Doc Holliday

John Henry Holliday (August 14, 1851 – November 8, 1887), commonly called Doc Holliday, worked as a dentist, gambler, and gunfighter. He is most famous for being a close friend of lawman Wyatt Earp and for taking part in the O.K. Corral gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona. Though legend says he killed over a dozen men, modern researchers believe the actual number was between one and three.

Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia, to Henry Burroughs Holliday and Alice Jane McKey Holliday. His ancestry was English and Scottish, and he was a descendant of Sir Leonard Holliday. His father served in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War as a major in the 27th Georgia Infantry. Baptized at Griffin’s First Presbyterian Church in 1852, Holliday moved with his family to Valdosta, Georgia, in 1864. There his father became mayor, and his mother died of tuberculosis on September 16, 1866—the same disease that had killed his adopted brother Francisco, whom Henry brought home from the war. Approximately four months after his wife’s death, Henry married Rachel Martin on January 10, 1867. Holliday attended the Valdosta Institute, studying rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, history, and languages, mainly Latin with some French and Ancient Greek.

At 19, he left home for Philadelphia. On March 1, 1872, at age 20, he earned a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery (now part of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine). Because he graduated five months before turning 21, the school held his degree until he reached the minimum age to practice dentistry.

Afterward, Holliday moved to St. Louis to assist his classmate A. Jameson Fuches, Jr. Less than four months later, in late July, he relocated to Atlanta, joining a dental practice and living with his uncle’s family to build his own practice. A few weeks before his birthday, dentist Arthur C. Ford advertised that Holliday would substitute for him while Ford attended meetings.

There are disputed rumors of a shooting on the Withlacoochee River in Georgia in 1873. The earliest mention comes from Bat Masterson in a 1907 profile. According to that story, when Holliday was 22, he and friends went to a swimming hole on his uncle’s land, only to find it occupied by Black U.S. Army soldiers, part of federal occupying forces in the South.