Doc Holliday was a dentist with a classical education in Greek and Latin who killed his first man at 19, coughed blood into a handkerchief for the next 17 years, and died in bed with a glass of whiskey, saying, "This is funny." Funny because he'd spent his entire adult life expecting to die in a gunfight. He never did. John Henry Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia in 1851. He came into the world with a cleft palate and a partial cleft lip, a deformity that in 1851 was usually a death sentence for an infant. His uncle, a surgeon named John Stiles Holliday, performed the corrective surgery himself when the baby was two months old. His mother Alice spent the next several years patiently teaching the boy to speak clearly. She taught him piano. She taught him manners. She taught him how to bow to a woman and how to address a gentleman. By the time he was a teenager, John Henry could quote Virgil in the original Latin, play Chopin from memory, and dance a quadrille. Then she died of tuberculosis when he was 15, and so did the small, soft world she'd built for him. He was sent to Philadelphia to study dentistry. He graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1872 at the age of 20, one of the youngest in his class, and his entry "Diseases of the Teeth" was considered exceptional. He won an award at a dental fair for "Best Set of Artificial Teeth in Gold." His diploma still exists. You can look at it. He moved back south, set up a practice, and started coughing. By 1873 the diagnosis was unmistakable. Pulmonary tuberculosis. The same disease that killed his mother. Doctors gave him a few months, maybe a year. They told him his only chance was to move west, where the dry air might slow the lungs from drowning. He kissed his cousin Mattie goodbye. He had been in love with her for years. She would later become a Catholic nun, Sister Mary Melanie, and she was the woman Margaret Mitchell would model Melanie Hamilton on in Gone With the Wind. They wrote each other letters until the day he died. Nobody has ever found those letters. The family burned them. He went to Dallas. He set up a dental office. And his patients, watching this thin polite young man cough blood into a handkerchief between extractions, stopped coming. So he turned to cards. Faro, mostly. Poker when he could find it. He had a gambler's gift and a dying man's nerve, and within two years he was making more in a week at the tables than he'd made in a year pulling teeth. He moved through Texas and into the Colorado mining camps, then New Mexico, then Arizona. He drank an estimated two to three quarts of whiskey a day, partly because it numbed the lungs and partly because nothing else did. Here is what made him terrifying. Most gunfighters in the Old West were cowards in expensive boots. They picked fights they could win and avoided fights they couldn't. Doc Holliday already knew he was dying. There was nothing you could threaten him with. There was no future you could take from him. He would walk into a room of armed men with that thin slow smile and a Colt and a knife and sometimes a sawed off shotgun under his long grey coat, and the math running behind his pale blue eyes was simple. Every day he was alive was already stolen. The men across the table had something to lose. He had nothing. He weighed about 135 pounds. He was five foot ten. He was usually drunk. And by the time he reached Tombstone, men crossed streets to avoid him. His common law wife was a Hungarian woman named Mary Katharine Horony, better known as Big Nose Kate. She had been born to nobility in Budapest, run away as a teenager after her parents died, worked as a prostitute in Iowa, and ended up on the frontier with a temper that matched his. He once got her out of jail by bribing a guard. She once got him out of jail by setting fire to the hotel next door as a distraction, then walking him out at gunpoint. They fought constantly. They loved each other in the way two people love each other when they both know one of them is going to die soon. He met Wyatt Earp in Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1877. The friendship that followed would shape both their lives. The legend goes that Doc saved Wyatt's life in Dodge City, walking out of the Long Branch Saloon to find Wyatt surrounded by cowboys with guns drawn, and putting his pistol to the leader's temple before anyone saw him move. Wyatt later said he owed Doc his life. He said Doc was "the most skillful gambler, and the nerviest, fastest, deadliest man with a six gun I ever knew." Wyatt Earp said that. About a tubercular dentist who could quote Cicero. At the OK Corral on October 26, 1881, the fight lasted thirty seconds. Doc was carrying a 10 gauge coach gun under his coat. He killed Tom McLaury with both barrels. When Morgan Earp was assassinated months later in retaliation, Doc rode with Wyatt on what history would later call the Vendetta Ride, a three week killing spree across Arizona that left every man they believed responsible dead in the dirt. They were never caught. They were never tried. They simply rode out of the territory and disappeared. By 1887 the disease had finally caught up with him. He was 36 years old. He weighed less than 120 pounds. He had outlived nearly every man who had ever tried to kill him, and most of the ones who had only thought about it. He checked into the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where the sulfur springs were said to ease the lungs. They didn't. On the morning of November 8th, the nurse brought him a glass of whiskey. He had always sworn he would die with his boots on, the way a gunfighter was supposed to die. He looked down at his bare feet under the white hospital sheet. He looked at the whiskey. He started to laugh. "This is funny." Then he drank it. And he died.