The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996 Page: 84
626 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
The most celebrated yarn that storytellers manufactured involved Doc
Holliday and his supposed evisceration of a fellow poker player and es-
cape from a lynch mob. District Court records show that in 1875 Doc in-
deed fled Fort Griffin on a fugitive warrant, but merely to avoid a
"gambling and liquor" charge. Had he returned afterward, he would
have had to face the local court. The more deviant act-that supposedly
included the torching of a downtown building to cover his flight-would
have brought another "alias capias" in the court records as well as word-
of-mouth notoriety in local people's recollections.'
Journalists Edgar Rye and Don Biggers, writing just after the turn of
the century, deserve much of the credit for creating the mythological
Fort Griffin. They put into print the lore that local people had spent al-
most three decades embellishing. Rye's much-cited The Quirt and the
Spur (1909) dramatized life at high tide, when "liquor flowed freely"
and "insults, real or imagined, were repaid in lead." Seldom do primary
sources support his wild tales, yet in the introduction to a reprint edi-
tion, Texas scholar James M. Day listed several prominent historians who
had "found Rye's book to bear the stamp of authenticity." The disclo-
sure, however, should have prompted him to admonish his colleagues
rather than praise the frontier editor. Biggers's efforts to enlarge his
boyhood memories of the West Texas frontier resulted in several works.
In Shackelford County Sketches (1908) he included a litany of violent acts at
Fort Griffin that gained an air of authority beside more creditable vi-
gnettes regarding settlers and aspects of early day life.8
A number of the uncorroborated stories repeated by these authors
and others probably possessed just enough basis in fact to have seeded
Griffin's reputation for unequaled violence. Gunman Jeff Milton
claimed that as he tried to break up a bar fight between two buffalo
hunters, one of them shot the other, splattering Milton with "blood and
brains." Jeff, according to his biographer, "learned right there the im-
portance of tending to his own business." On another occasion, a drunk-
en Lipan Apache was said to have stumbled into a Griffin hotel where a
woman killed him for his disruptive behavior. And once, when a partial-
ly deaf man refused to acknowledge a deputy's order to halt, the lawman
reportedly emptied his pistol into the man, and then offered to bet that
'John Myers Myers, Doc Holliday (1955; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973),
67-70; District Court, case no. 34, 1st term, 1875 (quotations).
* See James M. Day's introduction in Edgar Rye, The Quirt and the Spur: Vanishng Shadows of the
Texas Frontier (19o9; reprint, Austin: Steck-Vaughn Co., 1967), v-vi, vii (3rd quotation), viii-x, xi
(1st and 2nd quotations), xii-xvi, as well as Rye's Preface, 7. Don H. Biggers, Shackelford County
Sketches (19o8; annotated reprint, Albany, Tex.: Clear Fork Press, 1974). See also Seymour V.
Conner's biographical essay regarding Don Biggers in Don H. Biggers, Buffalo Guns and Barbed
Wire: Two FrontierAccounts... (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1991), 193-241.July
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996, periodical, 1996; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101217/m1/112/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.