DOC HOLLIDAY.

He was born John Henry Holliday in 1851, and grew up in Georgia. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen, and that is almost certainly where he contracted the disease. He was college educated, with a minor in the classics, and became a licensed dentist. Because of his disease, he went out West to drier climates. The disease cost him most of his clientele, so he supplemented his dental income by gambling, and he defended his winnings in the untamed cities of the West by becoming a gunslinger as well.

He saved Wyatt Earp when the latter was surrounded by gunmen in Dodge City, and the two became close friends. Somewhere along the way he met and had a stormy on-and-off relationship with Big Nose Kate Elder. He was involved in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and is generally considered to have delivered the fatal shots to both Tom and Frank McLaury. He rode with Wyatt Earp on the latter's vendetta against the Cowboys after the shootings of Virgil and Morgan Earp, then moved to Colorado. He died, in bed, of tuberculosis, in 1887. His last words were: "Well, I'll be damned-this is funny." No accurate records were kept in the case of most shootists; depending on which historians you believe, Doc killed anywhere from two to twenty-seven men.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1858. A sickly child, suffering from extreme asthma, he worked at strengthening his body through exercise and swimming, and by the time he attended Harvard he was fit enough to become the college's lightweight boxing champion. Even prior to that he was a devoted naturalist, and was acknowledged-even as a teen-as one of America's leading ornithologists and taxidermists.

His The Naval War of 1812 was (and is) considered the definitive book on that battle. Shortly thereafter he developed an interest in politics and became the youngest-ever minority leader of the New York State Assembly. His wife and mother died eight hours apart in the same house in 1884, and he quit politics, headed out to the Dakota Badlands, and bought two ranches. He signed a contract to write the four-volume The Winning of the West, became a lawman, and caught and captured three armed killers during "the Winter of the Blue Snow."

Coming back East, he married again, served as police commissioner of New York City, later was secretary of the navy, assembled the Rough Riders and took San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, became governor of New York, was elected vice president in 1900, and became president less than a year later with the assassination of President McKinley.

As president, Roosevelt fought the trusts, created the National Park System, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and turned the United States into a world power. When he left office in 1908 he embarked on a year-long African safari. He ran for President in 1912, was wounded by a would-be assassin, lost, and spent a year exploring and mapping the River of Doubt (later renamed the Rio Teodoro) for the Brazilian government. He was a strong advocate for our entry into World War I, and it was assumed the presidency was his for the asking in 1920, but he died a year before the election.

During his life, he wrote more than twenty books-many of them still in print-and over 150,000 letters.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON.

Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Edison is considered the greatest inventor of his era. He is responsible for the electric light, the motion picture, the carbon telephone transmitter, the fluoroscope, and a host of other inventions. He died in 1931.

NED BUNTLINE.

Buntline was born Edward Z. C. Judson in 1813, and gained fame as a publisher, editor, writer (especially of dime novels about the West), and for commissioning Colt's Manufacturing Company to create the Buntline Special. He tried to bring Wild Bill Hickok back East, failed, and then discovered Buffalo Bill Cody, who did come East and perform in a play that Buntline wrote.

GERONIMO.

Born Goyathlay in 1829, he was a Chiricahua Apache medicine man who fought against both the Americans and the Mexicans who tried to grab Apache territory. He was never a chief, but he was a military leader, and a very successful one. He finally surrendered in 1886, and was incarcerated-but by 1904 he had become such a celebrity that he actually appeared at the World's Fair, and in 1905 he proudly rode in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in Washington, DC. He died in 1909 at the age of eighty.

EDWARD DRINKER COPE.

Cope was a child prodigy who developed an interest in paleontology as a young man. Originally a friend of Othniel Charles Marsh, the two soon became bitter rivals, belittling each other in print, sabotaging each other's discoveries, racing to get their own finds into print first, even trying to get laws passed against one another. When the dust had cleared, Cope had produced more than 1,400 scientific papers-still a record-and discovered and named more than 1,000 vertebrate species. The "Bone Wars," as his rivalry with Marsh came to be known, bankrupted him and he died in poverty in 1897 at the age of fifty-seven, living in a single room, his cot surrounded by fossils he had not yet sold or given away.

OTHNIEL CHARLES MARSH.

