Customer Reviews

The Frontier World of Doc Holliday

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While this book is certainly an entertaining read, and covers Holliday's life quite fully, I consider the scholarship somewhat suspect.

The problem is that, rather than confine her account to the facts, the author often states how Doc felt, or what he thought about various things, people, events, etc. throughout the book. There is just no way she could possibly have such detailed and complete knowledge about such things, since Holliday never kept a diary, and indeed the only written accounts directly attributable to him were some letters written to his cousin, a Catholic nun - none of which go into the level of detail that would be required for Ms. Johns to know all of the things she appears to know. Most of what we know about Holliday comes from what others (many of whom disliked him cordially) said or wrote about him. Yet Ms. Johns writes as though she has an inside track on his innermost thoughts.

If she actually qualified such statements with words like "It seems probable that...", "it is very likely that...", or "the evidence clearly indicates that..." this would solve the problem; after all, it is a historian's job to present possible explanations for things the bare facts may not explain sufficiently, and to try and see past events to the causes and motivations behind them. But speculation and supposition MUST be labelled as such. To present it as though it were incontrovertible fact is poor scholarship. As a historian myself, I know this would never fly if the author were presenting this as a graduate thesis.

Ms. Johns is also inclined to make some pretty wild claims, such as Wyatt Earp's and Doc Holliday's "...friendship, may have caused many deaths, even Doc's own."(p.134) How Holliday's death from tuberculosis, several years after he parted company with Wyatt could, in any way, be attributable to Earp is a complete mystery to me. And this is only one example of some of the author's questionable assertions.

If your looking for entertainment, you'll enjoy this book. But I consider much of the information contained herein to be highly suspect, given that the author's scholarship is often very sloppy.

If you're interested in the life of Doc Holliday, than you will probably want to read this book.

It is definitely filled with some historical truths, but at the same time the author tries to tell the reader what Doc might have been feeling when relating things that happened to him. I found that to be slightly annoying, because it's just based on pure conjecture. Sometimes it seems more like a fictional story rather than factual information.

It also seems like more information could have been put into the book regarding the relationships between him and Kate and him and Wyatt Earp.

All in all a worthwile book, but one not too put too much credence into. "Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait," by Karen Holliday Tanner is a better choice for the Doc Holliday fan. It has a good deal more factual information information about Doc, and much of it is based on family records, letters, etc.

Highly pertinent to Pat Jahn's book, The Frontier World of Doc Holliday, a small booklet titled: An Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday was published in 1966 by the Reminder Press of Glenwood Springs Colorado, the town where Doc Holliday is buried. It was destined to raise a huge cloud of dust and a storm of controversy, and Jahns' book was partly the reason. It all started out innocently enough. The editor of the Reminder Press was also the President of the local Historical group which was looking for a manuscript to adapt for a typical Old West "mellerdrammer" of the Variety Theatre type. They asked Glenn Boyer, who just happened to be passing through town and who later went on to write extensively about the Earps and Doc, to try his hand at turning out a story to be adapted to the stage. Boyer, obviously a practical joker of the Mark Twain/John Phoenix journalism school did the subject up brown. In the Foreword recently issued as a supplement to this booklet, he makes it obvious he was panning such works as Pat Jahns and John Myers Myers Doc books, which were very little about Doc, and a lot of speculation about everything, including the "frontier world," by gum, which Jahns at least, added to her title.

According the new foreword, Boyer decided to kill three birds with one stone: (1) provide the basis for a "mellerdrammer" for Gaslamp theatre, (2) use the first as a handy medium to pan so-called biographers of the "frontier-world-of-and-a-heap-more," and also (3) concoct a platform to expose the widespread practice of stealing pictures from one another by Western magazine writers, such as those who filled the pages of True West (a.k.a. True Wind and more recently True Waste - the former conferred on it by Boyer and the latter by his son, an equally evil balloon buster.) Accordingly he planted a number of bogus pictures which were duly copied by larcenous writers, as he had hoped they would be, so he could later expose the practice pro bono publico. He decided to give the medium a five years gestation period before revealing what he had done.

