Dance with the Devil is the story of a quest, as young Dr. John Henry Holliday arrives in Texas looking for a new start while dealing with old demons: his love for a woman he can’t have, his troubled relationship with his father, his double addiction to gambling and alcohol, and his death sentence of consumption. Although Western legend paints Doc Holliday as a cynic who didn’t care if he lived or died, I had a hard time believing that a 23 year-old young man just starting into professional life would be so world-weary already. Instead, I imagined him as a young Aids victim who gets a fatal diagnosis at the prime of his life and goes through all the stages of grief before realizing that he isn’t dying just yet, but living until he dies. And the facts of Holliday’s life support that theme, as he starts what seems to be promising new career in Dallas before spiraling out of control into a life of liquor and legal trouble as he wandered the Western frontier. It wasn’t until he left Texas behind and followed Wyatt Earp to Dodge City that he regained something of his old life, practicing dentistry in the Cattle Capital and, according to Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson, staying out of trouble.
It was Bat Masterson’s recollections of Doc Holliday, combined with the memoirs of Doc’s mistress Kate Elder, that shaped this book, telling a much different story than the later inventions of novelists and screen-writers. Bat had known Doc in Dodge City and Denver and Tombstone and wrote about him as part of a series of articles for Human Life Magazine in 1907. Bat’s version of Doc’s history was reprinted in newspapers across the country at a time when other people who’d known Holliday were still alive and could have disputed the facts—but no one ever did. Neither Wyatt Earp nor Kate Elder, nor any of Doc’s other associates countered Bat’s stories, and so they stand as his first authoritative biography. And according to Bat, it wasn’t sickness, but a shooting that made Doc leave Georgia and head west.
As Bat tells it, near to the South Georgia village where Holliday was raised there was a little river where a swimming hole had been cleared, and where he one day came across some black boys swimming where he thought they shouldn’t be. He ordered them out of the water and when they refused, he took a shotgun to them and “caused a massacre.” His family thought it best that he leave the area, and so he moved to Dallas, Texas. Although the story of a massacre isn’t likely, there are some interesting points to Bat’s account: Holliday did, in fact, live in a village in South Georgia, the town of Valdosta, near where there is a little river called the Withlacoochee, along which his family owned some land and a swimming hole. Where would Bat have gotten such details, if not from Holliday himself? And when the family was later asked about the episode by a reporter, they said that Holliday had fired over the boys’ heads, not at them—but they did not deny the shooting. Having a perfect opportunity to deny the event and protect the family name, they did not. As for the story of Doc leaving Georgia for his health, that tale was first told nearly fifty years after he died in a novelized account of the life of Wyatt Earp called Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall. Although none of Doc’s contemporaries ever said that he left Georgia for his health, the fiction has been repeated so many times that it’s become part of his legend.
Following the facts instead of the legend lead me to an important discovery in Dallas: the legal case around Doc’s New Year’s Day shooting scrape, a story that appeared in the Dallas Herald of January 2, 1875:
“Dr. Holliday and Mr. Austin, a saloon-keeper, relieved the monotony of the noise of fire-crackers by taking a couple of shots at each other yesterday afternoon. The cheerful note of the peaceful six-shooter is heard once more among us. Both shooters were arrested.”
Because of the light tone of the news article, other writers had assumed that the incident was treated lightly by the law and that Holliday was laughed out of town. But before I was a novelist I was a trained paralegal and knew that where there was an arrest, there was also a legal paper trail. So I started my search for the paperwork of the New Year’s Day shooting in the Dallas County Court records stored in a series of boxes in the Dallas Public Library. With the assistance of my friend and fellow paralegal VelDean Fincher, we found the original charge listed in the Minutes book of the Court: Case #2643, Assault to Murder, which carried a penalty of 20 years in the State Penitentiary. Clearly, this was no laughing matter. But how was the case resolved? Although several legal aides in Texas told me that those court papers no longer existed, I knew in my bones that they did and kept searching, and found the records in another set of boxes in the State Archives in Austin:
January 25, 1875
2643
State of Texas vs J.H. Holliday
Assault to Murder
On this day came J.G. Colin, District Attorney pro tem for the State and the Deft. J.H. Holliday in his own proper person, and by his Attorney and this cause coming now for trial the parties announced themselves ready and the Deft for the plea says he is not guilty and thereupon came a jury with J.H Daniels and eleven others who being duly empanelled and sworn after hearing the evidence and argument of Council and receiving the charge of the Court retired to consider their verdict and came and returned into court the following Verdict: We the jury find the Deft not guilty. It is therefore ordered adjudged and decreed by the Court that the Deft J.H. Holliday g o hence without day and of this cause stand fully acquitted.
In this serious case Doc Holliday was not only taken seriously but found not guilty—and he was not laughed out of town. And when he did leave Dallas and later return, his only legal charges were for gambling in a house of spirituous liquors, for although the movies show things differently, betting on cards in a saloon was generally against the law in the Wild West.
