Debate over Doc Holliday’s remains continues

GLENWOOD SPRINGS – A new monument correcting information about Doc Holliday still can’t put to rest a key question regarding the colorful character from the old West: Just where, exactly, are his remains?Holliday isn’t believed to be buried beneath his monument. Less clear is whether he is buried at Linwood Cemetery at all.”I think he is,” said Cindy Hines, Frontier Museum director.

She bases that conclusion in part on a newspaper obituary that ran at the time, and on a lack of evidence to the contrary, she said. Some Holliday fans believe that Wyatt Earp came to Glenwood and brought his friends’ exhumed remains back to Georgia, Hines said. But Hines has never found mention in newspapers of Earp coming to town, an event she thinks would have merited news coverage, she said. Other theories have him being buried at 9th Street and Palmer Avenue in Glenwood Springs or at a former cemetery on Palmer by the 12th Street ditch.Hines particularly doubts the latter. Glenwood City Council minutes show that, about a week before Holliday died, the town hired someone to dig up the remains of people buried by the ditch, so ditch runoff couldn’t expose their remains.

Those remains were transplanted to Linwood Cemetery. Hines can’t see gravediggers going through the effort to bury Holliday by the ditch just as the cemetery was being relocated, she said. As for Holliday’s whereabouts in Linwood, Hines thinks he was buried with other indigents, uphill and to the east of the main cemetery. Perhaps only a wooden marker indicated his grave, she said.It’s hard to know for sure because the city bought the privately owned cemetery in 1939 and sometime during or after that transfer the cemetery’s records were lost or stolen, Hines said.A map, probably from the 1940s, and the current monuments are the best information the museum has about the identities of those buried at Linwood. But there are only about 200 headstones, though probably 400 to 500 people were buried there, Hines said.

When Holliday’s monument was erected in the 1950s, old-timers may have helped to suggest a location for it based on their recollections of where he was buried, Hines said. But city officials may have had other reasons for picking the spot they did.”I think it’s because it’s got a great view of town. … It may have been that it was just a great spot for a tourist attraction,” she said.Although Hines has become something of an expert on Holliday, he’s not her favorite character at the cemetery, she said. “I’m actually more interested in the other people buried up there. I think some of them are more interesting,” she said.She said the museum hopes to create a walking tour booklet that will tell visitors about some of the figures from Glenwood’s early history who are buried – or are believed to be buried – at Linwood Cemetery.