Weird West 04 - The Doctor and the Dinosaurs (23 page)

I
N THAT
“
ALTERNATE HISTORY
” in which the United States extended all the way to the Pacific, there are also a number of films made about the principals in this book, and a number of very popular actors portrayed them. Here's a list of them:

S
OME
M
OVIE
D
OC
H
OLLIDAYS
:

Victor Mature

Kirk Douglas

Jason Robards Jr.

Cesar Romero

Stacey Keach

Dennis Quaid

Val Kilmer

Walter Huston

Arthur Kennedy

Randy Quaid (TV)

Douglas Fowley (TV)

Gerald Mohr (TV)

S
OME
S
TAGE
AND
M
OVIE
T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELTS
:

Brian Keith

Tom Berenger

Karl Swenson

Robin Williams

Frank Albertson (TV)

Peter Breck (TV)

James Whitmore (Broadway)

Len Cariou (Broadway musical)

S
OME
M
OVIE
T
HOMAS
A
LVA
E
DISONS
:

Spencer Tracy

Mickey Rooney

S
OME
M
OVIE
N
ED
B
UNTLINES
:

Lloyd Corrigan

Thomas Mitchell

S
OME
M
OVIE
G
ERONIMOS
:

Chuck Conners

Wes Studi

Jay Silverheels (four times)

Monte Blue

S
OME
M
OVIE
C
OLE
Y
OUNGERS
:

Wayne Morris

Alan Hale Jr.

Frank Lovejoy

Cliff Robertson

David Carradine

Randy Travis

S
OME
S
TAGE
AND
M
OVIE
B
UFFALO
B
ILL
C
ODYS
:

William O'Neal (Broadway musical)

Art Lund (Broadway musical)

Ron Holgate (Broadway musical)

George Hearn (Broadway musical)

Louis Calhern

Joel McCrea

Paul Newman

A M
OVIE
E
DWARD
D
RINKER
C
OPE
:

Steve Carell

A M
OVIE
O
THNIEL
C
HARLES
M
ARSH
:

The late James Gandolfini was to have portrayed Marsh; no replacement has been announced as of press time.

T
HIS IS A
“
WHO
'
S WHO
” of the book's participants in that fictional alternate reality where the United States extended to the West Coast.

D
OC
H
OLLIDAY

He was born John Henry Holliday in 1851, and grew up in Georgia. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen, and that is almost certainly where he contracted the disease. He was college educated, with a minor in the classics, and became a licensed dentist. Because of his disease, he went out West to drier climates. The disease cost him most of his clientele, so he supplemented his dental income by gambling, and he defended his winnings in the untamed cities of the West by becoming a gunslinger as well.

He saved Wyatt Earp when the latter was surrounded by gunmen in Dodge City, and the two became close friends. Somewhere along the way
he met and had a stormy on-and-off relationship with Big Nose Kate Elder. He was involved in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and is generally considered to have delivered the fatal shots to both Tom and Frank McLaury. He rode with Wyatt Earp on the latter's vendetta against the Cowboys after the shootings of Virgil and Morgan Earp, then moved to Colorado. He died, in bed, of tuberculosis, in 1887. His last words were: “Well, I'll be damned—this is funny.” No accurate records were kept in the case of most shootists; depending on which historians you believe, Doc killed anywhere from two to twenty-seven men.

T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT

Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1858. A sickly child, suffering from extreme asthma, he worked at strengthening his body through exercise and swimming, and by the time he attended Harvard he was fit enough to become the college's lightweight boxing champion. Even prior to that he was a devoted naturalist, and was acknowledged—even as a teen—as one of America's leading ornithologists and taxidermists.

His
The Naval War of 1812
was (and is) considered the definitive book on that battle. Shortly thereafter he developed an interest in politics and became the youngest-ever minority leader of the New York State Assembly. His wife and mother died eight hours apart in the same house in 1884, and he quit politics, headed out to the Dakota Badlands, and bought two ranches. He signed a contract to write the four-volume
The Winning of the West
, became a lawman, and caught and captured three armed killers during “the Winter of the Blue Snow.”

Coming back East, he married again, served as police commissioner of New York City, later was secretary of the navy, assembled the
Rough Riders and took San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, became governor of New York, was elected vice president in 1900, and became president less than a year later with the assassination of President McKinley.

As president, Roosevelt fought the trusts, created the National Park System, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and turned the United States into a world power. When he left office in 1908 he embarked on a year-long African safari. He ran for President in 1912, was wounded by a would-be assassin, lost, and spent a year exploring and mapping the River of Doubt (later renamed the Rio Teodoro) for the Brazilian government. He was a strong advocate for our entry into World War I, and it was assumed the presidency was his for the asking in 1920, but he died a year before the election.

During his life, he wrote more than twenty books—many of them still in print—and over 150,000 letters.

