Big Nose Kate

Kate Horony (left) and younger sister Wilhelmina c. 1865, near the time they were orphaned. Kate is about 15 years old.

In 1860, Dr. Horony, his second wife Katharina, and his children left Hungary for the United States, arriving in New York City on the German ship Bremen in September.

The Horony family settled in a predominantly German area of Davenport, Iowa, in 1862. Horony and his wife died within a month of one another in 1865. Mary Katherine and her younger siblings were placed in the home of her brother-in-law, Gustav Susemihl, and in 1870 they were left in the care of attorney Otto Smith.[5] The 1870 United States Census records for Davenport show Kate's younger sister, 15-year-old Wilhelmina (Wilma), living with and working as a domestic for Austrian-born David Palter and his Hungarian wife Bettina.

In 1866, at age 16, Kate ran away from her foster home and stowed away on a riverboat bound for St. Louis, Missouri.[6] Kate later claimed that while she lived in St. Louis she married a dentist named Silas Melvin with whom she had a son, and that both died of yellow fever.[7] The United States Census records report that a Silas Melvin lived in St. Louis in the mid 1860s but that he was married to a steamship captain's daughter named Mary Bust. The census also shows that another Melvin was employed by a St. Louis asylum. Since Kate met Doc Holliday in the early 1870s, she may have confused the two and their occupations when recalling the facts later in her life.[8]

Researcher Jan Collins states that Kate entered the Ursuline Convent but did not remain long. In 1869, she is recorded as working as a prostitute for madam Blanche Tribole in St. Louis.[2] In 1874, Kate was fined for working as a "sporting woman" (prostitute) in a "sporting house" (brothel) in Dodge City, Kansas, run by Nellie "Bessie" (Ketchum) Earp,[9] James Earp's wife.[10][11][12]

Holliday, like his friend Wyatt Earp, was always looking for an opportunity to make money, and joined the Earps in Tombstone during the fall of 1880.[5] On March 15, 1881, at 10:00 pm, three cowboys attempted to rob a Kinnear & Company stagecoach carrying $26,000 in silver bullion (by the inflation adjustment algorithm: $790,000 in today's dollars) near Benson, Arizona, during which the popular driver Eli "Budd" Philpot and passenger Peter Roerig were killed.[15] Cochise County Cowboy Bill Leonard, a former watchmaker from New York City, was one of three men implicated in the robbery, and he and Holliday had become good friends.[16] When Kate and Holliday had a fight, County Sheriff Johnny Behan and Milt Joyce, a county supervisor and owner of the Oriental Saloon, decided to exploit the situation. Both were members of the Tombstone Ten Percent Ring.

Behan and Joyce plied Kate with alcohol and suggested to her a way to get even with Holliday. She signed an affidavit implicating Holliday in the murders and attempted robbery. Judge Wells Spicer issued an arrest warrant for Holliday. The Earps found witnesses who could attest to Holliday's whereabouts elsewhere at the time of the murders. Kate said that Behan and Joyce had influenced her to sign a document she didn't understand. With the Cowboy plot revealed, Judge Spicer freed Holliday. The district attorney threw out the charges, labeling them "ridiculous". After Holliday was released, he gave Kate money and put her on the stage. Kate returned to Globe for a time, but she returned to Tombstone in October of that year.

In a 1939 letter to her niece Lillian Rafferty, Kate claimed that she was in the Tombstone area with Holliday during the days before the shootout. According to Kate, she was with Holliday in Tucson, Arizona when they attended the San Augustin Feast and Fair in Levin Park during October 1881. On October 20, 1881, Morgan Earp rode to Tucson to request Holliday's assistance with dealing with Cochise County Cowboys who had threatened to kill the Earps. She wrote that Holliday asked her to remain in Tucson for her safety, but she refused, and traveled with Holliday and Earp.[17] Kate reminisced in the letter about her stay with Holliday at C.S. Fly's Boarding House which bordered the alley where the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place.[17]

Kate accurately described minor details of the shootout, writing that on the day of the gunfight a man entered Fly's Boarding House with a "bandaged head" and a rifle. He was looking for Holliday, who was still in bed after a night of gambling. Kate recalled that the man who was turned away by Mrs. Fly was later identified as Ike Clanton, whom city marshal Virgil Earp had pistol-whipped earlier that day when he found Clanton carrying a rifle and pistol in violation of city ordinances.[18] Clanton's head was bandaged afterward.

Virgil Earp had disarmed him earlier that day and told Ike he would leave Ike's confiscated rifle and revolver at the Grand Hotel, which was favored by cowboys when they were in town. Ike testified afterward that he had tried to buy a new revolver at Spangenberger's gun and hardware store on 4th Street but the owner saw Ike's bandaged head and refused to sell him one.[19] Clanton was unarmed at the time of the shootout later that afternoon.[5][8] Ike testified that he picked up the weapons from William Soule, the jailer, a couple of days later.[19]

Author Glenn Boyer disputes that Kate saw the gunfight through the window of the boarding house. Also according to him, Kate stated that after Doc Holliday returned to his room, he sat at the edge of his bed and wept from the shock of what had happened during the close-range gunfight. "That was awful," Kate claims he said. "Just awful."[5][8] Boyer's work, however, has been rejected by serious scholars.[20]

After Doc Holliday died in 1887, Kate married Irish blacksmith George Cummings in Aspen, Colorado, on March 2, 1890. After working several mining camps throughout Colorado, they moved to Bisbee, Arizona, where she briefly ran a bakery. After returning to Willcox, Arizona, in Cochise County, Cummings became an abusive alcoholic and they separated. In 1900, Kate moved to Dos Cabezas or Cochise and worked for John and Lulu Rath, owners of the Cochise Hotel. Cummings committed suicide in Courtland, Arizona, in July 1915.[21]

Kate is enumerated in the 1910 U.S. Census in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, as a member of the home of miner John J. Howard. When Howard died in 1930, Kate was the executrix of his estate. She contacted his only daughter, who lived in Tempe, Arizona, and settled the inheritance.[22]

In 1931 the 80-year-old Kate contacted her longtime friend Arizona Governor George Hunt, and applied for admittance to the Arizona Pioneers' Home in Prescott, Arizona. The home had been established in 1910 by the State of Arizona for destitute and ailing miners and male pioneers of the Arizona Territory. It took Kate six months to be admitted because the home had a requirement that residents must be American citizens. According to the 1935 Bork interview, Kate was owed money by the Howard estate, but the amount owed was not enough to buy firewood through the winter, as Kate had complained in her letters to the governor.[23]

She was admitted as one of the first female residents of the home. She lived there and became an outspoken resident, assisting other residents with living comforts. Kate wrote many letters to the Arizona state legislature, often contacting the governor when she was not satisfied with their response.[24] Near the end of her life, several reporters tried to record Kate's life story, her relationship with Doc Holliday and her time in Tombstone. She only talked to Anton Mazzonovich and Prescott historian A.W. Bork.