Doc Holliday

The Dying Dentist Who Became a Gunfighter

By: Shane Larson

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The deadliest gunfighter in the West died in bed, sober, his boots off — and his last words were "This is funny."

John Henry Holliday should have died at thirty-six in a saloon, shot down over a card game. Instead he died of tuberculosis in a Colorado sanatorium, killed slowly by the same disease that had made him fearless. He had been a dead man walking for fifteen years — and almost nobody who feared him understood it.

He was not supposed to be a killer at all. Born to a respectable Georgia family in 1851, Doc Holliday earned a genuine doctorate in dental surgery and opened a practice in Atlanta. He was cultured, well-mannered, and built for a quiet, conventional life. Then a cough and a death sentence rerouted all of it. Told he had months to live, ordered west for the dry air, he traded the dental chair for the card table — and discovered that a man with nothing left to lose fears nothing at all.

This is the real life behind the legend: the one figure of the Old West who was almost exactly what the movies say, and at the same time nothing like it. The educated Southern gentleman and the hot-tempered drunk. The doomed consumptive and the dangerous gambler. And at the center, the strangest loyalty the frontier ever produced — his bone-deep devotion to Wyatt Earp, the friend he stood beside at the O.K. Corral and rode beside on the bloody Vendetta Ride.

Shane Larson follows the whole arc the movies leave out — the Georgia boyhood in the wreckage of the Civil War, the Philadelphia dental training, the diagnosis that sent him west, the gambling circuit from Dallas to Dodge City to Tombstone, and the slow dying in Leadville and Glenwood Springs. Drawing on period newspapers, the Spicer hearing transcript, and court records, it stays honest about the holes in the record and lets the documented man stand on his own. He is dramatic enough without the embellishment. This is the disease, the loyalty, and the legend, told straight.

What you'll discover:

• How tuberculosis — not ambition — built the most feared gunman in the Southwest
• The Dodge City rescue that bound Holliday to Wyatt Earp for life
• His true role in the thirty seconds near the O.K. Corral, and the murder charges that followed
• The Vendetta Ride: the killings that put his name on Arizona warrants
• The long, lonely Colorado decline the movies always skip
• Which famous Holliday stories are documented — and which are too good to be true
• The deathbed scene, and the irony he laughed at with his last breath

This book is for you if:

• You love the Earp–Tombstone saga and want Holliday's side of it
• Val Kilmer's Doc made you want the real man behind the role
• You're drawn to the doomed, dangerous, fiercely loyal outsider
• You want frontier history that's honest about where the legend ends and the record begins

Book 5 in The Wild West series. If you devoured Wyatt Earp & the O.K. Corral and Bat Masterson, this is the dying gambler who tied them together. Scroll up and one-click to meet the gentleman killer who had nothing left to lose.