For most of his adult life, the Old West gambler and gunslinger John Henry ‘Doc’ Holliday (1851-87) had a reputation for violence. When he died of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis on 8 November 1887, aged 36, he was popularly reported as having killed anywhere between eight, 17 and 30 men. Journalists, though, were amazed to find him ‘as different as could be from the generally conceived idea of a killer’. Holliday was a ‘frail and harmless looking specimen’ not in the least ‘resembling the fancy caricature of a border desperado’. Small, ‘childlike’ and ‘almost fragile in appearance’, he was also ‘scrupulously neat’ and ‘beautifully’ dressed in the ‘latest style’. Confronted with such a puzzling combination of waif-like frailty and cold ferocity, the Omaha Daily Bee tried to sum him up as ‘a mild-mannered frontier angel, who has started a graveyard in every frontier town he has graced with his presence’.

Both during his lifetime and after his death, Holliday was a mysterious, contradictory figure. None of his private letters survived him and he was very reticent (sometimes even actively misleading) in the few public interviews he gave. Consequently, while the basic shape of Holliday’s life was easy to establish, the fine details of his motives and emotions were much more open to interpretation or outright invention. Even while he was alive he was, as the Colorado-based Carbonate Chronicle put it, ‘the subject of more than one fancy writer of the day’. The result of all this fancy writing was that, almost as soon as he entered the public eye, Holliday began to be mythologised and fictionalised. Journalists and authors rewrote the scanty details  of his real life into the melodramatic conventions of Victorian fiction, reimagining him as a tragic invalid, the archetypal sidekick and a moody anti-hero.

Holliday was born in the US state of Georgia. As a young man he trained to be a dentist – giving him his later nickname of ‘Doc’ – but he ultimately abandoned his practice and left his home state for good in 1873. Around this time, he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis which would eventually claim his life, and which may have already killed his mother, Alice. He was catapulted to celebrity in Tombstone, Arizona, in October 1881, when he stood alongside Wyatt Earp in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, probably the most famous shootout of the Wild West. Just over six years later, he passed away quietly at the Hotel Glenwood in Colorado.

The earliest writers to portray Holliday seem to have struggled to know what to make of him – how to fit this ‘soft’, ‘gentlemanly’, but ‘merciless’ individual into the kind of stories that the American public wanted to hear about their country’s western expansion? Some experimented with casting him in the role of hero, but this never quite caught on. Holliday was too much of ‘a misfit in his environments’, as the Kansas City Journal described him in 1899, to unproblematically settle into the position of main character. Instead, most writers found that it worked best to cast him as the devoted sidekick of some other, more straightforwardly heroic protagonist.

The most obvious candidate was Wyatt Earp, Holliday’s friend and deputy marshal for Tombstone at the time of the shootout at the O.K. Corral. In the early 1900s the former lawman Bartholomew ‘Bat’ Masterson (who had known both men in his youth, though he claimed to have always strongly disliked Holliday) wrote a series of articles for the Washington Post on ‘Famous Gun Fighters of the Western Frontier’. Masterson maintained that Holliday’s ‘whole heart and soul was wrapped up in Wyatt Earp, and he was always ready to stake his life in defence of any cause in which Wyatt was interested’. Other authors latched onto this portrayal, turning Holliday into the ‘disciple’ and right-hand-man of any number of other Western heroes, from the well-known Wild Bill Hickok to the now all-but-forgotten Mart Duggan. In this way, Holliday’s violent reputation could be partly redeemed, even given a tragic tinge. Holliday might have, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, ‘left a trail of blood across every state and territory between the Mississippi and the Sierras’, but he was also a man selflessly devoted to the service of other – and implicitly better – men than himself.

Holliday’s tuberculosis was another source of tragic potential for colourful depictions. Until the discovery of antibiotics, TB was difficult to treat effectively and was usually assumed to be fatal. Victorian observers tended to treat those with the disease with a strange mix of fatalism and spirituality, as if they were already doomed and disconnected from the world of the living. This, coupled with Holliday’s well-known reputation as a dangerous man, could be used to lend him a brooding, Byronic quality. The year before his death the Rocky Mountain News published a character sketch of him, observing that: ‘“Doc” Holliday impresses the stranger by his gloom and taciturnity and stalks among men a silent and much-dreaded notable’.

Different accounts cast Holliday’s illness as both the reason why he was so eager to claim the lives of others and why he seemed so morbidly heedless of his own life. Not long after Holliday’s death, his attorney, John T. Deweese, supposedly recalled how: ‘The doctor had just as lief kill a man as not. I said to him one day: “Doctor, don’t your conscience ever trouble you?” “No,” he replied with that peculiar cough of his, “I coughed that up with my lungs long ago.”’ Other observers took the view that it was Holliday’s secret hope to die from a bullet before consumption caught up with him. ‘The horizon of his future’, speculated one paper, ‘did not reach beyond the small cemetery on the mesa … He laughed at death, while courting its embrace.’

Ultimately, how John Henry Holliday really felt about himself, his friends and the illness that he lived with is almost impossible to know. Before his death, he was already encircled with supposition and speculation, and his final legacy as a part of ‘the hectic, mad romance of the old western border’ shows how easily history can become mingled with myth and fiction.

Douglas R.J. Small is Lecturer in 19th-Century Literature at Edge Hill University.