The Doctor and the Rough Rider (24 page)

T
HIS IS
W
YATT
E
ARP'S DESCRIPTION
and recollection of Doc Holliday, in his own words:

By the time I met him at Fort Griffin, Doc Holliday had run up quite a record as a
killer, even for Texas. In Dallas, his incessant coughing kept away whatever professional
custom he might have enjoyed and, as he had to eat, he took to gambling. He was lucky,
skillful, and fearless. There were no tricks to his new trade that he did not learn
and in more than one boom-camp game I have seen him bet ten thousand dollars on the
turn of a card.

Doc quickly saw that six-gun skill was essential to his new business, and set out
to master the fine points of draw-and-shoot as cold-bloodedly as he did everything.
He practiced with a Colt for hours at a time, until he knew that he could get one
into action as effectively as any man he might meet. His right to this opinion was
justified by Doc's achievements. The only man of his type whom I ever regarded as
anywhere near his equal on the draw was Buckskin Frank Leslie of Tombstone. But Leslie
lacked Doc's fatalistic courage, a courage induced, I suppose, by the nature of Holliday's
disease and the realization that he hadn't long to live, anyway. That fatalism, coupled
with his marvelous speed and accuracy, gave Holliday the edge over any out-and-out
killer I ever knew.

Doc's first fight in the West ended a row over a Dallas card-game. He shot and killed
a topnotch gunman, and as Doc was comparatively a stranger where his victim had many
friends, Doc had to emigrate. He went to Jacksborough, at the edge of the Fort Richardson
military reservation, where he tangled with three or four more gunmen successfully,
but eventually killed a soldier and again had to take it on the run. Next, he tried
the Colorado camps, where he knocked off several pretty bad men in gun-fights. In
Denver, Doc encountered an ordinance against gun-toting, so he carried a knife, slung
on a cord around his neck. Bud Ryan, a gambler, tried to run one over on Doc in a
card game, and when Doc objected, Ryan went for a gun he carried in a concealed holster.
Doc beat him into action with his knife, and cut him horribly.

Doc gambled in the Colorado and Wyoming camps until the fall of '77, and fought his
way out of so many arguments that, by the time he hit Fort Griffin, he had built up
a thoroughly deserved reputation as a man who would shoot to kill on the slightest
provocation. That reputation may have had some bearing on the fact that when I first
met him, he had not yet found anyone in Fort Griffin to provide him with a battle.

It was in Shanssey's saloon, I think, that Doc Holliday first met Kate Elder, a dancehall
girl better known as “Big-Nosed Kate.” Doc lived with Kate, off and on, over a period
of years. She saved his life on one occasion, and when memory of this was uppermost
Doc would
refer to Kate as Mrs. Holliday. Their relationship had its temperamental ups and downs,
however, and when Kate was writhing under Doc's scorn she'd get drunk as well as furious
and make Doc more trouble than any shooting-scrape.

Perhaps Doc's outstanding peculiarity was the enormous amount of whiskey he could
punish. Two and three quarts of liquor a day was not unusual for him, yet I never
saw him stagger with intoxication. At times, when his tuberculosis was worse than
ordinary, or he was under a long-continued physical strain, it would take a pint of
whiskey to get him going in the morning, and more than once at the end of a long ride
I've seen him swallow a tumbler of neat liquor without batting an eye and fifteen
minutes later take a second tumbler of straight whiskey which had no more outward
effect on him than the first one. Liquor never seemed to fog him in the slightest,
and he was more inclined to fight when getting along on a slim ration than when he
was drinking plenty, and was more comfortable, physically.

With all of Doc's shortcomings and his undeniably poor disposition, I found him a
loyal friend and good company. At the time of his death, I tried to set down the qualities
about him which had impressed me. The newspapers dressed up my ideas considerably
and had me calling Doc Holliday “a mad, merry scamp with heart of gold and nerves
of steel.” Those were not my words, nor did they convey my meaning. Doc was mad, well
enough, but he was seldom merry. His humor ran in a sardonic vein, and as far as the
world in general was concerned, there was nothing in his soul but iron. Under ordinary
circumstances he might be irritable to the point of shakiness; only in a game or when
a fight impended was there anything steely about his nerves.

To sum up Doc Holliday's character as I did at the time of his death: he was a dentist
whom necessity had made into a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier
vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long, lean, ash-blond
fellow nearly dead with consumption and at the same time the most skilled gambler
and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew.

T
HIS IS AN ARTICLE THAT
I
ORIGINALLY WROTE FOR
Oval Office Oddities
, edited by Bill Fawcett.

