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Holliday
StoriesAn Evening with Doc Holliday

An Evening with Doc Holliday

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An evening with Doc Holliday

Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend

Dr. Gary L. Roberts Doc’s family historian

With Author Dr. Gary Roberts

When I first began researching and writing about Doc Holliday, I had the pleasure of being introduced by Doc’s family to historian Dr. Gary L. Roberts, then working on his own biography of the Western legend. Gary and I became good friends over the years as we shared our historical discoveries and discussed what each new bit of information meant in the context of Doc’s adventurous life. And although we were writing different sorts of books—Gary’s the scholarly biography Doc Holliday: The Life & Legend, and mine the historical novel trilogy The Saga of Doc Holliday—we were both working toward the same goal of bringing Doc’s true history to light, and I have appreciated Gary’s unfailing support of my own work.

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StoriesLeadville Takes a Shot

Leadville Takes a Shot

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Leadville, Colorado circa 1882

Leadville, Colorado circa 1882

Called the “Cloud City” because of its 10,000-foot elevation, Leadville, Colorado was both the highest city in the country and the richest silver camp in the world. By 1882, when Doc Holliday arrived, the Leadville mining district was producing $14 million worth of silver and the hills were warrened with mine shafts, cluttered with stamp mills, and overhung with the haze of smelters that never stopped burning. With all that money and a population of 40,000 and growing, Leadville seemed destined to take over Denver’s place as the state capital. The city’s main thoroughfare of Harrison Street was crowded day and night with coaches and carriages, ore wagons and delivery drays, foot traffic and fine horses and trains of burros bound for the mines. There were brick and stone sidewalks fronting tall business buildings, stores filled with every description of merchandise, a grand Opera House provided by Horace Tabor, and enough law offices to handle all the legal entanglements of claims and claim jumpers, mine deeds and multiple-owner partnerships. There were, in fact, nearly as many lawyers in Leadville as there were saloons—and there were nearly a hundred of those, making saloon-keeping the biggest business in town. And where there were saloons, there were all the lesser establishments that went along with them: gambling houses, dance halls, bordellos and opium dens.

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My Process

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It’s the beginnings of things that interest me: Doc Holliday before he became a Western icon; a Caribbean pirate who started out as a wealthy plantation owner; a Native American Indian chief who was descended from Scots royalty.  Then curiosity takes over and I become a researcher, digging into archives and visiting museums and libraries, interviewing family members and historians, traveling to the places where the characters lived and the action happened.  As I study, the facts fall into something like a plot and a theme begins to appear.  The information fills file cabinets and fleshes out a timeline of the character’s life.  I turn the timeline into a skeletal chapter book, adding in my notes and the plot and action as far as I know it, so that before I begin the actual writing, there is something like a novel already waiting for me.  You could print the pages and read through, and have a good idea of the storyline, the characterization, the ending.  And then the real work starts.

Writing is a love-hate relationship for me.  Sometimes it’s easy and the words flow and I love it.  Sometimes I struggle for hours or days with a single paragraph and I hate it.  I writing at mackinac island michigannever have classic writer’s block, running out of words.  I have plot block, which is much worse, running out of story.  It’s when I can’t figure out how to connect point A to point C that I really hate my life.  And often it’s not just a leap from A to C that I have to maneuver, but from A to E by way of B, C, and D, which are the logical suppositions that take the story from the history we know at A to the history we know at E – everything along the way being only plausible conjecture.  Being constrained by the history is often harder for me than having nothing but my imagination to guide the story.  I can imagine all kinds of things.  It’s imagining them within the confines of known history that is challenging.  But somehow it all works out and the paragraphs turn into pages that turn into scenes that turn into chapters that turn into a book – or two or three. 

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StoriesDesigning Doc Holliday

Designing Doc Holliday

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One of the last—but most important—elements of book publishing is the design of the cover. A self published author may have complete control over cover design, while a traditionally published author (like yours truly) has a whole art and marketing department to do the work. With many creators taking part in the process, the final product may not reflect the author’s first intent, while still satisfying bookstore buyers and distributors.

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The Power of Point of View

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(Guest Post on Sarah Johnson’s “Reading the Past” Blog 2013)

Sarah Johnson’s wonderfully written review of Inheritance, the first book in my historical novel trilogy, Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday points out one of the challenges in writing fiction set during the American Civil War and Reconstruction: the difficulty of dealing with the “inherent racism” of the time. Although the Southern Confederacy was fighting for more than slavery in its war on the Federal government, the perpetuation of the “peculiar institution” was at the core of the fight. So a writer telling a story set in the Old South has to acknowledge the central issue of the era, even if that issue isn’t a central theme of the book.

