Death At His Elbow

The Moral of This Story Is: Dont Take a Drunk Dentist to Make an Arrest.

- Bob Boze Bell

If you took all the alcohol out of the Wild West era, you would certainly save a forest of trees, because all of the printed stories of shooting, mayhem and violence would be much, much shorter, including the page count of this magazine.

How much did alcohol factor into the O.K. Corral gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, on October 26, 1881?

Historians have a pretty clear picture of Ike Clanton’s condition: he had an all-night binge buzz, capped with a buffaloed head.

Doc Holliday’s condition is less clear. Doc was “tight”—intoxicated—the night before the fight, Wyatt Earp later recalled. On the day of the fight, Doc got up around noon, likely hungover, and went uptown to see what all the fuss was about. Did he have a nip, or two or three?

I believe Doc was “in his cups” and livid when he realized the cow-boys were waiting to confront him in the side yard of C.S. Fly’s boarding house, where Doc was rooming. The two conditions combined to set off the spark that started the gunfight.

Not everyone agrees with me. Wyatt Earp biographer Casey Tefertiller states, “There is no testimony that [Doc] stopped in a saloon, and he did not have time to become heavily inebriated. Was he still drunk enough from the night before that it carried over? Possible, I guess, but not probable. More likely that Holliday was sober by the time the guns went off in the mid-afternoon. He certainly seemed to shoot sober.”

Did Doc Holliday start the fight? Find out in this edited excerpt from my third edition of The Illustrated Life & Times of Doc Holliday.

The rivalry between lawmen Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp is already a rough and tumble political brawl in Arizona Territory when the Benson stage robbery attempt on March 15, 1881, focuses the tension.