WWWest-Online Development Blog

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.

A Confederate Child

John Henry Holliday (we’ll get to the “Doc” part later) was born on August 14th, 1851, in Griffin, Georgia. When Holliday was 10 years old, his father enlisted with the Confederate forces in the Civil War, after donating most of his wealth to their cause, and left a young John alone with his mother for a year. But his stint with the Confederacy didn’t last; in addition to draining him of his wealth, the Civil War also cost Henry Holliday his health, and he returned home just a year after joining, sick and weakened.

After his father’s return from the war, Holliday and his parents moved to Lowndes County, away from their relatives in Griffin; a move which wasn’t easy on the shy boy. Holliday suffered another blow when his mother died in 1866, and his father remarried less than a year later. Not long after his mother’s death, Holliday started getting into trouble. The first incident he was (allegedly) involved in was a shooting involving some African Americans who were swimming in a river on his family’s property, around 1870 (give or take a couple of years). Reports vary, and range from Holliday merely shooting over the swimmers’ heads, to him killing one of them. Around that time, Holliday was also (reportedly) involved in an attempt to blow up the Lowndes County Courthouse, which was also the headquarters of an organization which oversaw the rights of freed slaves.

Well, I do believe that that’s enough for today. As you can see, Doc’s life was never a bed of roses, even as a kid. If you want to hear the rest of Holliday’s story, just drop in later for our next post. Until, then, I bid you farewell.

Kraz