A graduate of Yale, thanks to the generosity of his uncle, George Peabody, Marsh developed an interest in paleontology and soon became involved in a lifelong feud with Edward Drinker Cope, a feud that has become known as the "Bone Wars." Marsh discovered eighty species of dinosaur, as well as early horses, flying reptiles, and ancient toothed birds. Much of his work was funded by Yale and its Peabody Museum, where many of his finds remain. He died in 1899 at the age of sixty-eight with $186 in the bank, the remains of a million-dollar fortune.

COLE YOUNGER.

Originally one of the famed Quantrill's Raiders after the Civil War. By 1868 he and his brothers Jim, John, and Bob became notorious bandits. John was killed in a shootout with the Pinkertons, but Cole, Jim, and Bob thrived until September of 1876, when they led the notorious Northfield, Minnesota, raid; all three were badly wounded, captured, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Bob died of his wounds, Jim and Cole were released in 1901, Jim committed suicide, and Cole joined Frank James in the Cole Younger and Frank James Wild West Company in 1903. He died in 1916 at the age of seventy-two.

WILLIAM "BUFFALO BILL" CODY Cody earned his name: he personally killed more than 4,200 buffalo. He also earned a Medal of Honor for "gallantry in action" during his military service. In between the hunting and the military, he was also a Pony Express rider. He began his Wild West show in 1872; toured the country and later Europe with it (including a command performance for Queen Victoria); and made stars out of Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, Calamity Jane, and others. He combined with Pawnee Bill's show, becoming the Two Bills Wild West Show in 1908. He died at the age of seventy.

JOHN L. SULLIVAN.

When sports fans refer to "the Great John L.," this is the man they're talking about. He was boxing's last bare-knuckle champion and its first gloved champion, winning his title in 1882 and holding until "Gentleman Jim" Corbett defeated him in 1892. He retired with a record of thirty-six wins, one loss, and two draws, and he died at the age of fifty-nine.

THIS IS WYATT EARP'S DESCRIPTION and recollection of Doc Holliday, in his own words: By the time I met him at Fort Griffin, Doc Holliday had run up quite a record as a killer, even for Texas. In Dallas, his incessant coughing kept away whatever professional custom he might have enjoyed and, as he had to eat, he took to gambling. He was lucky, skillful, and fearless. There were no tricks to his new trade that he did not learn and in more than one boom-camp game I have seen him bet ten thousand dollars on the turn of a card.

Doc quickly saw that six-gun skill was essential to his new business, and set out to master the fine points of draw-and-shoot as cold-bloodedly as he did everything. He practiced with a Colt for hours at a time, until he knew that he could get one into action as effectively as any man he might meet. His right to this opinion was justified by Doc's achievements. The only man of his type whom I ever regarded as anywhere near his equal on the draw was Buckskin Frank Leslie of Tombstone. But Leslie lacked Doc's fatalistic courage, a courage induced, I suppose, by the nature of Holliday's disease and the realization that he hadn't long to live, anyway. That fatalism, coupled with his marvelous speed and accuracy, gave Holliday the edge over any out-and-out killer I ever knew.

Doc's first fight in the West ended a row over a Dallas card-game. He shot and killed a topnotch gunman, and as Doc was comparatively a stranger where his victim had many friends, Doc had to emigrate. He went to Jacksborough, at the edge of the Fort Richardson military reservation, where he tangled with three or four more gunmen successfully, but eventually killed a soldier and again had to take it on the run. Next, he tried the Colorado camps, where he knocked off several pretty bad men in gun-fights. In Denver, Doc encountered an ordinance against gun-toting, so he carried a knife, slung on a cord around his neck. Bud Ryan, a gambler, tried to run one over on Doc in a card game, and when Doc objected, Ryan went for a gun he carried in a concealed holster. Doc beat him into action with his knife, and cut him horribly.

Doc gambled in the Colorado and Wyoming camps until the fall of '77, and fought his way out of so many arguments that, by the time he hit Fort Griffin, he had built up a thoroughly deserved reputation as a man who would shoot to kill on the slightest provocation. That reputation may have had some bearing on the fact that when I first met him, he had not yet found anyone in Fort Griffin to provide him with a battle.

It was in Shanssey's saloon, I think, that Doc Holliday first met Kate Elder, a dancehall girl better known as "Big-Nosed Kate." Doc lived with Kate, off and on, over a period of years. She saved his life on one occasion, and when memory of this was uppermost Doc would refer to Kate as Mrs. Holliday. Their relationship had its temperamental ups and downs, however, and when Kate was writhing under Doc's scorn she'd get drunk as well as furious and make Doc more trouble than any shooting-scrape.