Meanwhile back at The Frontier World of Doc Holliday, it is interesting to note, as others have, that Pat Jahns (pronounced Yahns, by the way) is a proven psychic in that she is able to divine every thought of Doc, which other reviewers also seem to be annoyed by, perhaps out of jealousy - but more likely out of well-founded skepticism. She also does a psycho-biographical thumbnail sketch of Big Nose Kate, whose true name she didn't know (no big fault at that time since no other Western writers did either) and portrays her as a gum chewing, bon bon gorging Hollywood Grade B strumpet. (Read Linda Darnell and Fay Dunaway.) She has Kate pronouncing the name of the Comique Theatre as Kom-ick-kue, since she was unaware that Kate came from minor Hungarian nobility and spoke the common European court language: French.

And, contrary to the accepted picture on the Earps, especially Wyatt, Jahns is certain that they are no damned good; so bad they don't even clean their fingernails. This somewhat faults her "frontier world" virtue, since what they did was normally a practice that netted the six-shooter benefactors a silver medal struck off by the blacksmith for public service. Unfortunately the sheriff, Johnny Behan, was the quintessential villain from Grade B "oaters," a died in the wool crooked sheriff. (Worthy to note the first of a long line of similar scumbags with ethical astigmatism in that locale.) Behan went after the Earps tooth and nail, and he and his political toadies, including an under-sheriff who was a fair hand at journalistic smear tactics, left behind the picture that debunkers so love today, in effect bequeathed to debunkers the major body of the work they use to tar and feather the Earps. Jahns, not necessarily a debunker, was roped in by the plausible propaganda.

It seemed to escape Jahns that WHEN the Earps and Doc shot it was from the front in daylight, while just the opposite applied to their enemies. She was also unaware of the cause of Behan's rabid hatred for Wyatt Earp: due to Wyatt having swiped his warm, wiggly concubine. (See book on Amazon: I Married Wyatt Earp.")

In sum, as someone else commented in these Amazon reviews, a much better book on this subject is Karen Holliday Tanner's Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait, not surprisingly, since she is Doc's first cousin three times removed, and thus his closest living Holliday blood relative. Karen's book released a flood of formerly "closely held" family secrets. A real "goodie" is that Doc's cousin, Sister Mary Melanie Holliday, between whom and Doc Pat Jahns concocted a crystal ball romance, was called by the Holliday family, "that damn nun." Nuntheless, her name was used, as Karen Holliday reveals, as the prototype for virginal Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. More startling, Margaret Mitchell was a Holliday relative, and used one of the Holliday clan's mansions as the model for her Tara. And, hold onto your hat, the figure of Doc Holliday was the prototype for sorta-likeable-renegade Rhett Butler. Had enough? Well, tough! There's more.

Karen Tanner reveals, though not in her book, that Doc was known to the family as John Henry, the tragic outcast, doomed by his disease to an unrefined life in the West far from cultured friends and family. But only until Walter Noble Burns' book Tombstone (see also on Amazon) revealed poor dear, tragic, John Henry's identity as "Doc" the murderous sidekick of Wyatt Earp. And then, as Karen says, "he falls out of the family picture entirely, and the proper little old ladies (read Aunt Pitty Pat with fan) never mentioned his name again."

I ain't through yet, either. Doc had a harelip. And so extensive is Karen Tanner's grab bag of family memorabilia that she has photos of the doctors who operated on him to correct it that appear in her book. And don't give up yet, one of them is the prototype for the kindly, harassed, old doctor in Gone With the Wind who is going out of his mind in Atlanta trying to take care of a flood of wounded soldiers as Sherman's army closes in and angelic Melanie decides to "birth a baby."

Maybe you think that all of this peripheral stuff will be more interesting than Jahns' book, and maybe it is, but Jahns can be commended for some pretty good research. She found Frank Waters' deceitful hatchet job in manuscript, which later appeared as The Earp Brothers of Tombstone, and she found and consulted members of Doc's family. She probably was swayed by Waters' negative portrayal of the Earps, a self-serving artifice, and inexcusable, since it has misled a lot of readers. See Bruce Trinque's expose of it also on Amazon. Waters' book is now recognized as, at best, a curiosity. And Jahns' book isn't all that bad, on balance, if you've first read this label on her product. She does have some nice touches, such as deflating Wyatt Earp's grandstanding by observing: "throw him a fish!"

