Monday Meanderings - 1.7.2019

Wait! What? In my home town?

I came across a startling fact the other day.

I have known the story of bigger-than-life characters Wyatt Earp and his buddy Doc Holliday since I was a boy. It is probable that Pansy Pace, the Breckenridge librarian, who went to great lengths to nurture my life-long love of reading, probably introduced me to these men and the Gunfight at OK Corral. Well, maybe. Neither one of them was exactly a role-model, but that aspect of their lives is often covered over with the blanket of revisionist legend.

While Wyatt Earp more or less overcame his outlaw persona (did you know he and his wife went to Alaska and built and managed the preeminent saloon in Nome, Alaska around 1900, "mining the gold miners"?), his running mate, Doc Holliday was bad to his consumptive core.

And he lived in Breckenridge Texas for a brief period.

Doc was evidently a pretty good dentist in his younger days (he died at age 36) and was in a successful practice with another dentist in Dallas, Texas around 1875. However, his tubercular cough sort put a serious crimp in his dental practice, and he turned to gambling as his sole means of support. The Dallas authorities ran him out of town for cheating at cards (and his habit of shooting at his fellow players), so he headed West, where the law was not so strictly enfo0rced.

As expected, he moved around a lot - Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming - and then, one step ahead of the authorities,  retraced his steps and came back to Texas. And ended up in Breckenridge, Texas. My home town.

He set up shop in an unknown saloon and it wasn't too long before he shot another player. But he only wounded him, and the injured party hunted Doc down later and seriously wounded him. Feeling unwelcome, Doc somehow made his way a few miles west to Fort Griffin (near Albany) and was nursed back to health by Mary Katherine Horony, a woman of un-questioned ill-repute who went by the sobriquet "Big Nose Nell," who became his "partner" for his remaining years.

For good reason, Doc never returned to Breckenridge, and  Fort Griffin deserves a blog entry all its own. Suffice it to say, to say the Fort Griffin Fandangle paints a more PG-rated picture than does actual history.