Every July 19, the calendars of true-crime history circle the same uneasy milestone. On this date in 1879, according to History.com's "This Day in History," John Henry "Doc" Holliday is said to have killed a man for the first time — the opening entry in a body count that would help turn a real person into one of the most durable legends of the American West.
It is a strange kind of anniversary, because the event it marks is also one of the murkiest. The July 19, 1879 date has been handed down and repeated for well over a century, attached to the name of a man whose life is now buried under nearly as much myth as fact. What survives cleanly in the record is the marker itself: a "first killing," a date, and a name that almost everyone recognizes even if they could not name a single thing he actually did.
That name, of course, is Doc Holliday. To the extent that the American Old West lives on as a set of characters rather than a stretch of history, Holliday is one of the central figures in the cast. He is remembered above all for his role in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the brief and deadly confrontation that has been retold in books, films, and museum exhibits until it hardened into folklore. The O.K. Corral historians who catalog that day place Holliday squarely in the middle of it, and it is largely through the O.K. Corral that his name reaches the present at all.