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According to Kate:
The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate Elder, Love of Doc Holliday
along with a Kindle Paperwhite.
Kate Elder’s hotel in the remote copper and silver mining town of Globe, Arizona, was a small, unassuming establishment that catered to prospectors, assayers, and occasionally outlaws. For twenty-five cents a night, guests were offered a clean room complete with a wash bowl, towel, chamber pot, and a pitcher of fresh water. For an additional ten cents, Kate would provide breakfast. Patrons were served in the saloon in the front of the building located a short distance from Alice Gulch, the site of the first silver claim.
In late December 1881, a merchant named Mrs. Alonzo Bailey escorted a potential boarding house customer into the saloon where the last of the regular guests were finishing their morning meal. According to Kate, although it was past the time to serve food, the pair made themselves comfortable at a table and ordered coffee. The gentleman accompanying Mrs. Bailey was carrying a copy of the Tombstone Epitaph, and, when Kate approached the duo with coffee cups and coffee pot, the man began to discuss the incident that had occurred at the OK Corral the previous month. “Some how Doc and I were mentioned,” Kate noted when sharing the story with her niece several years later.
Kate noted she didn’t say a word about the happenings in Tombstone; she simply poured the coffee and went about the business of clearing the dishes. The chatty customer continued with his thoughts about the location of the gunfight and the people involved in the incident. “There are so many that claim they saw the shooting on Allen Street,” Kate wrote her niece in March 1940, “It was not on Allen Street but nearer Freemont [sic] Street in an open lot.”
Kate invited Mrs. Bailey and her friend to help themselves to the bacon and eggs sitting on the buffet table near a stack of plates, forks, and knives. The man reluctantly set the newspaper aside to get a plate of food but never stopped talking. “He told Mrs. Bailey that Doc took me to New Mexico and killed me up in the mountains and that he helped to bury me,” Kate recalled. “That poor woman,” I remarked. “Mrs. Baily [sic] and I laughed but when the man found out he made a fool of himself he never came back. But it is laughable how some people will talk. I often laugh how often I have been dead and buried and turn up some place full of life.”
