Doc Holliday and Wild Bill Hickok were both dying, and they both knew it. And they both were bad tempered, alcoholic gunslingers, which is a very dangerous animal. Both were deadly with a gun but equally handy with a blade. Wild Bill was once jumped by a grizzly and lost his gun in the attack, but that's okay, he killed the bear with his knife while being mauled. Yep, Bill killed an angry momma grizzly with a knife. And Doc gutted a man at the poker table when the guy pulled his gun. Doc preferred the Colt but he took a sawed off ten gauge street sweeper to the OK Corral. Doc would kill you anyway he could. It's rumored he tickled a cowboy to death in Dodge. And Bill went twenty seven and oh in documented gunfights. Really. How do you even get in that many gunfights? Nobody even got off a lucky shot? And what about the 27th idiot that tried the legendary Wild Bill Hickok? Did he not get the memo? That clueless bear tried to kill him, and almost did, but Wild Bill was never harmed by a human in a fair fight.
Doc and Bill lived in the same violent world of sudden death; a world they created for themselves. However, they were very different people. Doc Holliday was from an aristocratic family in Georgia. He had a fine Eastern education and was a Doctor of Dentistry, erudite, and a classical pianist. He was aloof, and liked to speak Latin and quote Shakespeare to the cowboys, taunting their ignorance. Nobody liked him. He was a grouchy asshole. But his constant pain and ill health could be, at least partly, to blame. Even his friend, Wyatt Earp, couldn't get along with him. They were always at odds. But Earp and Holliday had a strange synergistic relationship. Holliday exploited Earp's legal and political influence, and Earp took advantage of protecting such a dangerous friend and gunfighter, a man that loved a fight and would always be at Earp's side, no matter what. Doc was not invited to the OK Corral, he just showed up. His loyalty was absolute. Everybody got hit that day except Wyatt, but Doc did all the killing. He opened up with the double barrel shotgun then went to the .45. Doc didn't fuck around. Witnesses claimed they could see Doc blazing away by the sun glinting off his nickel plated Colt. Although they didn't always see eye to eye, Doc and Wyatt had each other's back when the shit hit the fan. They were so close, Doc travelled all the way to Tombstone, Arizona Territory, with the Earp brothers. Doc was too sick to ride a horse that far, so he took the stage with his longtime lover, (some say wife), the infamous whore, Big Nose Kate. Wyatt Earp said Doc was " the nerviest, speediest and most deadly gunman I ever saw ".
Wild Bill quit farming and wandered the West as a sometime lawman, buffalo hunter for the railroads, scout for Custer, Indian fighter, Pony Express rider, prospector, stage actor and Wild West show rider. He was a workaholic.
But mostly, Doc and Bill were professional gamblers. Since they were both lifelong alcoholics, they found work in saloons, since that's the only place that sold booze. I'm pretty sure if alcohol was sold exclusively at cemeteries they would've both been grave diggers. Death dealing gravediggers.
They were both dying a slow, miserable death. Doc from consumption, now call tuberculosis, and Wild Bill was in the late stages of the calamity given to him years earlier by his mule skinning, and longtime lover, (some say wife,) the infamous whore, Calamity Jane. Hickok's liver was shot and he was turning yellow, plus, he was going blind. His assassin would do him a favor by preserving his legend before he became a pathetic invalid. Wild Bill would be dead three months after Custer was killed by the stings of Crazy Horse after stumbling into a Sioux hornet's nest. Doc Holliday would live another eleven years, dying quietly in a nursing home. A remarkable and unlikely death for a veteran gunman. Wild Bill would die in Deadwood at the tables of Saloon Number 10, with his brace of Colt revolvers strapped menacingly across his chest for effect, as usual. He was holding aces and eights when he got the bullet in the back of the head, shot dead in Deadwood by the coward, Jack McCall, in a mining town so debauched wagon trains arrived carrying nothing but gamblers and whores, all determined to mine second hand gold. As for his reputation as a poker player, nobody ever accused him of cheating, at least not to his face, but they must've noticed Bill won almost every time he dealt. Wild Bill Hickok was the consummate professional gunman. Every morning he reloaded his old cap and ball pistols with fresh powder to avoid a misfire, which stale or damp powder could cause. Perhaps a lesson taught to him in a split second by a less professional member of "the feckless 27" who misfired the one shot that might have saved his wretched life.
It's doubtful Doc and Bill ever met. But they were both going to the same place at the same time, slowly gathered in by a looming death. It was not the cold blooded murderer, Jesse James, or the psycho serial killer, John Wesley Hardin, or that scroungy peyote addict, Billy the Kid, it was Doc Holliday and William Butler Hickok the last genuine Wild West pistoleros.
Doc and Bill weren't dying alone. So was their mythical West. The brawling cow towns the railroads created were morphing into proper cities, with the trains now spilling out sinewy farmers, pious Mormons and prim school marms. It was civilization. The fun was over. And more tragically, a cruel wind was blowing across the Great Plains sweeping away the ancient and mystical aboriginal culture of the first Americans, and with them their great shaggy beasts that were believed to rise from the sacred earth. Neither the Indians nor the buffalo could exist without the other. The massive herds of the migratory buffalo were not only crucial to their rich culture and spirit religion, but the buffalo was the Indians' primary source of food, tools, shelter, weapons, and on and on. The American bison was being senselessly slaughtered to make way for the weak and sickly cattle of the white Europeans. But it goes deeper than that. This was institutionalized slaughter promoted and embraced by the government, killing absent civilized human guilt or shame. It was a frenzied bloodbath of murder and evil glee. The Indians and their buffalo alike. But, for whatever reasons, the Indians and buffalo were quickly disappearing. And the natives' life of fighting each other, fighting the white man, while desperately hunting the few scattered remaining buffalo, was unsustainable. They went down fighting, but their way of life was over long before it came to pass. But make no mistake, it was genocide, pure and simple. The Indians were rounded up, fenced in, and shipped out, just like the Jews would be by a German populace giddy with the same demonic lust seventy years later.
The Old West reeked of death
Before the New West fully formed
As longhorns flourished in the war
Greedy railroads of greedy men
Mountains lost their men of lore
So the end of the end came in Saloon Number Ten
But the beginning of the end
Was the first cough of a man from Spain
The deadly germ from an alien chest
Before rumbling death by train
Golden nuggets, silver miners
Plowing sodbusters from the East
Fortune seeking Forty Niners
Hunters of the shaggy beast
When first the East was the West
And the final West came the end of the land
Cowboys Indians and all the rest
On the shores of San Francisco Bay
Vanish into history
With Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holliday
