Doc Holliday earned his place in frontier legend standing beside Wyatt Earp and his brothers during the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, trading fire with the Clanton and McLaury faction in a shootout that lasted barely half a minute. He walked away from that fight, and from years more as a gambler and gunman across the American West, while the tuberculosis that had stalked him since his twenties slowly won.
That disease finally caught him on this day in 1887, in a sanatorium bed in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where he had gone to take the mineral waters in a last hope of a cure. The man who had survived bullets, knives and a string of enemies died quietly, not in a gunfight but in bed.
