August 14, 1851
November 8, 1887
Gunslinger
Doc Holliday has been celebrated—and criticized—for his involvement in the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral as well as several other murders. An alcoholic who suffered from tuberculosis, he spent much of his life in the gaming dens of the West with his girlfriend, a prostitute called “Big Nose Kate.”
Born in Griffin, Georgia, on August 14, 1851, John Henry Holliday was his parents’ only surviving child. The Hollidays’ first child, Martha Eleanora, died at the age of six months, possibly from diphtheria, a contagious bacterial disease that was spreading rapidly through some parts of the South. A blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby, John was born with a birth defect: a cleft palate (a division in the roof of the mouth) and partially cleft lip, which later required surgery and years of speech therapy.
John’s mother, Alice Jane McKey Holliday, was an educated woman and his father, Henry B. Holliday, was a military officer who had fought in the Mexican-American War (1846–48). A highly disciplined man, Henry raised his only child in a strict environment. Although his land-holdings once included forty pieces of land in Griffin and hundreds of acres elsewhere in the county, Holliday eventually lost most of his wealth after selling much of his business to support the Confederate, or Southern, cause during the Civil War (1861–65).
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