Perhaps Doc's outstanding peculiarity was the enormous amount of whiskey he could punish. Two and three quarts of liquor a day was not unusual for him, yet I never saw him stagger with intoxication. At times, when his tuberculosis was worse than ordinary, or he was under a long-continued physical strain, it would take a pint of whiskey to get him going in the morning, and more than once at the end of a long ride I've seen him swallow a tumbler of neat liquor without batting an eye and fifteen minutes later take a second tumbler of straight whiskey which had no more outward effect on him than the first one. Liquor never seemed to fog him in the slightest, and he was more inclined to fight when getting along on a slim ration than when he was drinking plenty, and was more comfortable, physically.

With all of Doc's shortcomings and his undeniably poor disposition, I found him a loyal friend and good company. At the time of his death, I tried to set down the qualities about him which had impressed me. The newspapers dressed up my ideas considerably and had me calling Doc Holliday "a mad, merry scamp with heart of gold and nerves of steel." Those were not my words, nor did they convey my meaning. Doc was mad, well enough, but he was seldom merry. His humor ran in a sardonic vein, and as far as the world in general was concerned, there was nothing in his soul but iron. Under ordinary circumstances he might be irritable to the point of shakiness; only in a game or when a fight impended was there anything steely about his nerves.

To sum up Doc Holliday's character as I did at the time of his death: he was a dentist whom necessity had made into a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long, lean, ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption and at the same time the most skilled gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew.

And here's Doc as seen through the eyes of one his many biographers, Sylvia D. Lynch: Doc was a very complicated man who lived an intense and prismatic life, and who seemed to exist on sheer will and determination. And when John Holliday committed himself to something or someone, he apparently held on with a death grip that nothing could pry loose. He was one of those people who seemed to have an unusual penchant for drawing extraordinarily back luck in some of his endeavors, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of extraordinarily good luck in others. He was a walking paradox who never shied away from encounters which had the toughest odds, and he kept his poker-faced attitude toward the world as he moved within his self-made cosmos. Those who knew him, those who saw him work his craft day after day, have testified that when he became involved in one of those awkward moments for which he was so well known, that it was most often wise counsel to leave him to fend for himself, so fend for himself he did, and very well at that.

And even though so many of his more memorable circumstances revolved around relationships with others, he seemed to be the one who rarely asked anything from those with whom he associated. He had an uncanny knack for being at the wrong places at the wrong times, and on many of those occasions, when the bad timing wasn't present in the nature of the situation, he seemed to delight in creating his own extenuating circumstances. Some say he thrived on whiskey, some say he thrived at the gaming table. Others say he drew his persistent strength from the deadly confidence with which he drew the nickel-plated weapons from underneath his coat in a split second's warning, much to the final regret of many of those who stood at the opposite end of his gun barrel.

There may be a good case for the argument that he thrived on boldly "bucking the tiger," on pushing his luck just as far as he could possibly shove it, whether it be in a card game, in his personal relationships, or in his private battle with the disease that was slowly consuming his body while he was making a name for himself in the West. There may also be truth in the theory that he carried with him an irreversible death wish for almost half his life span, and that his brash, confident manner was nothing more than the manifestation of his lack of assurance of being around the next day-the cruel uncertainty of having nothing to lose.

SO WHY WOULD ANYONE SPEND SO MUCH TIME, as I have done, writing science fiction stories and novels about Theodore Roosevelt?

Well, they have a lot in common, science fiction and Roosevelt. Both of them deal with ideas. Both of them are entertaining. And most of all, both of them are bigger than Reality.

You think not?

Let's take a look at Roosevelt's life.

Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1858. As a boy he suffered from a debilitating case of asthma. Rather than give in to it, he began swimming and exercising every day-and like every pulp hero you ever read about, he built himself up to where he was able to make the Harvard boxing team.

But he'd been making a name for himself before he went to Harvard. Even the Gray Lensman and Doc Savage weren't exclusively brawn, and neither was Roosevelt. An avid naturalist to the day of his death, he was already considered one of America's leading ornithologists and taxidermists while still a teenager. Nor was his interest limited to nature. While at Harvard he wrote what was considered the definitive treatise on naval warfare, The Naval War of 1812.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, married Alice Hathaway, went to law school, found it boring, and discovered politics. When Theodore Roosevelt developed a new interest, he never did so in a halfhearted way-so at twenty-four he became the youngest man ever elected to the New York State Assembly, and was made minority leader a year later.