T
HOMAS
A
LVA
E
DISON

Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Edison is considered the greatest inventor of his era. He is responsible for the electric light, the motion picture, the carbon telephone transmitter, the fluoroscope, and a host of other inventions. He died in 1931.

N
ED
B
UNTLINE

Buntline was born Edward Z. C. Judson in 1813, and gained fame as a publisher, editor, writer (especially of dime novels about the West), and for commissioning Colt's Manufacturing Company to create the
Buntline Special. He tried to bring Wild Bill Hickok back East, failed, and then discovered Buffalo Bill Cody, who
did
come East and perform in a play that Buntline wrote.

G
ERONIMO

Born Goyathlay in 1829, he was a Chiricahua Apache medicine man who fought against both the Americans and the Mexicans who tried to grab Apache territory. He was never a chief, but he
was
a military leader, and a very successful one. He finally surrendered in 1886, and was incarcerated—but by 1904 he had become such a celebrity that he actually appeared at the World's Fair, and in 1905 he proudly rode in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in Washington, DC. He died in 1909 at the age of eighty.

E
DWARD
D
RINKER
C
OPE

Cope was a child prodigy who developed an interest in paleontology as a young man. Originally a friend of Othniel Charles Marsh, the two soon became bitter rivals, belittling each other in print, sabotaging each other's discoveries, racing to get their own finds into print first, even trying to get laws passed against one another. When the dust had cleared, Cope had produced more than 1,400 scientific papers—still a record—and discovered and named more than 1,000 vertebrate species. The “Bone Wars,” as his rivalry with Marsh came to be known, bankrupted him and he died in poverty in 1897 at the age of fifty-seven, living in a single room, his cot surrounded by fossils he had not yet sold or given away.

O
THNIEL
C
HARLES
M
ARSH

A graduate of Yale, thanks to the generosity of his uncle, George Peabody, Marsh developed an interest in paleontology and soon became involved in a lifelong feud with Edward Drinker Cope, a feud that has become known as the “Bone Wars.” Marsh discovered eighty species of dinosaur, as well as early horses, flying reptiles, and ancient toothed birds. Much of his work was funded by Yale and its Peabody Museum, where many of his finds remain. He died in 1899 at the age of sixty-eight with $186 in the bank, the remains of a million-dollar fortune.

C
OLE
Y
OUNGER

Originally one of the famed Quantrill's Raiders after the Civil War. By 1868 he and his brothers Jim, John, and Bob became notorious bandits. John was killed in a shootout with the Pinkertons, but Cole, Jim, and Bob thrived until September of 1876, when they led the notorious Northfield, Minnesota, raid; all three were badly wounded, captured, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Bob died of his wounds, Jim and Cole were released in 1901, Jim committed suicide, and Cole joined Frank James in the Cole Younger and Frank James Wild West Company in 1903. He died in 1916 at the age of seventy-two.

W
ILLIAM
“B
UFFALO
B
ILL
” C
ODY

Cody earned his name: he personally killed more than 4,200 buffalo. He also earned a Medal of Honor for “gallantry in action” during his military service. In between the hunting and the military, he was also a
Pony Express rider. He began his Wild West show in 1872; toured the country and later Europe with it (including a command performance for Queen Victoria); and made stars out of Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, Calamity Jane, and others. He combined with Pawnee Bill's show, becoming the
Two Bills Wild West Show
in 1908. He died at the age of seventy.

J
OHN
L. S
ULLIVAN

When sports fans refer to “the Great John L.,” this is the man they're talking about. He was boxing's last bare-knuckle champion and its first gloved champion, winning his title in 1882 and holding until “Gentleman Jim” Corbett defeated him in 1892. He retired with a record of thirty-six wins, one loss, and two draws, and he died at the age of fifty-nine.

T
HIS IS
W
YATT
E
ARP
'
S DESCRIPTION
and recollection of Doc Holliday, in his own words:

By the time I met him at Fort Griffin, Doc Holliday had run up quite a record as a killer, even for Texas. In Dallas, his incessant coughing kept away whatever professional custom he might have enjoyed and, as he had to eat, he took to gambling. He was lucky, skillful, and fearless. There were no tricks to his new trade that he did not learn and in more than one boom-camp game I have seen him bet ten thousand dollars on the turn of a card.

Doc quickly saw that six-gun skill was essential to his new business, and set out to master the fine points of draw-and-shoot as cold-bloodedly as he did everything. He practiced with a Colt for hours at a time, until he knew that he could get one into action as effectively as any man he might meet. His right to this opinion was justified by Doc's achievements. The only man of his type whom I ever regarded
as anywhere near his equal on the draw was Buckskin Frank Leslie of Tombstone. But Leslie lacked Doc's fatalistic courage, a courage induced, I suppose, by the nature of Holliday's disease and the realization that he hadn't long to live, anyway. That fatalism, coupled with his marvelous speed and accuracy, gave Holliday the edge over any out-and-out killer I ever knew.

