User blog:BattleGames1/BattleGames1's Season of War Episode 5 - The OK Corral Town Marshals (Doc Holliday) vs The Kelly Gang (Ned Kelly)



Last time on the Season of War, the criminal underworld was shaken as a battle raged between two brutal and well-equipped gangs who spread terror in the world. This time, we now pit two of the greatest legends to have existed in the period known as the Wild West where cowboys and bushrangers ran rampant.

Doc Holliday, one of the 4 sheriffs responsible for winning the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral...

vs

Ned Kelly, the Irish man in the iron mask whose legendary feats of liberty and terror have become permanently embedded in Australian culture...

WHO... IS... DEADLIEST? =Let's Meet the Warriors=

Doc Holliday
John Henry "Doc" Holliday (1851-1887) was best known in the American Wild West as a gambler, gunfighter, dentist, and a good friend of Wyatt Earp. From the early age of 20, Holliday practiced dentistry first in Atlanta, Georgia and then in the American Southwest where he also established his reputation as a gambler and a deadly gunslinger. While in Texas, he saved Wyatt Earp's life and they became friends. In 1880, he joined the Earps in Prescott, Arizona, and then in Tombstone. On October 26, 1881, after many months of threats and attacks on his character, Holliday was deputized by Virgil Earp. Around this time, the Earps and Holliday were embroiled in the Gunfight at the OK Corral, one of the most famous Wild West shootouts in history but only one of the 8 or more that he was involved in. After the gunfight, Holliday became more brutal as a gunslinger/vigilante, hunting down and murdering the cowboys responsible for the incident landing him in hot water with the justice system. Before he could be extradited however, Holliday died of tuberculosis at the age of 36 (having been diagnosed with it since he was 20) in Colorado.

Throughout his lifetime, Doc was known by many of his peers as a tempered, calm Southern gentleman. In an 1896 article, Wyatt Earp said that "Doc was a dentist, not a lawman or an assassin, whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean, ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun that I ever knew." His tuberculosis didn't hamper his ability as a gambler and a marksman. Holliday was ambidextrous and was known to have carried two pistols into fights. Much of Holliday's violent reputation, however, was nothing more but rumors and self-promotion - it is not known how many people he has killed (although there are exceptions) but it is known that was in at least five one-on-one gunfights in his lifetime.

Ned Kelly
Edward "Ned" Kelly (1855–1880) was an Irish Australian bushranger with a legendary reputation of being both a cold-blooded cop killer and a folk hero akin to Robin Hood - as a historian has put it, Kelly was "the last expression of the lawless frontier in what was becoming a highly organised and educated society, the last protest of the mighty bush now tethered with iron rails to Melbourne and the world." Growing up in a poor selector family who saw themselves as downtrodden by colonial 'squatters' and as victims of police persecution, Ned Kelly undertook the life of crime from about age 12 when he first associated himself with bushranger Harry Power. After several run-ins with Victorian police, Ned was declared an outlaw alongside his brother (Dan Kelly) and two associates (Joe Byrne and Steve Hart) in 1878 by the Government. Between 1878 and 1880, Kelly and his posse committed numerous armed robberies and killed a number of people in the process - a police sergeant, 2 constables and an informant. Kelly, during this time, was also made famous through a manifesto letter in which Kelly — denouncing the police, the Victorian Government and the British Empire in general — set down his own account of the events leading up to his outlawry, threatening dire consequences against those who defied him. Kelly's downfall came about in 1880 when his attempt to derail and ambush a police train failed and then engaged in a final violent confrontation with the Victoria Police at Glenrowan which saw Joe, Dan and Steve get killed but Ned only wounded but alive to stand trial and be hung.

Ned Kelly has been described by historians as Ned Kelly as 'one of the most cold-blooded, egotistical, and utterly self-centred criminals who ever decorated the end of a rope in an Australian jail'; that 'Popular instinct has found in Kelly a type of manliness much to be esteemed—to reiterate: courage, resolution, independence, sympathy with the under-dog'. The popular estimate of Kelly's killings of the police at Stringybark Creek accords with his statement, 'I could not help shooting them, or else let them shoot me, which they would have done if their bullets had been directed as they intended'.