The Power of Story

(Keynote Address at the Blue Ridge Writer’s Conference 2014)

He was Georgia’s best-known Western legend, infamous in his own time and famous in ours for the part he played in the Gunfight at the OK Corral, becoming a celebrity in literature and film, with his character featured in more than 70 movies and TV shows. She was Georgia’s first superstar, her every activity chronicled in newspapers and magazines, with crowds of admirers camping out on her lawn. At Davison’s Department Store, where she’d gone to buy a dress for a big premiere, she was followed into the dressing room by fans who pulled at her hair and tore off her clothes as souvenirs. Yet neither of them was looking for notoriety; they just wanted to live ordinary lives. It was the power of the story that make their lives extraordinary. And amazingly, Doc Holliday and Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind had a family connection.  And to explain that surprising bit of Georgia history, I first need to share some of my own history.  You might call that the story behind the story. 

And my story starts here with my own Mormon pioneer ancestors who crossed the Great Plains in covered wagons to settle the American West in the days of the real cowboys and Indians. One of my grandfathers became president of the Cattleman’s Association in Portland, Oregon. The other left the silver mines of Eureka, Utah behind to mine a different kind of fortune in early pioneer Hollywood.  And that’s when my mother’s cousin came to stay with the family and became a film actress, costarring in a series of movie Westerns, like Silver on the Sage and Hidden Gold with cowboy actor Hopalong Cassidy. Her name was Ruth Rogers—that’s her on the right playing the pretty but plucky love interest. She even did a film with a young John Wayne in The Night Riders.

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The Mysterious Dr. Holliday of Dodge

The Mysterious Dr. Holliday of Dodge

Doc Holliday arrived in Dodge City, Kansas in the spring of 1878, and opened a dental practice at the Dodge House Hotel. The town was lively that summer, keeping the local police force occupied with arresting drunks and cowboys who carried their pistols with them over the “deadline,” the boundary between the red light district south of the railroad tracks and the business district north of the tracks. Wyatt Earp had arrived back in Dodge soon after Doc got there, and took back his former job as Assistant to Marshal Charlie Bassett. Bat Masterson was in town, too, as the new Sheriff of Ford County, and it was there that he first met Doc Holliday. As he later wrote of Doc during his time in Dodge:

Bat Masterson & Wyatt Earp, Dodge City

He was slim of build and sallow of complexion, standing about five feet ten inches, and weighing no more than 130 pounds.  His eyes were of a pale blue and his moustache was thin and of a sandy hue.  Dodge City was then very much like Dallas and Denver, only a little more so, and the doctor did not express regret at having come.  It was easily seen that he was not a healthy man for he not only looked the part, but he incessantly coughed it as well.  During his year’s stay at Dodge at that time, he did not have a quarrel with anyone, and, although regarded as sort of a grouch, he was not disliked by those with whom he became acquainted. Continue reading

Doc Holliday & Dr. Long: Bringing Life to a Legend

Doc Holliday & Dr. Long: Bringing Life to a Legend

Doc Holliday is one of the great legends of the Wild West, his life an epic adventure that’s been told and retold in literature and film. But without the help of another legendary doctor, he might never have seen the Wild West at all.

According to one old family story, John Henry Holliday was born with a cleft palate that threatened his life and required a dangerous surgical procedure – the surgery performed by his medical doctor uncle, John Stiles Holliday, assisted by the Holliday’s relative Dr. Crawford Long, who pioneered the use of ether anesthesia in surgery (see links below).

Cleft lip and palate will develop very early in-pregnancy

Cleft Palate Baby

A cleft palate occurs during pregnancy, when the two halves of the baby’s mouth do not connect and grow together as they were designed to do.  It’s that joining together that makes a suture line down the roof of your mouth and gives your lips that pretty bow shape.  If that joining doesn’t happen, a baby is born with a “cleft” – a gap in the roof of the mouth that opens up into the sinuses.  If the cleft continues into the lip and up into the nose, it’s what is known as a “harelip”…Continue reading

Graves in the Garden – Doc Holliday’s Family & The Civil War

Graves in the Garden – Doc Holliday’s Family & The Civil War

Mary Anne Fitzgerald Holliday, Mattie’s mother

Mary Anne Fitzgerald Holliday, Mattie’s mother

Although John Henry “Doc” Holliday grew up in Georgia during the Civil War as the son of a Confederate officer, the closest he got to the action himself was seeing troops marching through his hometown of Griffin, location of two Confederate training camps. When his father returned home early from the war on a medical discharge, the family left Griffin and moved south to the little village of Valdosta, close by the Florida border and far from the advancing Yankee army. But other members of the family had a much closer view of the war, and their stories became part of his childhood memories – like the story of his Uncle Robert Kennedy Holliday (father of Cousin Mattie) who served under General Longstreet at Gettysburg, and Rob’s wife, Aunt Mary Anne Fitzgerald Holliday, who was home with the children in Jonesboro when Sherman’s Army marched south from Atlanta. With an army approaching and the road “filled with bluecoats,” Mary Anne took her children away to her uncle’s plantation for safety. The following comes from Mattie in her “Memoirs of the Holliday Family in Georgia”:Continue reading

Fire and Ice: Doc Holliday in Philadelphia

Fire and Ice: Doc Holliday in Philadelphia

John Henry Holliday, Dental School Portrait

John Henry Holliday, Dental School Portrait

It’s been one of the worst winters on record in the eastern United States: epic snowfalls in Boston, thunder snow in New York, fire and ice in Philly. With a temperature of 3 degrees in the City of Brotherly Love and a wind chill of 16 below, firefighters had a challenging job containing a blaze in a three-story medical building on Locust Street. By the time the fire was contained, icicles hung from the end of the fire hoses and the building the firefighters saved was covered in ice.Continue reading

The Face Behind The Fireplace

The Face Behind The Fireplace

Willis Swint was six years-old when his family moved from their hometown of Milner, Georgia to Jonesboro in Clayton County, and into an antebellum cottage across from the tracks of the Macon & Western Railroad. That was in 1933, during the Great Depression, and hobos riding the rails often stopped at the house looking for a meal and maybe some work to pay for another day of hard living. But the old house was used to strangers coming by through the years, from Yankee soldiers during the Civil War to young recruits during two World Wars. Willis liked to think about all the old house had seen, as he spent his growing up years there, finally moving out when he married and started his own home.