Doc's first fight in the West ended a row over a Dallas card-game. He shot and killed a topnotch gunman, and as Doc was comparatively a stranger where his victim had many friends, Doc had to emigrate. He went to Jacksborough, at the edge of the Fort Richardson military reservation, where he tangled with three or four more gunmen successfully, but eventually killed a soldier and again had to take it on the run. Next, he tried the Colorado camps, where he knocked off several pretty bad men in gun-fights. In Denver, Doc encountered an ordinance against gun-toting, so he carried a knife, slung on a cord around his neck. Bud Ryan, a gambler, tried to run one over on Doc in a card game, and when Doc objected, Ryan went for a gun he carried in a concealed holster. Doc beat him into action with his knife, and cut him horribly.

Doc gambled in the Colorado and Wyoming camps until the fall of ’77, and fought his way out of so many arguments that, by the time he hit Fort Griffin, he had built up a thoroughly deserved reputation as a man who would shoot to kill on the slightest provocation. That reputation may have had some bearing on the fact that when I first met him, he had not yet found anyone in Fort Griffin to provide him with a battle.

It was in Shanssey's saloon, I think, that Doc Holliday first met Kate Elder, a dancehall girl better known as “Big-Nosed Kate.” Doc lived with Kate, off and on, over a period of years. She saved his life on one occasion, and when memory of this was uppermost Doc would refer to Kate as Mrs. Holliday. Their relationship had its temperamental ups
and downs, however, and when Kate was writhing under Doc's scorn she'd get drunk as well as furious and make Doc more trouble than any shooting-scrape.

Perhaps Doc's outstanding peculiarity was the enormous amount of whiskey he could punish. Two and three quarts of liquor a day was not unusual for him, yet I never saw him stagger with intoxication. At times, when his tuberculosis was worse than ordinary, or he was under a long-continued physical strain, it would take a pint of whiskey to get him going in the morning, and more than once at the end of a long ride I've seen him swallow a tumbler of neat liquor without batting an eye and fifteen minutes later take a second tumbler of straight whiskey which had no more outward effect on him than the first one. Liquor never seemed to fog him in the slightest, and he was more inclined to fight when getting along on a slim ration than when he was drinking plenty, and was more comfortable, physically.

With all of Doc's shortcomings and his undeniably poor disposition, I found him a loyal friend and good company. At the time of his death, I tried to set down the qualities about him which had impressed me. The newspapers dressed up my ideas considerably and had me calling Doc Holliday “a mad, merry scamp with heart of gold and nerves of steel.” Those were not my words, nor did they convey my meaning. Doc was mad, well enough, but he was seldom merry. His humor ran in a sardonic vein, and as far as the world in general was concerned, there was nothing in his soul but iron. Under ordinary circumstances he might be irritable to the point of shakiness; only in a game or when a fight impended was there anything steely about his nerves.

To sum up Doc Holliday's character as I did at the time of his death: he was a dentist whom necessity had made into a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long, lean, ash-blond fellow nearly dead with
consumption and at the same time the most skilled gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew.

And here's Doc as seen through the eyes of one his many biographers, Sylvia D. Lynch:

Doc was a very complicated man who lived an intense and prismatic life, and who seemed to exist on sheer will and determination. And when John Holliday committed himself to something or someone, he apparently held on with a death grip that nothing could pry loose. He was one of those people who seemed to have an unusual penchant for drawing extraordinarily back luck in some of his endeavors, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of extraordinarily good luck in others. He was a walking paradox who never shied away from encounters which had the toughest odds, and he kept his poker-faced attitude toward the world as he moved within his self-made cosmos. Those who knew him, those who saw him work his craft day after day, have testified that when he became involved in one of those awkward moments for which he was so well known, that it was most often wise counsel to leave him to fend for himself, so fend for himself he did, and very well at that.

And even though so many of his more memorable circumstances revolved around relationships with others, he seemed to be the one who rarely asked anything from those with whom he associated. He had an uncanny knack for being at the wrong places at the wrong times, and on many of those occasions, when the bad timing wasn't present in the nature of the situation, he seemed to delight in creating his own extenuating circumstances. Some say he thrived on whiskey, some say he thrived at the gaming table. Others say he drew his persistent
strength from the deadly confidence with which he drew the nickel-plated weapons from underneath his coat in a split second's warning, much to the final regret of many of those who stood at the opposite end of his gun barrel.

There may be a good case for the argument that he thrived on boldly “bucking the tiger,” on pushing his luck just as far as he could possibly shove it, whether it be in a card game, in his personal relationships, or in his private battle with the disease that was slowly consuming his body while he was making a name for himself in the West. There may also be truth in the theory that he carried with him an irreversible death wish for almost half his life span, and that his brash, confident manner was nothing more than the manifestation of his lack of assurance of being around the next day—the cruel uncertainty of having nothing to lose.