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 50 years that 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 that Big Nose Kate stockpiled 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 O.K. 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.

Reviewed by Chris Enss, COWGIRL Book Editor, and a New York Times best-selling author who writes about women of the Old West.

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