Big Nose Kate
| Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings | |
|---|---|
Big Nose Kate at about age 50, photo about 1900
|
|
| Born |
November 7, 1850 Pest, Hungary |
| Died | November 2, 1940 (aged 89) Prescott, Arizona, United States |
| Other names | Mary Cummings-Haroney |
| Occupation | prostitute dance hall girl boarding house owner baker |
| Spouse(s) |
Doc Holliday (common-law), George Cummings |
| Children | none |
Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings (born as Mária Katalin Horony, November 7, 1850 – November 2, 1940), better known as Big Nose Kate, was a Hungarian-born prostitute and longtime companion and common-law wife of Old West gunfighter Doc Holliday.
Mary Katherine Horony (also spelled Harony, Haroney, and Horoney) was born on November 7, 1850 in Pest, Hungary, as the second oldest daughter of Hungarian physician Miklós Horony.
In 1860, Dr. Horony, his second wife Katharina, and his children left Hungary for the United States, arriving in New York City on the German ship Bremen in September 1860. Writer Glenn Boyer was the first to state that Kate was descended from nobility and that after her father was appointed personal physician to Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico the family accompanied the monarch's retinue to Mexico. However, in none of his published works did Boyer ever cite a source for these assertions. Patrick A. Bowmaster exposed the fallacy of Boyer's story.”
The Horony family settled in a predominantly German area of Davenport, Iowa in 1862. Horony and his wife died only three years later, in 1865, within a month of one another. Mary Katherine and her younger siblings were placed in the home of her brother-in-law, Gustav Susemihl, and in 1870 they were left in the care of attorney Otto Smith. The 1870 United States Census records for Davenport, Iowa show Kate's younger sister, 15-year-old Wilhelmina (Wilma), living with and working as a domestic for Austrian-born David Palter and his Hungarian wife Bettina.
At age 16, Kate ran away from her foster home and stowed away on a riverboat bound for St. Louis, Missouri. Kate later claimed that while she lived in St. Louis she married a dentist named "Silas Melvin" with whom she had a son, and that both died of yellow fever. No record has been found to substantiate marriage, birth of a child, or the death of either Melvin or the child.United States Census records report that a Silas Melvin lived in St. Louis in the mid 1860s but that he was married to a steamship captain's daughter named Mary Bust. The census also shows that another Melvin was employed by a St. Louis asylum. Since Kate met Doc Holliday in the early 1870s, there is speculation that she may have confused the two and their occupations when recalling the facts later in her life.
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Wikipedia