Willis Swint

Willis Swint

He was an older man himself when he moved back to the house on the railroad tracks, hoping to preserve the home and his family’s history. But it was another family’s surprising history that Willis discovered when he and his wife Beverly returned and began renovations on the 150 year-old property – the family of Western legend, Doc Holliday. In an old safe left in the house, they discovered a pile of deeds to the property reaching back to the 1860’s when the home was known as the “Holliday Office House.” The owner then was Captain Robert Kennedy Holliday, uncle of the famous Doc Holliday, and father of Doc’s rumored first love, Mattie Holliday. The home was Captain Holliday’s office, and a place that young Doc would have known and likely visited.Continue reading

I’m Your Huckleberry

I’m Your Huckleberry

Tombstone

Tombstone

Wyatt Earp

Wyatt Earp

The films “Wyatt Earp” and “Tombstone” both had scripts by Oscar nominated writers. Wyatt Earp’s Lawrence Kasdan was nominated for “The Accidental Tourist,” “The Big Chill,” and “Grand Canyon.” Tombstone’s Kevin Jarre won for “Glory.” But only “Tombstone” brought us a whole new dialogue for the men of the OK Corral. Although there is enough conversation to carry the story, the script is filled with great one-liners that have become classics over the twenty years since the film was released. And Doc Holliday had some of the best lines.Continue reading

Bringing Doc Holliday Home

Bringing Doc Holliday Home

John_Henry

John Henry Holliday

John Henry Holliday wasn’t always Griffin, Georgia’s favorite son.  For generations, he was the black sheep of his hometown, the good boy gone bad who was rumored about behind his back.  How could a young man of such promise turn out so poorly?  Surely, his parents had raised him better than to spend his life as a killer and a drunk.  The Hollidays were, after all, fine Southern folk who been some of the pioneers in the area and helped to put Griffin on the map.  His mother’s family, the McKeys, were large landholders with a plantation along Indian Creek and several business buildings in town.  And weren’t they kin to the Elijah Cloud family who owned half of north Georgia and claimed Stone Mountain as their own private property?  And although his father, Henry Holliday, came from somewhat less prosperous circumstances – wasn’t his own father a tavern keeper over in Fayetteville? – Henry had made something of himself as a landholder, too, and been clerk of the first county court in Griffin before moving to South Georgia when the Yankees came through.  No, one couldn’t blame John Henry’s folks for not teaching him his responsibilities.  His mother was a refined, religious woman and his father had served honorably in three wars.  Yet somehow John Henry had turned out all wrong, wandering from Georgia to Texas and the frontier west to make his fame and infamy in gun battles and gambling halls.  That sort of story made for entertaining novels and movies, but it didn’t suit the reputation of a Southern town like Griffin. Continue reading

Doc’s Holliday in New Orleans

Doc’s Holliday in New Orleans

Bourbon Street

Bourbon Street

The river city of New Orleans has been called one of the most haunted places in America. It certainly is full of spirits — especially the kind found on the French Quarter’s Bourbon Street, lined with bars and restaurants and other, less reputable, places of entertainment. If Doc Holliday had visited the Crescent City, Bourbon Street would surely have been one of his favorite haunts…

On the Exhibit Floor

On the Exhibit Floor

I was in New Orleans for a somewhat more businesslike purpose, attending the Southeast Independent Booksellers Alliance Convention, where authors and publishers present their books for the new season, and where I was showcasing “Inheritance” and “Gone West” which comes out next spring. But what I really wanted to see was the hotel where Doc Holliday likely stayed on his own visit to New Orleans.

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Doc Holliday’s Florida Getaway

Doc Holliday’s Florida Getaway

masterson_bat

Bat Masterson

Mattie Holliday, Doc’s cousin and rumored sweetheart, was quoted as saying, “He was a much different man than the one of Western legend.”  He was also a lot more interesting, with travels that took him far beyond the OK Corral.  But did Doc take a Florida beach break, as well?  That’s the surprising direction the research goes, as historians continue to explore the unanswered questions of why – and how – Doc Holliday left Georgia.  And one of the most intriguing of the answers comes from someone who knew Doc personally:  Dodge City lawman Bat Masterson.

Withlacoochee-rivee

Withlacoochee River

In his later years, Bat became a reporter and did a series of stories about the famous characters of the American West, including an article about Doc Holliday.  The story, published in 1907 in a Boston, Massachusetts magazine, tells a tale of murder and escape set during the troubled times following the Civil War.  According to Bat, there was a swimming hole on a little river near to the south Georgia village where Doc Holliday was raised, and where he one day came across some black boys swimming where he thought they shouldn’t be.  He ordered them out of the water and when they refused, he took a shotgun to them, causing a massacre.  His family thought it best that he leave the area, and he moved to Dallas, Texas.  Although the report of a massacre isn’t likely, there are some interesting points to Bat’s story: Holliday did, in fact, live in a little village in South Georgia, the town of Valdosta, near where there is a river named the Withlacoochee, along which Doc’s family owned some land.  And when Bat’s story was published and the family later asked about it by another reporter, they said that Holliday fired over the boys heads, not at them – but they did not deny the shooting.Continue reading