Beschreibung

The unruly life of John Henry Holliday, who while "not a good man... was good at a number of things" - provides a lively, and deadly, chronology of the southwestern frontier. Born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1852, young Holliday was sent to Baltimore to study dentistry- but learned a couple of other things as well- to play cards, and to drink. A consumptive, he headed south for Dallas looking for a drier climate which he found largely in saloons where he became an expert faro dealer and a fast hand with a loaded gun as well as a stacked deck. Run out of Dallas, Dodge City, Kansas, and later Tombstone, Arizona, witnessed the many years of feuding and killing; the intermittent, brawling lovemaking with Kate- a rowdy slut; the partnership with Wyatt Earp whom John Myers Myers recorded at some length in The Last Chance (1950); and finally his slow dissolution which paralleled the dissolution of his world... The ?? of a man who "belonged in a wheel chair" but "held his own among as hardy a tribe of desperadoes as the world has ever seen" lends a certain reckless, de?? splendor to this life- unworthy and unedifying as it was. (Kirkus Reviews)