Get into Dodge!

I just finished DOC, by Mary Doria Russell, a fictionalized bio of Doc Holliday.  A good read and I think an accurate retelling of the second-most-interesting part of the man's life.

A matter of opinion, of course.  DOC is mostly about Doc Holliday's tenure in Dodge City, where he hung around with the Earp brothers and Bat Masterson.  Doc was a dental surgeon and Faro dealer, but apparently most of his income came from high-stakes card games, mostly poker.  The impression from the book is that he was totally honest, but nevertheless won much more often than he lost.

Sometimes the card games would end in violence, usually fisticuffs.  Every now and then a knife or gun would come into play.

I think most saloons made you check your guns at the door.  When Wyatt Earp was sheriff of Dodge, for some time he evidently made cowboys turn in their weapons as soon as they came into the city, to retrieve them on the way out.  (In a scene I think is based on fact, Doc gets in trouble with Wyatt because he wouldn't turn in the Derringer he hid away as a last resort.)

People like me, who only know a couple of things about Doc, probably know that he was a gifted young Southern gentleman who had to leave the South because his developing tuberculosis required the dry heat of the West.  We know that he survived the shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone.  Those parts of his life comprise only two short chapters of the 394-page book.

It's mostly about his daily life in Dodge City, arranged more or less chronologically.  I found it fascinating, and perhaps more than complete.  The cast of characters, printed in the front, runs almost three pages.

(A number of prominent characters, printed in italics in that list, are completely fictional.  That's the author's right in this freewheeling genre, and I'm glad she identifies them, but perhaps it gives one too many degrees of freedom.  Art thrives on limitations, after all, and an obvious limitation in this particular form would be to only use people of whom there is some historical record.)

One of my favorite western movies is the 1993 Tombstone, where Val Kilmer does a wonderful ironic turn as Doc, dying and deadly.  By odd coincidence we happened to be driving through Arizona the month that movie came out, and toured the reconstructed Tombstone right after we saw it. 

It was kind of a little boy's dream, reinterpreted through tourism and Hollywood illusion.  Kilmer's Doc may have been an invention that owed more to fiction than biography, but what a wonderful fiction.  Heroism, pathos, wry realism, I think a very American archetype. 

So it's a good subject and a good book.

Joe