Scene of the Week: Tombstone – Jonny Ringo meets Doc Holliday
Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo were a couple of historical rapscallions who ended up in the frontier town of Tombstone in what could easily be considered the Golden Era of the Old West. While we often lump many of the fabled characters all together under terms such as ‘cowboys’, men like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Bill Hickok were something far different than the men who actually performed the duties of the cowboy. The cattle being driven up from Texas and through towns like Dodge City to the railroads meant that a new brand of lawman had to be incorporated in order to deal with the seasonal influx of sometimes lawless men.
Wyatt and the rest of the Earp brothers were among the men who found that “Lawing” was often times a more profitable occupation than hunting buffalo or scouting for the Army. You could argue that Wyatt’s older brother Virgil was the more accomplished Earp lawman but it would be Wyatt who would be immortalized due to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
A surprising friend of Wyatt, Doc Holliday was a dentist, professional gambler, and a raging alcoholic. After suffering from tuberculosis, Doc moved around the American West in an effort to keep himself from dying from his conditions and he was so drunk off his ass most times that he could barely shoot straight. This scene from 1993’s Tombstone gives us a glimpse into a few subtlety’s of the relationship between a couple of cowboys (Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo) and how the legacy of the Earp brothers probably led to them getting into even more trouble while in Tombstone. Plus, it’s just cool as hell.
