Doc Holliday - Final Illness, Death and Burial

Final Illness, Death and Burial

Holliday spent the rest of his life in Colorado. After a stay in Leadville, he suffered from the high altitude. He increasingly depended on alcohol and laudanum to ease the symptoms of tuberculosis, and his health and his ability to gamble began to deteriorate.

In 1887, prematurely gray and badly ailing, Holliday made his way to the Hotel Glenwood, near the hot springs of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. (The Hotel Glenwood was not a sanatorium, as is popularly believed. The sanatorium in Glenwood Springs was not built for many years after Holliday's death. see http://www.glenwoodhistory.com .) He hoped to take advantage of the reputed curative power of the waters, but the sulfurous fumes from the spring may have done his lungs more harm than good. As he lay dying, Holliday is reported to have asked the nurse attending him at the Hotel Glenwood for a shot of whiskey. When she told him no, he looked at his bootless feet, amused. The nurses said that his last words were, "Damn, this is funny." Holliday died at 10 am, November 8, 1887. He was 36. It was reported that no one ever thought that Holliday would die in bed with his boots off.

Recent Holliday biographer Gary L. Roberts, however, considers it unlikely that Holliday, who had scarcely left his bed for two months, would have been able to speak coherently, if at all, on the day he died. Although the legend persists that Wyatt Earp was present when Holliday died, Earp did not learn of Holliday's death until two months afterward. Big Nose Kate later said she attended to him in his final days, but it is also doubtful that she was present.

The Glenwood Springs Ute Chief of November 12, 1887 wrote in his obituary that Holliday had been baptized in the Catholic Church. This assertion in his obituary was based on correspondence written between Holliday and his cousin, Sister Mary Melanie, a Catholic nun. However, no baptismal record exists in St. Stephen's Catholic Church in Glenwood Springs or the Annunciation Catholic Church in nearby Leadville, Colorado. Holliday's mother had been raised a Methodist and later joined a Presbyterian church (her husband's faith), but objected to the Presbyterian doctrine of predestination and reconverted to Methodism publicly before she died, saying she wanted her son John to know what she believed. Holliday himself was later to say that he had joined a Methodist church in Dallas. At the end of his life, Holliday had struck up friendships with both a Catholic priest, Father E.T. Downey, and a Presbyterian minister, Rev. W.S. Randolph, in Glenwood Springs. When he died, Father Downey was out of town, and so Rev. Randolph presided over the burial at 4 pm on the same day Holliday died. The services were said to be in the presence of "many friends."

He is buried in Linwood Cemetery overlooking Glenwood Springs. Because it was November and the ground may have been frozen, some authors like Bob Boze Bell have speculated that Holliday could not have been buried in his marked grave in the Linwood Cemetery which was only accessible via a difficult mountain road. However, Holliday biographer Gary Roberts has located evidence that other bodies were transported to the Linwood Cemetery at the same time of the month that year, and the papers reported at the time explicitly that the burial was in the Linwood Cemetery. No exhumation has been attempted.