It would be tempting to insert one’s modern perceptions into the narrative, commenting on or criticizing the racist attitudes of the times. Such editorial comment, however, puts a distance between the reader and the characters and detracts from the sense of time and place of the story. How, then, to accurately show the social ills of the Old South without seeming to approve of them? Without some negative commentary the story might seem to celebrate the institution of slavery.
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The Power of Story

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(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 End?

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Finishing the manuscript is just the start of the Business of Writing. (From a blog post for Bookmasters.com)

So you’ve finally finished your masterpiece, read and edited and proofed and reread the carefully typed manuscript, and now it’s ready for the two most wonderful words in a writer’s vocabulary: The End! And soon, you’ll be querying agents and sending off submissions, receiving an offer of representation, and watching a bidding war between all the top publishers in your genre. Hey, it could happen!

But before it does and before you type “The End” at the bottom of your final page, you’ve still got some work to do. Because finishing the manuscript is just the start of the business of writing.  Now you have a synopsis to write, and you may find it even harder than writing the work on which it’s based. And doing it right may mean the difference between landing a book deal and languishing in the slush pile of an agent’s office. Even if you’re intent on self-publishing, a synopsis is elemental to the success of your book.

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StoriesWhy Doc Holliday Killed Johnny Ringo in “Tombstone”

Why Doc Holliday Killed Johnny Ringo in “Tombstone”

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Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday challenges Johnny Ringo in their last duel.

Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday challenges Johnny Ringo in their last duel.

It’s the dramatic final duel between Doc Holliday and his alter-ego nemesis, Johnny Ringo, in the classic Western film “Tombstone,” as Doc shoots Ringo dead and comments wryly, “the strain was more than he could bear.” Although that’s not what really happened (Doc wasn’t even in Arizona when Ringo died), there’s a reason screenwriter Kevin Jarre wrote it that way: this is drama not documentary, and the rules of

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StoriesWhy Doc Holliday Went West

Why Doc Holliday Went West

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According to popular legend, Doc Holliday left home and went west because he was diagnosed with consumption and told that he had to go to a kinder climate to save his life. And that’s partly true. He was eventually diagnosed with consumption (though when or where, we don’t know) and he did go to the western Territory of New Mexico for his health. But that was years after he left Georgia, after he’d already made a name for himself in several other states. The first place he went after leaving home was Dallas, Texas, which is in the South, not the West, and which did not have a kinder climate. The Dallas weather was much like Georgia, hot and humid in the summer, cold and humid in the winter. It had also been recently closed down by a yellow fever epidemic and was famous for being the second least healthy place in the country to live, right behind the bayous of Louisiana. No one would go there for his health.

Withlacoochee River

So what was it that made John Henry Holliday leave home? The more likely cause of his western exodus wasn’t sickness, but a shooting—a story told in various versions by people who knew him personally, most notably by lawman Bat Masterson. As Masterson tells it, near to the South Georgia village where Holliday was raised ran a little river where a swimming hole had been cleared, 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 to go, he took a shotgun to them and “caused a massacre.” In the troubled days of Reconstruction, his family thought it best that he leave the area, so he moved to Dallas, Texas. The village, of course, was Valdosta, and the river was the nearby Withlacoochee. Continue reading

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StoriesDoc Holliday: Before the Legend

Doc Holliday: Before the Legend

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No one knew when John Henry Holliday was born that he would die as a legend called “Doc Holliday.”  So no one bothered keeping the kind of records that his future chronicler would need to bring his story back to life.  The facts that were noted were nothing more than would appear in any old family Bible.  But if you mix together the few recorded facts of his life before he became a legend with details of the lives of his family and set it against the background of the Southern world in which he lived, the history begins to look something like a story…

John Henry Holliday Baby PictureHe was born on the 14th of August in 1851 in the little city of Griffin, Georgia.  His father, Henry Burroughs Holliday, was a businessman and clerk of the county court.  His mother, Alice Jane McKey, was the musically talented oldest daughter of a cotton planter, set to inherit some of her family’s fortune.  There was another boy in the Holliday household when John Henry was born — a teenager named Francisco Holliday Family PhotosHidalgo who’d been orphaned during the Mexican War and brought to Georgia by Henry Holliday in his bachelor days.

Before long there were girls coming to join the family: Alice Jane’s younger sisters Eliza and Ella and Margaret, given into Henry Holliday’s guardianship when their father William Land McKey died.  But there were no sisters or brothers for John Henry.  His parents’ only other child, a baby girl they named Martha Eleanora, had died six months after her birth and nearly two years before John Henry was born.Continue reading

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