Lost in the myths and fairy tales of the Old West & beyond.
In the aftermath of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Halloween October 1881 was not a happy one for the Earps or for Doc Holliday. Both Virgil and Morgan Earp were recovering from wounds that they had received during the gunfight. The cowboys had held a combined funeral for Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury…
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There’s a photograph of Molly Fly (wife of Camillus Fly, yes the same one that had the photography studio at the site of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral) that was taken in Tombstone, AZ. By Mollie’s feet is a Redbone Coonhound. The photograph started me thinking about dogs out West. In the film Tombstone,…
Read moreAround midnight, on March 18, 1882, Morgan Earp died in a card room at Campbell and Hatch’s saloon in Tombstone, Arizona. He was a few weeks shy of celebrating his 31st birthday. Despite tension mounting with the cowboys, he and his brother Wyatt had visited Schieffelin Hall to see a play called Stolen Kisses. Afterwards,…
Read moreI’m really excited to announce the release of my new slick all-in-one Doc Holliday novel: A Gentleman in Hell. The Doc Holliday Book Series has officially been replaced. Why don’t you go take a peek of it on Amazon. It’s available as an ebook for Kindle right now at a sweet $5.99. The paperback will…
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I was really inspired by the painting of Wild Bill by N.C. Wyeth. It was on the cover of a compilation of western stories I owned back when I was in college. The guy at the back of the painting caught my eye. He looked the way I imagined Doc Holliday should have looked back…
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I sometimes wonder what Doc Holliday looked like. In fact, if I’m honest, I think about it quite a lot. Everyone knows what Val Kilmer looked like in the film Tombstone, but what did the real John Henry Holliday look like? You’re probably thinking that he was tall, skinny, well-dressed and had a mustache and…
Read moreDodge City has some fantastic stories, especially regarding pranks that some of the gamblers would play on unsuspecting citizens. The Dodge City Gang as they were referred to included well-known names such as Luke Short, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. One of my favorite stories is about a prank that was played on a lawyer…
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Back in 2003, I was lucky enough to take a trip out to Tombstone to visit some of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp’s old haunts. It was something that I’d dreamed of doing since I first watched Tombstone and Wyatt Earp back in 1994. I’ve loved watching Westerns since I was small and I’ve always…
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Everyone has heard about Wyatt Earp but do you really know who he was? Sometimes it’s hard to separate legend from fact. From the publication of the biography “Wyatt Earp – Frontier Marshal” by Stuart Lake in 1931 to the popularity of the 1993 film “Tombstone”, Earp has become impossibly tangled in his own myth….
Read moreWriting a novel based on real history and real people is difficult. The problem with history books is they can be a bit dry. I wanted to make my characters human and really breathe some life into them. My solution was music. There’s a song for just about every human emotion out there. Someone has…
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