According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday

by Chris Enss

Overview

*2020 Will Rogers Medallion Award Winner (Western Biographies)*

Doc Holliday’s paramour Big Nose Kate could never get a publisher to give her the big bucks she demanded to tell the story of her life, but that didn’t mean she didn’t collect material she wanted to use in a biography. Over the fifty years Mary Kate Cummings, alias Big Nose Kate, traversed the West she saved letters from her family, musings she had written about her love interests, and life with the notorious John Henry Holliday. Using rare, never before published material Big Nose Kate stock-piled in anticipation of writing the tale of her days on the Wild Frontier, the definitive book about the famous soiled dove will finally be told.


Kate claims to have witnessed the Gunfight at the OK Corral and exchanged words with the likes of Wyatt Earp and Josephine Marcus. There’s no doubt she embellished her adventures, but that doesn’t take away from their historical importance. She was a controversial figure in a rough and rowdy territory. What she witnessed, the lifestyle she led, and the influential western people she met are fascinating and represent a time period much romanticized.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781493037742
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	545,174
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Chris Enss is a New York Times Bestselling author who has been writing about women of the Old West for more than a twenty years. She has penned more than forty published books on the subject. Her book entitled Entertaining Ladies: Actresses, Singers, and Dancers in the Old West was a Spur Award finalist in 2017. Enss’s book Mochi’s War: The Tragedy of the Sand Creek Massacre received the Will Rogers Medallion Award for best nonfiction Western for 2015. Her book entitled Object Matrimony: The Risky Business of Mail Order Matchmaking on the Western Frontier won the Elmer Kelton Award for Best Non-fiction book of 2013. Enss’s book Sam Sixkiller: Frontier Cherokee Lawman was named Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History by the Oklahoma Historical Society. She lives in Grass Valley, CA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction ix

Chapter 1 The Girl from Hungary 1

Chapter 2 Soiled Dove in a Cow Town 15

Chapter 3 Riding with Doc Holliday 33

Chapter 4 Time in Dodge City 47

Chapter 5 Leaving Las Vegas 63

Chapter 6 Street Fight in Tombstone 77

Chapter 7 Mrs. George Cummings 95

Chapter 8 Life in Dos Cabezas 109

Chapter 9 The Pioneers' Home 119

Chapter 10 The Legend of Kate Elder 131

Endnotes 139

Bibliography 155

Index 163

About the Author 171

Editorial Reviews

In According To Kate, Chris Enss sorts through the facts and the myths surrounding Kate Elder (aka Big Nose Kate) one of the west’s most mysterious figures. Enss constructs a clear and credible time line as Kate and Doc Holliday made their way across the country and into history. This is a must for studies on Kate and Doc Holliday.

Thomas Cobb

Kate Elder believed her story was worth a small fortune, and Chris Enss proves she was right. Chris has won a galaxy of awards for her storytelling and earned every one of them. As one of the most reliable researchers in the trade, she traces Maria Izabella Magdolna from her birth in Hungary in 1850 to her death as Mary Cummings at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home at Prescott only five days shy of her ninetieth birthday. As Chris writes, Kate Elder mostly left historians “only the legend to draw from—and that’s a fact.

Will Bagley

Once again, master storyteller Chris Enss has enriched the annals of American history with her blockbuster chronicle of “Big-Nose” Kate Elder, a woman whose life over nearly a century intertwined with such noted Western figures as Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers. From Kate’s birth in Hungary in 1850, through her sometimes risqué exploits across the United States, to her death in Prescott, Arizona, in 1940, Kate Elder led a most interesting life, and Chris Enss reveals it all in this meticulously researched and well-documented biography.

James A. Crutchfield

Oftentimes in western history, the women have been left behind. Fortunately for that history—and for us—author Chris Enss repeatedly chips away at stone, delivering one passionate account after another of the West’s women. In her latest work, According to Kate, Enss provides a picture of Kate Elder’s life, including her decades after Doc Holliday and the Gunfight at the OK Corral, as she continued to make her own way on her own terms in the bawdy West.

Deborah Morgan