Doc Holliday’s Guns: The Borrowed Shotgun, the Nickel Colt and Kate’s Derringer

Doc Holliday’s most famous gun wasn’t his. At the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral he carried a short Wells Fargo coach gun that Virgil Earp handed him to hide under his long coat, and he used it to kill Tom McLaury before switching to his nickel-plated revolver. According to Old West gun historian Lee A. Silva, the only revolver that can be firmly documented as Holliday’s own is an 1851 Navy Colt his uncle gave him after the Civil War. In Stuart Lake’s 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp is quoted calling a nickel-plated Colt Doc’s favorite gun for years. And when he died of tuberculosis in a Colorado hotel in 1887, the gun said to have been in his room was a .41 Remington derringer engraved “To Doc from Kate.” A museum paid $84,000 to bring it home in 2017.

Here are all of Doc Holliday’s guns, what’s documented and what’s Hollywood, and what the same guns cost today.

Table of Contents

Doc Holliday’s Guns at a Glance

Gun	Connection	How solid?
Colt 1851 Navy, serial 198418	Given to him by his uncle after the Civil War	The only revolver firmly documented as his, per historian Lee A. Silva
Nickel-plated Colt	Wyatt Earp called it “for years his favorite weapon,” as quoted by Stuart Lake in 1931	Witnesses saw a nickel-plated pistol at the O.K. Corral, but the exact model is unrecorded
Wells Fargo coach gun	Used at the O.K. Corral to kill Tom McLaury	Well documented; it belonged to Wells Fargo and later disappeared
Remington double derringer, .41 rimfire	In his room when he died; engraved “To Doc from Kate”	Bought by the Glenwood Springs Historical Society for $84,000; provenance questioned
Colt Model 1877 “Thunderer”	Popular in books and in Tombstone	Possible, not proven

Who Was Doc Holliday?

John Henry Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia, on August 14, 1851. He earned a dental degree from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery at 20, and the school had to hold it for him until he turned 21, the minimum age to practice. Not long after he set up practice, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother. He went west for the dry air and ended up making his living at the card table as a faro dealer and gambler, with a reputation for being quick to go for a gun. In Fort Griffin, Texas, he met Mary Katharine Horony, the dance hall woman known as Big Nose Kate, and a friendship with Wyatt Earp that would put him in the middle of the most famous gunfight in American history.

The Navy Colt From His Uncle

Old West firearms historian Lee A. Silva spent years tracking Holliday’s guns and concluded that just one revolver “can be absolutely documented as having belonged to Doc”: a cap-and-ball Colt 1851 Navy, serial number 198418, with its original holster. Doc’s uncle, Dr. John Stiles Holliday, gave it to him after the Civil War. The .36-caliber Navy was the same model Wild Bill Hickok favored, and you can read about Hickok’s pair in Wild Bill Hickok’s guns.

Uberti builds faithful 1851 Navy reproductions that fire black powder, caps and lead balls, and our best black powder revolvers guide compares them:

Doc Holliday’s Revolver: The Nickel-Plated Colt

By the time he reached Tombstone, Doc carried a cartridge revolver. Silva calls Stuart Lake’s 1931 biography of Earp the only credible source on Doc’s taste in six-guns: Lake quotes Wyatt describing his friend’s “nickel-plated Colt’s, which was for years his favorite weapon.” Lake also admitted putting words in Earp’s mouth, so even that line is secondhand. Witnesses at the O.K. Corral saw Doc with a nickel-plated pistol, and some of the Cowboys’ witnesses testified that it was the first gun he drew. What nobody recorded is the model. Popular books and the 1993 film Tombstone give him a nickel-plated Colt Model 1877 Thunderer, the double-action .41, alongside a Colt Single Action Army, both with ivory grips. That’s a plausible pairing for a gambler of the 1880s, but Silva found no hard evidence for it. In an 1884 shooting in Leadville, accounts describe Doc’s gun as either a .41 Colt double action or a short-barreled single-action .44.

If you want the Tombstone look, Cimarron sells a “Thunderer” with a bird’s-head grip, though it’s a single-action copy rather than a true 1877 double action. We explain the difference in Billy the Kid’s guns, because the Thunderer is his gun too. For a Colt like the one Earp described, Colt still makes the Single Action Army, and Uberti’s affordable copy is covered in our Uberti Cattleman review:

The O.K. Corral: Doc Holliday’s Shotgun Under His Coat

On October 26, 1881, Virgil Earp picked up a short coach gun from the Wells Fargo office and set off with his brothers Wyatt and Morgan to disarm the Clantons and McLaurys. To avoid alarming the town, Virgil gave the shotgun to Holliday to hide under his long overcoat and carried Doc’s walking stick himself. When the shooting started, Doc stepped around a horse and killed Tom McLaury with a blast to the side of the chest. Then he tossed the empty shotgun aside, drew his nickel-plated revolver and kept firing at Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton. Doc was grazed in the fight. Three Cowboys died.

The Doc Holliday shotgun wasn’t Doc’s at all. Silva notes that it belonged to Wells Fargo, and that it simply disappeared afterward. Around 1905, Wyatt sold a 12-gauge double in Quartzsite, Arizona, that he swore was the shotgun Doc used at the O.K. Corral, but that gun was stolen in the 1950s and Silva never saw it. He suggests it could have been a British Anson & Deeley, an early hammerless double. The short double-barrel coach gun is still made, though, and Stoeger’s Coach Gun even comes in polished nickel. Our best double-barrel shotguns guide covers the rest:

For how the 1993 film armed Val Kilmer’s Doc and everyone else, see our guns of Tombstone, and for what Wyatt carried that day, read Wyatt Earp’s guns.