He might have remained in the state assembly, but on February 14, 1884, not long after his twenty-fifth birthday, his beloved Alice and his mother died in the same house, only hours apart. He felt the need to get away, and he went west to become a rancher (and, being Theodore Roosevelt, one ranch couldn't possibly contain him, so he bought two).

Not content to simply be a rancher, a sportsman, and a politician, like hundreds of pulp and science fiction heroes he became a lawman as well, and, unarmed, hunted down and captured three armed killers in the Dakota Badlands during the fearsome blizzard that was known as "the Winter of the Blue Snow." Could Hawk Carse or Lije Baley have done any better?

He began building Sagamore Hill, the estate he made famous in Oyster Bay, New York, married childhood sweetheart Edith Carew, and started a second family. (Alice had died giving birth to his daughter, also named Alice. Edith promptly began producing sons-Kermit, Theodore Jr., Archie, and Quentin, as well as another daughter, Ethel.) In his spare time, he wrote a number of well-received books. Then, running short of money, he signed a contract to write a four-volume series, The Winning of the West. The first two volumes became immediate bestsellers. He was also an avid correspondent, and it's estimated that he wrote more than 150,000 letters during his lifetime-and what science fiction writer, I ask you, is not an avid correspondent?

He was now past thirty years of age, and he decided it was time to stop loafing and really get to work-so he took the job of police commissioner of the wildly corrupt City of New York...and to the amazement of even his staunchest supporters, he cleaned the place up, just like heroes from The Shadow to Lincoln Powell had done. He became famous for his "midnight rambles" to make sure his officers were at their posts, and he was the first commissioner to insist that the entire police force take regular target practice.

He made things so uncomfortable for the rich and powerful (and corrupt) of New York that he was kicked upstairs and made assistant secretary of the navy in Washington. When the Spanish-American War broke out, he resigned his office, enlisted in the army, was given the rank of colonel, and assembled the most famous and romantic outfit ever to fight for the United States-the fabled Rough Riders, consisting of cowboys, Indians, professional athletes, and anyone else who impressed him-and what classic space operas don't have a crew of romantic misfits just like that? They went to Cuba, where Roosevelt himself led the charge up San Juan Hill in the face of machine-gun fire, and he came home the most famous man in the country.

Less than three months later he was elected governor of New York, a week after his fortieth birthday. His new duties didn't hinder his other interests, and he kept turning out books and studying wildlife.

Two years later they kicked him upstairs again, finding the one job where his reformer's zeal couldn't bother anyone: he was nominated for the vice presidency of the United States, and was elected soon afterward.

Ten months later President William McKinley was assassinated, and Roosevelt became the youngest-ever president of the United States, where he served for seven years.

What did he do as president?

Not much, by Rooseveltian standards. Enough for five presidents, by anyone else's standards. Consider: He created the National Park System.

He broke the back of the trusts that had run the economy (and the nation) for their own benefit.

He created the Panama Canal.

He sent the navy on a trip around the world. When they left, America was a second-rate little country in the eyes of the world. By the time they returned, we were a world power.

He became the first president ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize when he put an end to the Russo-Japanese war.

He mediated a dispute between Germany and France over Morocco, preserving Morocco's independence.

To make sure that the trusts didn't reclaim their power after he was out of office, he created the Departments of Commerce and Labor.

When he left office in 1909 with a list of accomplishments equal in magnitude to any galactic president in science fiction, he immediately packed his bags (and his rifles) and went on the first major safari ever put together, spending eleven months gathering specimens for the American and Smithsonian Museums. He wrote up his experiences as African Game Trails, still considered one of the half dozen most important books on the subject ever published. Clearly he had a lot in common with science fictional hunters, from Gerry Carlyle to Nicobar Lane.

When he returned to America, he concluded that his hand-chosen successor, President William Howard Taft, was doing a lousy job of running the country, so he decided to run for the presidency again in 1912. Though far and away the most popular man in the Republican Party, he was denied the nomination through a number of procedural moves. Most men would have licked their wounds and waited for 1916. Not Roosevelt. He formed the Progressive Party, known informally as the "Bull Moose Party," and ran in 1912. It's thought that he was winning when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest while he was being driven to give a speech in Milwaukee. He refused all medical aid until he had delivered the speech (which ran ninety minutes!), then allowed himself to be taken to a hospital. The bullet would never be removed, and by the time Roosevelt was back on the campaign trail, Woodrow Wilson had built an insurmountable lead. Roosevelt finished second, as President Taft ran a humiliating third, able to win only eight electoral votes.

So now did he relax?

Fat chance. This is Theodore Roosevelt we're talking about. The Brazilian government asked him to explore a tributary of the Amazon known as the River of Doubt. He hadn't slowed down since he was a baby, he was in his fifties, he was walking around with a bullet in his chest, all logic said he'd earned a quiet retirement-so of course he said yes.

This trip didn't go as well as the safari. He came down with fever, he almost lost his leg, and indeed at one point he urged his party to leave him behind to die and to go ahead without him. They didn't, of course, and eventually he was well enough to continue the expedition and finish mapping the river, which was renamed the Rio Teodoro in his honor. (I don't really need to compare him to the hundreds of explorers who inhabit the worlds of science fiction, do I?) He came home, wrote yet another bestseller-Through the Brazilian Wilderness-then wrote another book on African animals, as well as more books on politics...but his health never fully recovered. He campaigned vigorously for our entry into World War I, and it was generally thought that the presidency was his for the asking in 1920, but he died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, at the age of sixty-having crammed about seventeen lifetimes into those six decades.

He was so fascinating, so talented in so many fields, so much bigger than Life, that I decided (and I hope you agree) that he belonged in the one field that could accommodate a man with those virtues-science fiction, where he could finally find some challenges that were truly worthy of his talents.

DID THIS NOVEL EXAGGERATE THE COPE-MARSH FEUD? Try this, from R. W. Howard's The Dawnseekers, on for size: "Cope spent hours each day on a hilltop spying on the Marsh dig. This encouraged Marsh's crew to assemble a skull from the jawbones, teeth, eye sockets and horns of a dozen species. They buried Old-what-you-may-call-it just before Cope showed up for his daily spell at the telescope. When he did arrive, they put on an elaborate pantomime of arduous shoveling and great excitement. Cope sneaked over that dusk, dug up What-you-may-call-it and wrote a paper about its significance."

Cope's response?

He began dynamiting his own digging sites when he was done, so that no one from Marsh's camp could possibly find some treasure he'd overlooked.

Marsh's response to that?

He used his political connections to get the Department of the Interior to demand that Cope turn over all his finds to them.

Cope's response?

He went to the press, pointing out every mistake and misstatement Marsh had ever made.

Marsh's response?

The same.

End result?

Each man started with a huge fortune, and each man bankrupted the other.

But when the dust had cleared, these two men had advanced American paleontology a couple of centuries.

Doc Holliday Museum.

209 North Thirteenth Street Griffin, GA 30223 Theodore Roosevelt Memorial American Museum of Natural History Central Park West at Seventy-Ninth Street.

New York, NY 10024.

Buffalo Bill Museum 199 North Front Street Le Claire, IA 52753 Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park 37 Christie Street Edison, NJ 08820.

Othniel Charles Marsh collection Peabody Museum of Natural History 170 Whitney Avenue New Haven, CT 06520.

Edward Drinker Cope collection Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University.

1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway Philadelphia, PA 19103.

The Buntline Special is on display at:.

The Autry Museum 4700 Western Heritage Way.

Los Angeles, CA 90027.

THERE IS A GAME-The Game of Ruthless Paleontology-based on Marsh and Cope's rivalry, created by James Cambias and Diane Kelly, and produced by Zygote Games.

ALMOST ALL THE GREAT SHOOTISTS AND ADVENTURERS of that era have been immortalized in song, but here's a link to a song I'll bet you didn't know about: "Bone Wars, Marsh and Cope (to the tune of *Two Black Cadillacs' by Carrie Underwood)," YouTube video, 5:12, posted by "Zack Neher," April 21, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA3fhPs1aKk Mike Resnick has won five Hugos (from a record thirty-six nominations), plus a Nebula Award and other major awards in the United States, France, Spain, Poland, Croatia, Catalonia, and Japan, and has been short-listed in England, Italy, and Australia. He is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction. Mike is the author of seventy-four novels, twenty-five collections, over two hundred sixty short stories, and three screenplays; he has edited forty-one anthologies. He is currently the editor of The Stellar Guild book series and Galaxy's Edge magazine. He was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.

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