T
HE
U
NSINKABLE
T
EDDY
R
OOSEVELT

His daughter, Alice, said it best:

“He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

Of course, he had a little something to say about his daughter, too. When various
staff members complained that she was running wild throughout the White House, his
response was: “Gentlemen, I can either run the country, or I can control Alice. I
cannot do both.”

He was Theodore Roosevelt, of course: statesman, politician, adventurer, naturalist,
ornithologist, taxidermist, cowboy, police commissioner, explorer, writer, diplomat,
boxer, and president of the United States.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was widely quoted after inviting a dozen writers, artists,
musicians and scientists to lunch at the White House when he announced: “This is the
greatest assemblage of talent to eat here since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” It's
a witty statement, but JFK must have thought Roosevelt ate all his meals out.

Roosevelt didn't begin life all that auspiciously. “Teedee” was a sickly child, his
body weakened by asthma. It was his father who decided that he was not going to raise
an invalid. Roosevelt was encouraged to swim, to take long hikes, to do everything
he could to build up his body.

He was picked on by bullies, who took advantage of his weakened condition, so he asked
his father to get him boxing lessons. They worked pretty well. By the time he entered
Harvard he had the body and reactions of a trained athlete, and before long he was
a member of the boxing team.

It was while fighting for the lightweight championship that an incident occurred which
gave everyone an insight into Roosevelt's character. He was carrying the fight to
his opponent, C. S. Hanks, the defending champion, when he slipped and fell to his
knee. Hanks had launched a blow that he couldn't pull back, and he opened Roosevelt's
nose, which began gushing blood. The crowd got ugly and started booing the champion,
but Roosevelt held up his hand for silence, announced that it was an honest mistake,
and shook hands with Hanks before the fight resumed.

It was his strength of character that led to his developing an equally strong body.
His doctor, W. Thompson, once told a friend: “Look out for Theodore. He's not strong,
but he's all grit. He'll kill himself before he'll ever say he's tired.”

In fifty-nine years of a vigorous, strenuous life, he never once admitted to being
tired.

Roosevelt was always fascinated by Nature, and in fact had seriously considered becoming
a biologist or a naturalist before discovering politics. The young men sharing his
lodgings at Harvard were probably less than thrilled with his interest. He kept a
number of animals in his room. Not cute, cuddly ones, but rather snakes, lobsters,
and a tortoise that was always escaping and scaring the life out of his landlady.
Before long most of the young men in his building refused to go anywhere near his
room.

Roosevelt “discovered” politics shortly after graduating Harvard (
phi beta kappa
and
summa cum laude
, of course). So he attacked the field with the same vigor he attacked everything
else. The result? At twenty-four
he became the youngest Assemblyman in the New York State House, and the next year
he became the youngest-ever Minority Leader.

He might have remained in New York politics for years, but something happened that
changed his life. He had met and fallen in love with Alice Hathaway Lee while in college,
and married her very soon thereafter. His widowed mother lived with them.

And then, on February 14, 1884, Alice and his mother both died (Alice in childbirth,
his mother of other causes) eight hours apart in the same house.

The blow was devastating to Roosevelt. He never mentioned Alice again and refused
to allow her to be mentioned in his presence. He put his former life behind him and
decided to lose himself in what was left of the Wild West.

He bought a ranch in the Dakota Badlands…and then, because he was Theodore Roosevelt
and couldn't do anything in a small way, he bought a second ranch as well. He spent
a lot more time hunting than ranching, and more time writing and reading than hunting.
(During his lifetime he wrote more than 150,000 letters, as well as close to thirty
books.)

He'd outfitted himself with the best “Western” outfit money could buy back in New
York, and of course he appeared to the locals to be a wealthy New York dandy. By now
he was wearing glasses, and he took a lot of teasing over them; the sobriquet “Four
Eyes” seemed to stick.

Until the night he found himself far from his Elkhorn Ranch and decided to rent a
room at Nolan's Hotel in Mingusville, on the west bank of the Beaver River. After
dinner he went down to the bar—it was the only gathering point in the entire town—and
right after Roosevelt arrived, a huge drunk entered, causing a ruckus, shooting off
his six-gun, and making himself generally obnoxious. When he saw Roosevelt, he announced
that “Four Eyes” would buy drinks for everyone in the bar—or else. Roosevelt, who
wasn't looking for a fight, tried to mollify him, but the drunk was having none of
it. He insisted that the effete dandy put up his dukes and defend himself.

“Well, if I've got to, I've got to,” muttered Roosevelt, getting up from his chair.

The bully took one swing. The boxer from Harvard ducked and bent the drunk in half
with a one-two combination to the belly, then caught him flush on the jaw. He kept
pummeling the drunk until the man was out cold, and then, with a little help from
the appreciative onlookers, he carried the unconscious man to an outhouse behind the
hotel and deposited him there for the night.

He was never “Four Eyes” again.