Doc’s Other Fights

Doc’s reputation came from more than one afternoon in Tombstone. The record, such as it is, includes:

• Fort Griffin: in an 1896 interview, Wyatt Earp told of Doc stabbing a gambler named Ed Bailey who went for his pistol at the card table. In Stuart Lake’s 1931 biography, Earp added that Big Nose Kate sprang Doc from custody by setting a shed on fire and handing him a second pistol. No contemporary record of Bailey’s death or the fire has been found, and Kate herself denied the Bailey story.
• Tombstone, October 1880: after a quarrel at the Oriental Saloon, Doc came back with a revolver, shot the gun out of owner Milt Joyce’s hand and wounded the bartender in the toe. Joyce then pistol-whipped him unconscious.
• Tucson, March 1882: during the Earp Vendetta Ride, Frank Stilwell was killed in the Tucson rail yard, and a warrant named Doc as one of the shooters.
• Leadville, 1884: Doc hid a gun under the bar at Hyman’s saloon and fired at bartender Billy Allen, who had threatened him over a debt. The first shot missed and hit the door frame. The testimony suggested Allen was unarmed, but the jury acquitted Doc anyway.

For all the legend, the men Doc is known to have killed are few: Mike Gordon in 1879, probably Tom and Frank McLaury at the O.K. Corral, and possibly Frank Stilwell. The famous duel with Johnny Ringo in Tombstone is fiction. Ringo was found dead in July 1882, a coroner ruled it suicide, and newspapers placed Doc hundreds of miles away in Colorado that month.

What Earp and Masterson Said About Him

The two lawmen who knew him best saw him very differently. In an 1896 article, Wyatt Earp called Doc “a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a vagabond,” and “the most skillful gambler and nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew.” Bat Masterson was harsher. In a 1907 profile, he wrote that Holliday “had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man,” and that physically he “could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy” in a fistfight. That combination, a sick, slight man who made up for it with a gun, is most of the legend in one sentence.

Doc Holliday’s Derringer: “To Doc From Kate”

In 1887, gray and badly ill, Doc went to the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, hoping the hot springs would help his lungs. He died there on November 8, 1887, at 36. Looking at his bare feet at the end, he’s said to have remarked, “This is funny,” since he’d always expected to die with his boots on.

According to the legend, in his room was a Remington double derringer of the 1866 pattern, engraved on the backstrap “To Doc from Kate,” a gift from Big Nose Kate, who probably bought it in Tombstone around 1881. Remington made its over-and-under double derringer only in .41 Short rimfire, a slow, 130-grain round meant for close range. The story goes that hotel bartender William G. Wells took the gun as partial payment toward Doc’s funeral, and that it stayed in the Wells family until a Utah gun dealer, E. Dixon Larson, bought it in 1968. In 2017 the Glenwood Springs Historical Society bought it for $84,000 to display at its Frontier Museum. “To this museum and to our board of directors, it’s priceless,” the society’s director said. The same report notes that other Holliday items have sold in recent years, including a flask for $130,000 and a shotgun believed to have been his for $200,000.

The derringer’s story has a weak link. Shortly after the purchase, its provenance came under scrutiny: the society learned that Larson had a reputation for chasing celebrity Wild West guns, and some suspect he wasn’t above forging documents and embellishing stories. After Larson it passed to a Tennessee lawyer in the 1980s and then to the Canadian seller. The gun is now the centerpiece of the society’s Doc Holliday Museum in Glenwood Springs, and its director is careful to hedge when he talks about it.

The two-shot derringer is still around in modern form. Bond Arms makes stainless over-and-under derringers in calibers from 9mm to .45 Colt, and our best derringers guide ranks them. If you want more than two shots in a pocket gun, see the best pocket pistols and best snub-nose revolvers:

Doc Holliday’s Knife

Doc was said to be handy with a blade, too. Silva cites historian Gary Roberts on the knife Doc took from his cousin Tom McKey around 1873, a heavy, double-edged fighting knife Tom had made from a meat cleaver and carried through the Civil War. Tom called it the “Hell Bitch.” A San Francisco bowie by the maker Michael Price has also been claimed as Doc’s, supposedly given to a miner near Bisbee who treated a wound for him, but Silva has only seen photos of it, and its story rests on one family’s account.

Doc Holliday’s Guns in the Movies

Most people picture Doc’s guns from one film. In Tombstone (1993), Val Kilmer’s Doc carries an ivory-gripped, nickel-plated Colt Model 1877 double action in a shoulder holster as his first gun, and a matching ivory-gripped Colt Single Action Army on his hip. Kilmer’s performance was so popular that Silva says Doc re-enactors soon outnumbered Wyatt Earps in Tombstone itself. There’s no record that puts the real Doc in a shoulder holster. What the witnesses at the O.K. Corral described was a shotgun under his overcoat and a nickel-plated pistol, carried however a gambler of the 1880s chose to carry one.

More Guns of the Old West

Doc’s story runs straight through the others in this series: Wyatt Earp’s guns, Wild Bill Hickok’s guns and Billy the Kid’s guns, plus our wider Wild West outlaw guns roundup. If you shoot these guns for fun, start with cowboy action shooting and our best revolvers guide. Doc’s life ran from Georgia through Texas and Arizona to Colorado, and our Georgia, Arizona and Colorado gun law guides explain the rules there today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Featured image: AI-assisted restoration of the Denver Public Library portrait “J.H. Holliday, as he appeared in the early eighties,” public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, which notes that the photo’s identity has been questioned. Added text; no features were added.