofore had not been recognized by prior biographers.

Karen beamed, “We found traces of Doc in many counties of Texas and we traveled through practically every small county in that big state.  In one instance, I had been poring over microfilm all day and was quite tired, and ready to call it a day when I found myself reading, for some unknown reason, a story about a local county fair.  Much to my surprise, this seemingly incongruous story contained the name John Henry Holliday.  Focusing and reading the story again, I found that Doc had won a blue ribbon at a Dallas fair for a school project he had apparently completed at dental college. This confirmed a family story that John Henry had won awards for his dentistry.”

Doctor John Henry Holliday DDS, Georgia native, mining camp resident, noted gambler, wayward traveler, and friend of Wyatt Earp may never have uttered the words, “I’m your huckleberry” but he will forever be a “daisy of a character” in the legend that is Tombstone.