A journalist’s facts are the mainstay of any article. Consider the following:
• John Henry “Doc” Holliday graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1872. He opened a dental practice in Dallas shortly thereafter. He later took up the practice of dentistry in Tombstone, Arizona, though in both cases ill health caused him to give it up.
• The legendary gunfight at the OK Corral was over in just under thirty seconds, and more than thirty shots were fired.
• The last known meeting of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday took place at the Windsor Hotel on May 1, 1885 (other sources claim 1886) and was documented by Earp’s wife, who was also in attendance at this historic meeting.
• Wyatt Earp lived well into the twentieth century, moving to California, where he befriended many in the movie business. Two cowboy stars of the time, William S. Hart and Tom Mix, were pallbearers at his 1929 funeral.
• The Pinkerton Detective Agency’s logo was a large eye, and their motto was “We never sleep.” Alan Pinkerton earned fame as the man who foiled an early assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln.
• The first book in Beadle & Adams’ Beadle’s Dime Novel series, Maleaska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Ann S. Stephens, dated June 9, 1860, is widely considered to be the first dime novel.
• The Denver Times was an actual newspaper published from 1872 through 1926. Winston Mitchell, however, is completely fictional and never wrote a column for the paper.
• Nineteenth-century journalist Nelly Bly, born Elizabeth Cochran but who wrote under a pseudonym taken from a Stephen Foster song, blazed for female reporters a trail that included a stint in an insane asylum playing the part of an actual inmate. She had only one year of formal education, and that was at home under her father’s tutelage.