A Legendary Lunger
When I was a kid, cowboy costumes were common enough, and we all had cap-guns modeled after six-shooters and old rifles, but we didn’t really know much about the West; we hadn’t even seen any westerns. This probably had something to do with growing up in a country half a world away, with a rather different culture. This is why the first Westerns I saw were the “modern” Westerns, like Silverado and Tombstone.
To those of you who haven’t seen it, Tombstone is a retelling of the story of Tombstone, Arizona; and the feud between Wyatt Earp and his brothers and compatriots, and the Cowboy gang. It’s a good movie, even if it only tells a part of the story, and focuses on the action and drama. Actually, it’s likely that it’s a good movie because it does so. But I digress. Of all the characters in Tombstone, the one that, to me, stood out the most, was not Wyatt Earp, but rather the blood-coughing, card-playing and quick-drawing Doc Holliday, memorably played by Val Kilmer.
Since Tombstone is not quite a documentary, the movie’s depiction of Doc Holliday was a wee bit shy of being accurate, but he was still an interesting man, who’d led an interesting life, about which I will tell you a bit.
