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Katie
Elder: Her True Story
Page 3
by
Maggie Van Ostrand |
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Page
2
When
she was 89, however, she wrote a letter revealing that she was with
Doc in his room in Fly's Boarding house, next to the O.K. Corral,
and that she actually witnessed the shootout. Many details were included
in her writings that strongly suggest she was telling the truth.
In Kate's story, on the day of
the gunfight, a man entered Fly's boarding house with a bandaged head
and a rifle. He was looking for Holliday, who was still in bed after
a night of gambling during which he'd had one argument with Ike Clanton
that had been stopped by onlookers. The man was turned away by Mrs.
Fly. He was probably Ike Clanton, although how Clanton's head had
come to be bandaged is unknown. Clanton was known to have headaches,
and perhaps he had been treated for that even before Virgil Earp hit
him over the head and removed his weapons a short time later. In any
case, Clanton's actually entering Holliday's rooming-house with a
rifle would have given Holliday and the Earps all the reason they
needed to believe that a gunfight between Holliday and the cowboys
was inevitable.
While Clanton was being disarmed, arrested, and taken before a judge,
Kate claims that Holliday put on his clothes and went up to see the
Earps. They had gathered at the corner of 5th Street and Allen, where
they could keep an eye on the courtroom to the South, the O.K. Corral
a block west, and the various cowboys who were believed to be coming
and going from out of town. Eventually, the Earps and Holliday walked
down Fremont Street to confront the cowboys in the vacant lot West
of Fly's (and Holliday's) boarding house. Kate would have been able
to see the fight, just feet away, from her window overlooking the
vacant lot. In Kate's version of the gunfight, Holliday had a problem
with this "rifle" after the shooting started. He threw it to the ground
and drew his pistol. This report fits with what is known of the events,
although what Holliday actually threw down would have been his double-barrelled
short shotgun (the gun he had emptied when killing Tom McLaury).
It is only from Kate that we know what happened after the fight. Doc
Holliday went back to his room and examined a minor flesh wound on
his hip, which he had gotten from a bullet fired by Frank McLaury.
He sat on the edge of the bed and wept from the shock of what had
just happened. "That was awful," Kate claims he said. "Just awful."
Kate
stayed at the Arizona Pioneers' Home until her death on November 2,
1940, five days before her 90th birthday.
Kate was a larger-than-life character who lived to see stories of
her own life and death (in that alleged gunfight in Bisbee) told as
a legend of the Old West. In real life, she died in bed, having survived
a world that was hard on both women and horses.
Kate said of life: "Part is funny and part is sad, but such is life
any way you take it."
Katie
Elder: Her True Story Page
1 | Page
2 |
Copyright
Maggie Van Ostrand
"A Balloon In Cactus" -
May 26, 2006 column
More People
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Sources:
Doc
Holliday: A Family Portrait, Karen Holliday Tanner, University of
Omaha Press, 1998 (ISBN 0-8061-3036-9).
Wyatt
Earp: Frontier Marshal, by Stuart Lake, Pocket Reprint, July 1994
(ISBN 0671885375)
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia: Katie "Big Nose" Elder
Website:
www.legendsofamerica.com
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| The
Legend of the O.K. Corral |
| Gunfight
at the O.K. Corral |
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