Life After the Gunfight at the OK Corral for Doc Holliday and Kate Elder

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According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday

The last news Kate heard about Doc (after the Gunfight at the OK Corral and the Vendetta Ride) was that he was in Leadville, Colorado, and on trial for shooting a bartender named Billy Allen. “They arrested him and telegraphed to Tombstone that they had Doc Holliday,” Kate recalled years later.

“A deputy from Tombstone was sent for him with a requisition. Governor Tabor of Colorado refused to sign the document and told the Arizona deputy that Doc Holliday was too good a man to turn over to the Arizona cow thieves. He would not sign the requisition. Doc was free.” Doc was eventually acquitted and moved to Denver.

Kate received a letter from Doc in April 1887. He had plans to travel to Glenwood Springs and wanted her to meet him there. Kate couldn’t refuse the invitation. “Holliday at last broke away from the Earps at Gunnison,” Kate wrote years later. “A [chain] mail shirt was the cause of their parting company. Wyatt had a job to pull and was going to wear the mail shirt. But Doc said to Wyatt, ‘No, you don’t. If you want me to go into anything with you, you have to take the same chance I do or else we quit right here. I thought you had got rid of that shirt long ago.’* “Wyatt insisted on wearing the mail shirt, so Doc left that evening and hit the trail for Leadville. But it was too cold for him, and he went from there to Denver, and later to Glenwood Springs. All those places were in Colorado.”

Kate and Doc reunited in Glenwood Springs in May 1887. Doc’s health had substantially deteriorated. The disease that had been in remission for a time was now fully awake and eating his lungs from the inside out. His lungs were now mostly engulfed in liquid and sloshing around in his chest. Doc struggled to breathe and coughed all the time. Kate noted in her memoir that when he arrived in the area he had tried to return to dentistry to support himself, but the persistent cough made the work impossible to do. Doc then took a short-term job guarding a mining claim for a well-known prospector. According to Kate, Doc also served as “Under Sheriff of Garfield County under Sheriff Ware.”

To learn what became of Kate and Doc read

According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday