Before there was the WWF and NASCAR, the hillbilly territory where sport and entertainment meet was occupied by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. A rootin' tootin' shoot-em-up tour where Bill and Annie Oakley and other costumed cowboys spun six-shooters and rode horses and staged gunfights for a paying audience in which the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys black ones.

But before there was the Wild West show there was, well, the wild west. The legends of which any Coloradoan or westerner ought to know well. John Wesley Harding, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Wild Bill Hickock - their fingerprints are still all over us out here.

In fact, it's still legal in Colorado to openly carry a gun in the street, so long as you're not drunk or threatening people. (Someday some wiseass in Aspen is going to realize this and set up shop outside of Gucci or Prada wearing a holster loaded with Smith & Wessons, just to put a scare into the effete mink coat crowd.)

And just about every place in Colorado has its own piece of Wild West folklore. Denver has Lookout Mountain and Buffalo Bill. Telluride has Butch Cassidy and the San Miguel Valley Bank robbery. Here in the Roaring Fork Valley, though, we can claim just about the baddest of all the badass deeds in the West: killing Doc Holliday.

The whiskey-swilling tubercular Georgia boy and dentist-turned-gambler-turned-gunslinger with the name of a porn star suffered the last months of his short life in Glenwood Springs.

Doc Holliday, hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, spent most of his life dying, or so the legend goes. Afflicted with tuberculosis, he put himself in harm's way with a cool and dark-eyed fatalism - knowing the lung disease would kill him anyway, and believing being cut down in the street with his spurs on would be more fun than that. Or so the legend goes.

The Holliday legend, fed by countless pulpy books and film portrayals by the likes of Kirk Douglas and Val Kilmer, was best summed up by Wyatt Earp himself. Earp, a fastidious do-right lawman, struck up an unlikely friendship with the debauched Holliday, added him to his Tombstone posse, and eulogized him thusly: "He was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long, lean blonde fellow nearly dead with consumption and at the same time the most skillful gambler and nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew."

At age 35, Holliday came to Glenwood in the hopes that the Yampah hot springs would heal his ailing lungs. But historians believe that our thin mountain air actually hastened his death, which came in bed at the Hotel Colorado in November 1887.

Looking down at his bootless feet, taking his last sip of whiskey and finally succumbing to death, he laughed and said, "This is funny." Or so the legend goes.

Today in Glenwood, you can hike up a thin dusty trail lined with cottonwoods and sage brush, to the final resting place of our dissolute hero. Sort of. In a strange twist of fate, the records of where Holliday's bones actually rest have been lost.

So when you reach the end of that trail and enter Linwood Cemetery, at the edge of a mesa you will find an etched stone grave honoring Doc Holliday, "who is buried someplace in this cemetery."
And that is funny. Or at least Doc might think so.

Shoot Andrew Travers an e-mail at andrew@aspendailynews.com