Doc Holliday

John Henry Holliday trained as a dentist in Philadelphia and had a practice in Atlanta until tuberculosis, probably contracted from his mother, forced him west in 1873 in search of drier air that was supposed to slow the disease. The dry air did not stop him from dying young, but it did put him in the saloons and card rooms of Dallas, Denver, and Fort Griffin, where a steady hand with cards translated easily into a steady hand with a pistol, and where he met a Dodge City lawman named Wyatt Earp who became his closest friend.

By 1880 Holliday had followed the Earps to Tombstone, Arizona Territory, running card tables and nursing a cough that visibly worsened by the month. When Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp confronted the Cowboy faction near the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, Holliday stood with them, carrying a shotgun under his coat, and fired some of the fight's fatal shots in the 30-second exchange that killed three men. He rode out with Wyatt on the Vendetta Ride the following spring, by most accounts the coolest gun among them even as his health failed.

Holliday spent his last years drifting through mining camps in Colorado, gambling for a living because his lungs no longer allowed dentistry, and reportedly taking the sulfur waters at Glenwood Springs on a doctor's advice that they might ease his breathing. He died there in a hotel bed on November 8, 1887, 36 years old, having survived nearly every other gunfighter of his generation despite carrying the frailer body. His last words, as a nurse told it, were a request for whiskey and some surprise that he was dying in bed with his boots off.