Big Nose Kate

Among the men with guns and grudges, one woman kept pace with all of them, Mary Katharine Horony, better known across the frontier as Big Nose Kate. She was born in November of eighteen forty nine in Hungary, into an educated family that emigrated to America when she was a child. Orphaned young, she made her own way as a gambler and a prostitute, work she is said to have chosen for the independence it gave her in a world with few options for women.

In eighteen seventy seven she met a tubercular dentist turned gambler named Doc Holliday at Fort Griffin in Texas, and she became his longtime companion and common law wife, the only woman known to have shared his hard life. Their bond was fierce and stormy. In Tombstone, after one bitter quarrel, Sheriff Johnny Behan and a saloon owner plied Kate with liquor and coaxed her into signing a statement that tied Holliday to a stagecoach robbery and killing.

Once sober, she took it all back. Kate outlived Holliday by decades, married again, and did not die until November of nineteen forty, one of the last living links to the wild days of Tombstone.