Doc Holliday's Last Stop at Glenwood Springs

John Henry Holliday arrived in Glenwood Springs in the spring of eighteen eighty-seven. He was thirty-five years old and had been dying of tuberculosis for most of the previous decade. He had a dental degree from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery. He had survived the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in October of eighteen eighty-one. He had survived gamblers and gunmen and Pinkerton agents and frontier courts and the kind of reputation that made ordinary men keep their distance. The tuberculosis was winning anyway.

The sulfur springs at Glenwood were widely believed at the time to help consumptive patients. Physicians recommended the altitude and the mineral waters. Holliday drank the waters. He stayed through the summer and into the fall, which in the mountains that frame Glenwood Canyon means fog in the mornings and color on the aspens and temperatures that drop early.

He died in his room at the Hotel Glenwood on November eighth, eighteen eighty-seven. His last reported words, according to accounts compiled by his biographers, came when he asked for a shot of whiskey, was refused, and looked down at his bare feet and said this is funny, since he had always expected to die with his boots on. He was thirty-six.

His grave is believed to be on a hillside above the town in Linwood Cemetery, though the exact spot is uncertain, and a marker there reads: he died in bed. The gravesite became a tourist destination within years of his death. The springs are still there. The pool fed by them is still open and is the largest mineral hot springs pool in the world. Holliday would have found this ironic, and probably would have had something to say about it.