The facts of his day-to-day life in Texas were drawn from city directories and newspaper articles, along with an interview he gave to a newspaper in Colorado, where we first learned that he had attended the Dallas Methodist Church and joined the local Temperance Union and spent some time in the North Texas town of Denison. What he didn’t talk about in that interview was his fight in Breckenridge, which was reported in the Dallas papers, or his shooting of a soldier in Fort Griffin. That was another story from Bat Masterson, though Bat gives the location as the military post town of Jacksboro. But as there was no soldier killed in Jacksboro during Doc’s Texas years, Bat may have just gotten the location wrong. There was a soldier killed in the post town of Fort Griffin while Doc was there and shortly before he left Texas for Denver, where he lived under the alias Tom McKey—running from a killing would certainly explain his taking an alias until things cooled down. The fact that the man killed in Fort Griffin, Private Jake Smith, was a black Buffalo Soldier seems to support the story of the shooting on the Withlacoochee, showing a pattern of racial violence not unusual in the Reconstruction South.
It was also in Fort Griffin that Doc took up with Hungarian born Mary Katherine Haroney, known in the West as Kate Elder—though according to Kate she had first met Doc a few years earlier in St. Louis when he was a newly graduated dental student practicing dentistry “on Fourth Street, near the Planter’s House Hotel.” Kate’s reminiscence was part of a series of letters she wrote to an Arizona newspaper reporter in the 1930’s, but as she was just a woman in a man’s Western world her story was pretty much ignored. I had ignored it myself, as everyone knew that Doc Holliday had never been in St. Louis and Kate’s memories were likely confused by old age. But when I went to Philadelphia to research Holliday’s time in dental school, I discovered that he had a classmate there who was from St. Louis and who had returned to that city after graduation, where he had a practice on Fourth Street near the Planter’s House Hotel—the very location Kate had mentioned in her letters. Of all the cities and all the addresses she could have imagined, she had picked a place actually linked to Holliday’s early life, which gave credence to her memoir.
It was also from Kate that I took the story of Doc’s sudden illness in Trinidad and the harrowing covered wagon journey over the mountains to the healing hot springs at Las Vegas, New Mexico, but it was my own research that uncovered information about Doc’s Las Vegas saloon. I had written to the clerk of the San Miguel County Court three times asking for a copy of the original deed and three times been told that no such record existed. Although Holliday’s property ownership in Las Vegas was mentioned in the local paper, the usual legal proof of ownership seemed strangely missing. So I booked a flight to New Mexico and went to see for myself if the deed existed. And there it was carefully recorded in the County Deed Book: Dock Holliday’s deed to a saloon on Centre Street. The misspelled name had made the clerk miss the record.
But I wasn’t alone in researching Doc’s lost years between Georgia and Tombstone. My friend and fellow author Dr. Gary Roberts (Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend) has spent years delving into old newspapers and trying to piece together the scattered facts that add up to a story. I thank him for his generous sharing of his research and his support of my own work. We never saw a conflict between his biography and my historical fiction, as we approach the history of Doc Holliday from our own areas of expertise, trying to breathe life into the legend. I also thank author Casey Tefertiller for his research and encouragement through the years—his Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend remains the best biography of the lawman who became Doc Holliday’s favorite friend. If Bat Masterson expressed dislike for Doc, it may have been because Doc so clearly favored Wyatt over all the other men he knew. Even Kate was jealous of Doc’s affection for Wyatt, a factual element that added to the fiction of Dance with the Devil.
Many thanks to the archivists and historians who aided in my own work: the late Susan McKey Thomas ( In Search of the Hollidays ), Doc’s cousin whose family history work started my own research and who became my dear friend over the years; Joan Farmer of the Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas; Harold F. Thatcher, City of Las Vegas Museum and Rough Rider Memorial Collection, New Mexico; and Dr. Arthur W. Bork, Prescott, Arizona, who knew and interviewed Kate Elder and shared his recollections with me. Family & friends who were my first readers and stalwart supporters: Patricia Petersen, Samuel Shannon, Sterling Felsted, Jennifer Felsted, Heather Shannon, Ashley Wilcox, Ross Wilcox, Mack Peirson, Daniel Mikat, Michael Spain, Melinda Talley, VelDean Fincher, and Dr. Dorothy Mikat. Special thanks to Laura Pilcher, copyeditor extraordinaire, and to Dan and Sally Mikat for giving me long quiet weeks to write at their home on Mackinac Island, Michigan. And especially to Erin Turner, Editorial Director of TwoDot Books, for giving new life and a new look to Doc Holliday’s Wild West story.
Finally, thanks to my late mother, Beth Wanlass Peirson, who was my best research assistant as we traveled the West in search of Doc Holliday, and to my husband and favorite dentist, Dr. Ronald Wilcox, who paid for all the trips and watched the kids while I was traveling, and whose understanding of the pride of profession helped me to understand John Henry Holliday, D.D.S. Without you, Doc’s story would have remained just a legend.
—Victoria Wilcox
Peachtree City, Georgia