In Doc, Mary Doria Russell reimagines the life of Doc Holliday, infamous gambler and outlaw.

When you hear those words, what do you think of?

The Shoot-Out at the O.K. Corrall. Tombstone, Arizona. The Wild West. Dusty old cow town. John Wayne and his slow drawl.

Shooting Out the old Cliches

Doc employs most of those old western elements (though, tellingly, it never gets to Tombstone), because Doc Holliday lived in the Old West.

Or did he? Better said, Doc Holliday lived in what we think of as the Old West. From his perspective, he lived in today, here, now. Just like you do.

The genius of Doc is that, instead of bringing Holliday to us, it brings us to Holliday. Through Russell’s vision, Dodge City, Kansas, in the year 1878 is just as real and immediate and human as YourTown, USA, 2023.

Portraits in Full Color

Russell reimagines Holliday and his community through a post-modern lens. Instead of a dangerous gunslinger, Holliday — in fact a rail-thin, consumptive dentist — becomes a noble, slightly tragic figure, exiled from his beloved Georgia home due to a bad mixture of climate and tuberculosis, who survives on gambling because dentistry doesn’t pay much in a cow town. His exploits — those that can be substantiated — take on a different hue in this protrait.

All the citizens of Dodge, not just Holliday, benefit from this update. My favorite is the Chinese laundry owner, ubiquitous in these stories, usually smiling like Confucius and speaking pidgin while stirring the vat next to the tall, striding White hero.

Not here. Dodge City has its Chinese launderer, Jau Dong-Sing, and at first he appears in the stereotypical role: called “China Joe” by the locals, alone and outside society but befriended by Doc. But halfway through the book, Russell lets us see Dodge through the eyes of Jau as well: his reflexively relentless work ethic but also the loneliness it costs him; his financial success and the pains he must take to hide it from a racist society for his own safety; the letters he composes to his family in his head while he works the laundry (letters that are probably never read but sold by his family for the value of the paper they’re written on); his resigned heartbreak after the Page Act of 1875 effectively precluded the immigration of Chinese women (on the grounds of preventing prostitution). He sets up a nephew in business so that someone will sweep his grave, but he mourns that he “will be no one’s ancestor.”

Inspiration

I came by Doc in my tour of the 1870s, as I work on a biography of a man who started his life in that decade. Russell’s work inspires me to humbled awe and no small desire to at least try to emulate the immediacy she achieves.

Though I’m endlessly fascinated by the latter half of the nineteenth century, I struggle to see it in plain daylight as Russell does. Filtering through old newspapers and government documents, I tend to see the actors in sepia tones. I work hard to overcome the bias of time.

Russell has the advantage of historical fiction — she doesn’t need to find Doc’s real words preserved someplace; she can guess what he would have thought and said based on what she knows about what he did and her obvious intuitive empathy. Perhaps I’ll experiment with that technique with my subject, just to get to know him better, even though I won’t be free to publish those imagined dialogues. With Doc and Russell’s example, I will at least know how to listen better.