John Henry “Doc” Holliday is depicted in movies as an edgy, ailing, hard-drinking gunslinger who participated in the legendary 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona alongside lawman Wyatt Earp.
Most people don’t know the real life “deadly dentist” had an important connection to Texas, where he started getting into trouble before meeting Earp and joining him in Dodge City, Kansas.
Although he spent more time in North Texas, researchers have found Holliday stayed for a few months in Eagle Pass and a short time in San Antonio in 1877.
Author Victoria Wilcox, speaking recently in San Antonio at the Wild West History Association’s annual convention, said the Georgia native’s Texas experiences put him on a dark path that also gave him an immortal legacy cemented by Hollywood.
A patron enters the Fort Griffin General Merchandise Co. steak house in Albany, a North Texas town near the Fort Griffin State Historic Site. Wyatt Earp and “Doc” Holliday are believed to have met at Fort Griffin in the winter of 1877-1878.
L.M. OTERO/AP“Without Texas, Doc would likely never have met Wyatt Earp or ended up in that gunfight near the O.K. Corral, becoming one of the greatest characters in the American Wild West,” said Wilcox, author of a historical novel trilogy, “The Saga of Doc Holliday.”
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Born in 1851, Holliday was 15 when his mother died of tuberculosis. The studious Holliday graduated from the Pennsylvania School of Dentistry in Philadelphia in 1872, then returned to Georgia.
Wilcox said there’s been debate about when Holliday was himself diagnosed with tuberculosis and why he moved to Texas, working initially in a Dallas dental practice with Dr. John A. Seegar.
The traditional narrative is that he came to…
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