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History in Focus: Doc or not?

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This photo is of the actual John Henry "Doc" Holliday. He was born Aug. 14, 1851 in Griffin, Georgia. He was educated at the Valdosta Institute and later graduated from Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in Philadelphia. It is believed that this photo is his graduation picture. "Doc" was best known for his involvement with Wyatt Earp and his brothers in the shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona on Oct. 26, 1881. In May of 1887, "Doc" came to Glenwood Springs suffering from advanced stages of tuberculosis (consumption) hoping the waters of the Hot Springs would offer a cure. It did not and he died on November 8, 1887 in his room at the Hotel Glenwood. He was 36 years old. This is a tribute written by his friend, Wyatt Earp: "Doc was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long, lean ash-blonde fellow nearly dead with consumption, and, at the same time, the speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew."
Courtesy/Frontier Historical Museum
This is not “Doc” Holliday. This man’s name is John Escapule. He was born in France in 1856 and died in 1926. He came to America in 1877 and lived in Tombstone, Arizona. While there he hauled timber to mines, eventually owning his own mine. He also ran an assay office in Tombstone near the OK Corral. In the 1980s, the Arizona Historical Society obtained this photo from the album of a Tombstone mining engineer. The Society erroneously filed it as “Doc” Holliday and supplied it to people as such. The photo was later discovered to be John Escapule. But, the mistake of being misidentified as “Doc” was never really corrected and has persisted for decades.
Courtesy/Frontier Historical Museum
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