In my mind, Doc Holliday was a gunslinger, one of the men who left behind a string of real and embellished legacies that were way from spotless.
So when I was trolling the list of western items for an upcoming auction, I was momentarily stumped when I saw a Doc Holliday dental chair for sale. Doc Holliday was a man of medicine? I had assumed that “Doc” was a name that he – or someone else – had pinned on him for some sort of ignoble feat. I realized I was way off on my western history.
Holliday was an actual dentist, having started out fixing (or maybe pulling) teeth in Atlanta, GA, in the late 1800s until he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (back then it was called consumption, which had also taken his mother). So, he moved west hoping that the weather would be better for him. He tried to make a go of it at his occupation, but found it hard to keep patients with him coughing all the time.
So he closed his practice and took up gambling, soon finding that it was a lot more lucrative.
The Doc Holliday dental chair at auction was among several items purported to have belonged to him. They were part of a seven-day sale of artifacts purchased over a 16-year period by a former mayor of Harrisburg, PA, to furnish a western and other historical museums in that city. I went to the auction specifically to see if items related to African Americans were among the lots.
Walking down aisles, slipping past tables with dusty artifacts and locked glass cases, I got a peek at items that told the history of the westward movement in this country – some apparently real, others not so much. Native Americans were represented, as well as African Americans in photos (although some of the photos were from the 20th century). The pieces were a smorgasbord of what the west must have been like for outlaws, lawmen, gold miners, and good people just looking for a better life.
The items were stored in an un-air-conditioned Public Works building. When staffers for the auction house first entered the building a few months ago, a worker told me, the stuff was stacked and packed tightly, with several wagons in the middle of a long space that now had been opened up.
There were tons of guns, he said, and they were snapped up pretty quickly in the first days of the auction. The remainder, about 35 of them, were purchased by a man who came in to pick them up and presented 2 ½ sheets of items totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I was a little skeptical of the amount. I learned later that the auction itself had brought in $3.1 million, far short of the $8.3 million the mayor had reportedly spent on the artifacts.
Here are some of the items and the stories they told about the Old West and the folks who peopled it:
Doc Holliday’s gear included a sword cane (sold for $15,000) inscribed “J.H. Holliday DDS”; an ivory daily appointments book ($3,750) inscribed “Appointments. John H. Holliday DDS”, and a frock coat ($55,000), which, according to a letter accompanying it, belonged to his mate Mary Katherine Cummings or “Big Nose Kate” and worn by Holliday in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone in 1881. His dental chair came with a letter that seemed to offer some provenance – or evidence that it may have actually been his – and a foot pedal inscribed with his name.
What’s a western town without its booze and saloons? These were among items sold on the last day of the auction. They were not listed in the online part of the sale.
Native American memorabilia and photos were displayed in cases and on a stand on the floor of the storage building. A Native American headdress and beaded necklace sold for $2,000, and the other items in the photo above ranged from $175 to $600 for an Indian Territory slave document from the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations dated 1908. The document gave 40 acres of land to slaves owned by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole nations. Slavery was abolished in the Indian Territory by treaty in 1866, but blacks apparently struggled for the rest of the century to wrangle both their rights to citizenship and land from the nations. In 1898, both became citizens of Oklahoma and the land rights were granted.
Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum was an outlaw who was actually hanged for attempting to rob a train. He was shot and badly wounded during the debacle and was caught not too far away. His hanging was delayed a few times because of rumors that some of his gang would try to free him. The poster at auction was dated April 25, 1901, but Ketchum was hanged on April 26 (a photo of his grave marker showed the same date). The hanging in New Mexico was a public event: tickets were sold, along with dolls of Black Jack hanging on a stick.
Wells Fargo got its start in 1852 in California in the midst of the Gold Rush, and was among the companies that miners took their gold for assaying. The company set up its own stagecoach and mail business. Its strong boxes of gold lured stagecoach robbers, and its detectives hunted them down. Many of the items at the auction bore the Wells Fargo name.
These represented the tools of the trade for cowboys, and there were several saddles at the auction. The note on the boots says they belonged to E.H. Davison, an early 1900s rancher in Montana, “reputed to be the best bronc rider in Montana.” It says they were acquired from Davison’s grandson.
The California Gold Rush of 1848 drew droves of people out west seeking to find riches. More than 300,000 people had stampeded the state by 1850, devastating what was becoming a dwindling way of life for Native Americans. Many of the prospectors were immigrants, and practically all were poor and spent too much of their gold on overpriced supplies.
The owner of this case was among the miners who arrived in Cape Nome, Alaska, in the late 1890s in the Second Gold Rush. The box bore this inscription: “Sour Dough Sam. Samul Baker. If you find this set, I am, either frozen or et by a bear. Keep my stuff if you want, but please write to tell my wife in a kind way, of my end. Contact Mrs. Ida S. Baker. Gen. Del. LaCrosse, Wis. U.S.A. ‘Thank you.’ Arrived at Cape Nome, April 1898 to find Gold.”
While miners were breaking their backs, others were on hand to relieve them of the chore of trucking their load to an assay office. This box contained the equipment of Joe Krug Burden, who was offering cash for gold. Inside were the weights, cups and other items he used for measuring, along with a gun he likely was willing to use on anyone who tried to rob him.
The box says that he was registered with the Mineral Assay Office in Cripple Creek, Colo. In the 19th century, assay offices received gold dust from prospectors. Gold dust and nuggets were not harvested in their purest form, so miners took them to assay offices for the process of melting them, removing the impurities and casting them into bars.
The Gold Rush came to Cripple Creek in the 1890s. Many of the folks who ended up there worked in the mines, relieving the earth of millions of dollars in gold ore. One website noted that assay offices were as common as grocery stores, and tent cities and storefronts sprouted to accommodate the growing and dusty community. Gold continues to be mined in the area. The photo shows workers at the Mollie Kathleen Mine in Cripple Creek.
