Big Nose Kate

Did You Know?

• Mary Katherine Horony was born on November 7, 1849, in Érsekújvár, Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Nové Zámky, Slovakia).
• In 1874, she was fined for working as a 'sporting woman' in a Dodge City sporting house run by Nellie 'Bessie' (Ketchum) Earp, James Earp's wife.

Early life

Mary Katherine Horony was born on November 7, 1849, in Érsekújvár, Kingdom of Hungary, to physician and teacher Mihály Horony and his second wife Katalin Boldizsár. In 1860 the family emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City that September, and settled in Davenport, Iowa, in 1862. Both parents died within a month of each other in 1865, and Mary Katherine and her younger siblings were placed with her brother-in-law Gustav Susemihl, then in 1870 with attorney Otto Smith. At age 16 she ran away and stowed away on a riverboat to St. Louis, Missouri. She later claimed to have married a dentist named Silas Melvin and had a son who died of yellow fever, but census records show Melvin married to a different woman. Horony entered the Ursuline Convent but did not stay long.

Joins Doc Holliday

In 1876 Horony moved to Fort Griffin, Texas, where she met Doc Holliday the following year at John Shanssey's Saloon. Holliday considered her his intellectual equal, and she appreciated his refined manners. By then she had earned the nickname Big Nose Kate. A card game between Holliday and a local bully named Ed Bailey ended when Holliday killed Bailey with a knife after Bailey drew a revolver.

Holliday was arrested and held in a hotel room, and a vigilante group formed. Horony set fire to a shed to distract the mob, then confronted the deputy with a gun, allowing her and Holliday to escape on stolen horses to Dodge City, where they registered as Dr. and Mrs. J. H. Holliday. Holliday opened a dental practice but spent most of his time gambling and drinking. The couple fought regularly and violently but reconciled.

Horony said they later married in Valdosta, Georgia. They traveled to Trinidad, Colorado, and then to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where Holliday ran a saloon and Horony occasionally worked at a dance hall in Santa Fe.

After the O.K. Corral and later life

Horony made trips to Tombstone to see Holliday until he left for Colorado in April 1882. In 1887 she visited her brother Alexander in Redstone, Colorado, near Glenwood Springs. After Holliday's death that year, she married Irish blacksmith George Cummings in Aspen, Colorado, on March 2, 1890. They worked several mining camps in Colorado before moving to Bisbee, Arizona, where she briefly ran a bakery.

After returning to Willcox, Arizona, Cummings became an abusive alcoholic and they separated. In 1900 Horony moved to Dos Cabezas or Cochise and worked for John and Lulu Rath at the Cochise Hotel. Cummings committed suicide in Courtland, Arizona, in July 1915. The 1910 census shows Horony living with miner John J. Howard; when Howard died in 1930, she served as executrix of his estate.

In 1931 the 80-year-old Horony applied to the Arizona Pioneers' Home in Prescott, was admitted after six months as one of its first female residents, and became an outspoken advocate for other residents, writing letters to the state legislature and governor.

Death and discrepancies in records

Horony died on November 2, 1940, of acute myocardial insufficiency, with coronary artery disease and advanced arteriosclerosis also noted. Her death certificate lists her birthplace as Davenport, Iowa, and her parents as Marchal H. Michael and Catherine Baldwin, both with unknown birthplaces. She was buried on November 6, 1940, in the Arizona Pioneers' Home Cemetery in Prescott; her grave marker gives an incorrect birth year of 1850.