Doc Holliday

"He was a study in contrasts: the legendary gunslinger who made his living as a dentist; the emaciated consumptive whose very name struck fear in the hearts of his enemies; the degenerate gambler and alcoholic whose fierce loyalty to his friends compelled him, more than once, to risk his own life; the sidekick whose near-mythic status has come to rival that of the West's greatest heroes. More than 100 years after he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-six, Doc Holliday remains an enigma, a legend in the shadows, a brooding metaphor for the moral contradictions of life on the late nineteenth-century frontier." "In Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend, the historian Gary Roberts takes aim at the most complex, perplexing, and paradoxical gunfighter of the Old West. Drawing on more than twenty years of research on his enigmatic subject, Roberts discovered numerous new primary sources in his quest to understand both what John Henry Holliday did and didn't do, and what these exploits meant to the elusive man behind the now-legendary deeds." "Roberts explores Holliday's idyllic, antebellum childhood in Georgia, where he was schooled in the manly virtues of independence, loyalty, proficiency with weapons of every kind, and above all, honor. He considers numerous explanations behind John Henry's sudden and drastic decision to abandon his large extended family and a promising career to move to Texas, where, in the parlance of the day, he "slipped from the path of rectitude" even as he clung to his profession and the ideals he had learned as a child. Roberts tracks Holliday's western ramblings from Dallas to Denver to Cheyenne to Dodge City to Tombstone, always in pursuit of the next game of chance and another shot of whiskey, his health on a deep, downward spiral, his gunfighting skills on the rise. Along the way he befriended (or made enemies of) such Western icons as Bat Masterson, Kate Elder, Curly Bill Brocius, and Wyatt Earp."--Jacket.