The “Deadly Dentist” Doc Holliday
Public DomainDoc Holliday as a young man, back when he thought he’d be a regular dentist. 1872.
John Henry “Doc” Holliday didn’t plan to become a Wild West legend. Born on August 14, 1851, in Griffin, Georgia, he originally wanted to be an ordinary dentist. But illness — and fate, perhaps — had other plans.
Shortly after Holliday finished dental school and opened his own dental practice, he was struck with tuberculosis. Told that he might have just a few months left to live, Holliday took one doctor’s advice and moved west, where he hoped the dry air might extend his life. Instead, it introduced the dentist to saloons, gambling, and life as a Wild West outlaw.
To make money — since his coughing disconcerted his dental patients — Holliday started to gamble. He frequently got into trouble for fighting in saloons and, to protect himself, carried a revolver and allowed his reputation as the “Deadly Dentist” to spread. But Holliday may have lived up to the name in 1877, when he was arrested in Fort Griffin, possibly for fatally stabbing a cheat in the stomach (or possibly for illegal gaming).
Public DomainDoc Holliday in Prescott, Arizona. 1879.
But unlike most Wild West outlaws, Holliday found his way back to the straight and narrow. After moving to Dodge City, Kansas with Big Nose Kate, the most significant romantic partner of his life, he tried to practice dentistry again. And he fatefully befriended the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp.
When Earp and his brothers set out for Tombstone, Arizona, in 1879, Holliday followed them. There, he supported the Earp brothers as they struggled to contain Tombstone’s criminal element, and fought alongside them in the 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which led to the deaths of three outlaws.
Just six years later, however, Doc Holliday’s tuberculosis finally caught up to him. The “Deadly Dentist” went to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in hopes that the hot springs would improve his health. Instead, he died at the age of 36.