Jahn's biography does a fine job in portraying Holliday's maladies and myths--both self-inflicted. Holliday's Devil-may-care attitude sustained him and it seemed to be the same thing that fueled his mystic.

I found this book a fine expansion and exploration of the era and culture of the West (having been to several of the same towns that Holliday lived in) and I thought the author had researched her topic very well. My one criticism is this: I was a little unclear of the narrative of the shooting at the OK corral. She presented the depositions of several of the participants, which is solid history, but the flow of the events seemed disjointed.

While the subject of the book is indeed interesting, the author is not the best writer I've ever read. It's as if she thought she were going to be paid by the word and truly goes overboard with her descriptions. She writes from Doc Holliday's point of view, which I find extremely irritating. I'd much rather she just tell the story of his life rather than try to figure out what he was thinking. My advice is to choose a different title and different author.

Not well written. Disjointed. Over all a poor effort. Much better books on the subject are available.

As a fan of westerns all my life, I became interested in the exploits of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and other old west legends. I also have seen the numerous versions of the OK Corral shoot outs on the screen and wondered which was the most accurate story about that incident.

The author of this book does a good job of being objective when it comes to the many stories and legends surrounding Holiday and his relationsip with the Earps. Like the other reviewers, I did not like the way the author using her poetic license to assume what Holiday actually thought and felt at the time. I realize she was just attempting to make Holiday more real to the reader, but other experts do not agree with this author on many points. Nevertheless, I thought it was a good read and she gave a fairly good evaluation of the personality of Doc Holiday. How many men he may have killed can be debated, but he was clearly a fearless gunman and loyal to his friends.

In conclusion, I think this book will be of some interest to anyone with a passion for the old west.

Rating: 3 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Martial Art Myths-Cafe Press).

OSTENSIBLY THIS IS A BIOGRAPHY OF DOC HOLIDAY. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE FASHIONS OF THE DAY - MALE AND FEMALE AND THE COLOR OF THE WINDOWS IN THE SALOONS THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT DOC READ THE FUNNY PAGES BECAUSE THEY ARE MORE ACCURATE. AS A BIOGRAPHY THIS BOOK IS SO BAD IT NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED. I WOULD AVOID IT. SHE DOES ALMOST NO IN DEPTH INVESTIGATION OF HOLIDAY, ALL SHE DOES IS TELL WHERE HE HAS GONE OR WHAT HE THINKS. I THOUGHT ALL THE MIND READERS BELONGED TO THE X-MEN. SHE DOES A GREATER DISSERVICE TO WYATT EARP. SHE WRITES AND REPRINTS ALL THE BAD PRESS HE GOT AFTER THE OK CORRAL AND DUMPS ON HIM ENDLESSLY. SHE OBVIOUSLY DOES NOT LIKE HIM AND MAKES NO ATTEMPT TO INVESTIGATE IF WHAT SHE PRINTS ABOUT HIM IS TRUE OR NOT. SHE JUST WANTS HIM TO LOOK BAD.

I am basically an expert on Doc Holliday so when I read this book I was impressed with how accurate the author was. Many authors try to make him out to be either really good or really bad but Jahns brings out both sides of him. I greatly admire Doc for both his good and bad qualities. He feared nothing and yet was full of respect and undying loyalty for his friends. He is one of the most fascinaing people in all of history and this book gives alot of info about this interesting man.

Born a Catholic near Atlanta, Holliday went to dental school in Baltimore, but because of consumption gave up on that career (except for a while in Denver). He became a professional gambler (and drunk), and was in Tombstone for the fight at the O.K. Corral. Johns tells Holliday's story in a non-scholarly, conversational manner, and can be quite sardonic at times. This makes the book entertaining and pleasurable to read. She also offers lots of quotes from contemporary newspapers. Factually it's accurate; a more modern biography might get into more psychobabbling over Doc's motives and behavior, but I don't miss any of that at all. A well-written, straight ahead biography.