I KNEW DOC HOLLIDAY AND HE WAS A WEAKLING WILLING TO SHOOT A MAN

Editor's Note: Doc Holliday was a fabled gambler and gunfighter who traveled the West in the late 19th Century. Trained as a dentist in Philadelphia, Holliday moved to Denver in 1875 and worked as a card dealer at John A. Babb's Theatre Comique at 357 Blake Street. He is buried in Glenwood Springs. The journalist, lawman and gambler W.R. "Bat" Masterson was his contemporary. Masterson, who worked for the old New York Morning Telegraph, wrote this in 1907.

By W.R. "Bat" Masterson
Special to the Daily Sketch

While he never did anything to entitle him to a statue in the Hall of Fame, Doc Holliday was nevertheless a most picturesque character on the western frontier in those days when the pistol, rather than law courts, determined issues.

Holliday was a product of the state of Georgia and a scion of a most respectable and prominent family. He graduated as a dentist from one of the medical colleges in his native state before leaving, but did not pursue his profession for very long after receiving his diploma.

It was perhaps too respectable a calling for him.

Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor, was a most dangerous man.

In this respect he was very much like the big Missourian who had put in the day at a cross-road groggery, and after getting pretty well filled up with the bug juice of the Moonshine brand, concluded that it was about time for him to say something that would make an impression on his hearers; so he straightened up, threw out his chest and declared in a loud tone of voice, that he was “a bad man when he was drinking, and managed to keep pretty full all the time.”

So it was with Holliday.

Physically, Doc Holliday was a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy 15-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fist fight, and no one knew this better than himself. The knowledge of this fact was perhaps why he was so ready to resort to a weapon of some kind whenever he got himself into difficulty.

He was hot-headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling, and, among men who did not fear him, was very much disliked.