"I'll be your Huckleberry"

I'm not entirely sure what that title means. It's from a time long ago (or a place far away). But Val Kilmer uttered that line in the movie Tombstone, and the hair on the back of my neck went straight up.

Doctor John Henry Holliday came from a large, close knit, family from Georgia. He was just a touch too young to serve the Confederate Army in their war with the North, and that is said to have had an effect on the way he was raised. Without strong male role models, he was said to foster a reckless streak not found in young men of that place and time.

After dentist college in Pennsylvania, he returned to Georgia to apprentice and practice in the towns where his people were well known. Back room poker games and other ways to take chances were readily available to him, and he was recorded to have done well in all of them.

Around the time he was twenty, he woke up with the common symptoms of Tuberculosis. After a period of denial, he committed a crime in Northern Florida while on convalescence, and from there headed west fleeing to SouthWest Texas.

He spent the rest of his life dodging his illness and the other dangers in the still untamed West. He used whiskey to dull the pain of his body, sore and weak from the constant spasm of cough.

He moved about frequently, usually avoiding the law that sought him for the disagreements that left other men dead. He befriended a reluctant Marshall named Earp, and with the Earp brothers took part in one of the most famous gun battles in the history of the West. Solidifying his place in the minds and imaginations of all of us who dream about what it would be like to be free.