Maria Izabella Magdolna Horony (9 November 1849-2 November 1940), later known as Mary Katherine "Big Nose Kate" Horony-Cummings, was a Hungarian-American prostitute and the common law wife of Doc Holliday.
Biography[]
Kate in 1882
Maria Izabella Magdolna Horony was born in Ersekujvar, Hungary, Austrian Empire (present-day Nove Zamky, Slovakia) on 9 November 1849, the daughter of a Hungarian physician. Her family arrived in the United States at New York City in September 1860 and settled among the German community of Davenport, Iowa in 1862, only for both of her parents to die within a month of each other in 1865. At the age of 16, Kate ran away from her foster home and stowed away on a riverboat bound for St. Louis, Missouri, and she married a St. Louis dentist who, along with their son, died of yellow fever soon after. By 1874, she was forced to work as a prostitute in Dodge City, Kansas, and, in 1876, she moved to Fort Griffin, Texas, where she met Doc Holliday. They travelled to Trinidad, Colorado and then to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and she worked as a dancer in Santa Fe. She later worked as a prostitute in The Palace Saloon in Prescott while her husband gambled, and they later settled in Tombstone. However, they fell out after an argument in 1881, and Sheriff Johnny Behan convinced her to testify against her husband as a way to get back at him; however, her testimony was later discarded, and she had an on-again, off-again relationship with Holliday for months. She witnessed the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881, and, in April 1882, Holliday left her for good, travelling to Colorado. Holliday died in 1887, and Kate married an Irish blacksmith in Aspen, only for them to separate due to his alcoholism; he committed suicide in July 1915. She went on to befriend Governor George W.P. Hunt and was admitted to the Arizona Pioneers' Home in Prescott, where she died in 1940 at the age of 90.