John Henry Holliday (Doc Holliday)

John Henry Holliday trained as a dentist in Georgia before a tuberculosis diagnosis sent him west chasing a drier climate that might slow the disease, if not cure it. He never really practiced dentistry again; instead he made his living gambling across frontier towns, developing a reputation as a short-tempered, highly skilled gunman with genuinely nothing left to lose. His friendship with Wyatt Earp, formed in Dodge City, pulled him into the Earp faction's conflict with the Clantons and McLaurys in Tombstone, and he stood beside the Earp brothers at the gunfight near the O.K. Corral in 1881, reportedly firing the shotgun blast that killed Tom McLaury. He rode with Wyatt's vendetta posse afterward and spent his remaining years drifting through gambling halls in declining health. Consumption finally killed him in 1887 at a Colorado sanatorium; his famous last words, by legend, were astonishment at dying in bed with his boots off, rather than in the gunfight he'd spent years expecting.