Richard Rowland wrote:
So your Hug? I would have never guessed. By the way, Doc Holiday was a phony. Never had a gunfight till helping out at the OK corral. And then he used a shotgun to have a better chance of hitting something.
No, I am not Hug..... but, I would expect that you would be nonplussed by others who wish to engage you in factual discussion.
John Henry Holliday, like many gunfighters, may have spread stories about their "abilities" and this was more common than one would believe. One reason, if people thought that you were faster than lightening then you could avoid many fights. But, in the case of Doc, he simply did not care.... he engaged in gunfights because he thought a quick death from a bullet might be better than waiting to die a very slow, painful death from his disease. He owned a shotgun, but he preferred a "long knife." It was with his long knife that he killed his first man, having been drawn on.... he headed west to avoid a trial. The shootout at the OK Corral actually is history, not myth.
You may not be aware, but I love history and often find myself digging through old news articles in Library of Congress as well as the National Archives. It is at the Library of Congress that I found reports of Doc Holliday and his friends the Earps.
The person you may be thinking of is Wyatt Earp. He became nationally renowned as a flim-flam man. He would regale anyone, which included William S. Hart and Tom Mix, willing to listen with stories of the "Old West" and how he and his brothers fought for the "law" and justice. In reality, he was more of a legend in his own mind..... much like some "authorities" on OPP. In reality Wyatt was drawn to police work not because of a devotion to the law but because, during the Gilded Age when public corruption was rampant, it was an easy source of cash. As a young man, Earp was arrested for horse theft and consorting with prostitutes. He was run out of a Texas town for trying to sell a rock painted yellow as a gold brick. As for his preference, handgun or shotgun, well it was not the Smith & Wesson as claimed by some, because by 1881 the American Model and its ammunition were obsolete.... his weapon of choice was the 10-inch-barrel Colt Single Action.
Attached is a copy of the news article about the OK Coral.... this story was published in the Tombstone Nugget which was a daily paper that was printed in Tombstone during that time period. The article was reprinted in a Tucson paper, The Arizona Weekly Citizen, on October 30 1881 4 days after the shoot out happened. You can read the remainder of the article at
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015133/1881-10-30/ed-1/seq-3/ Location, column 7.