People who knew the deadly dentist weigh in on his looks and his character.
"Doc Behind Bars"
Bat Masterson described Doc Holliday as " a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fight."
A Denver reporter, who met Holliday in 1882, wrote, "Holliday was of medium stature and blonde complexion. He was small boned and of that generally slumped appearance common to sufferers from inherited pulmonary disease. The clenched setting of his firmly pointed lower jaw and the steadyness of his blue eyes were the only striking features of his pallid countenance. He was scrupulously neat and precise in his attire, though neither a ladie's man nor a dandy. . ."
—E. D. Cowen
Doc In Prescott, 1879
Of course there were those who didn't see the sickly dentist in a good light: "Holliday was the most thoroughly equipped liar and smoothest scoundrel in the United States."
Holliday was a"shiftless bagged-legged character—a killer and a professional cut-throat and not a whit too refined to rob stages or even steal sheep."
—The editor of the Las Vegas Daily Optic
A little known fact gleaned from Gary L. Roberts' fine book, "Doc Holliday: The Life And Legend": Five of Henry's brothers and sisters had died before the age of ten.
After mentioning that Holliday left no writing to speak of (his cousin, or someone in the family, threw away all his letters). Roberts sums up Doc's life like this: "for one so well-known, Doc Holliday remains a mystery, a legend in the shadows."
"The truth of a life is more than a sum of the facts."
—Gary L. Roberts
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