According to Kate

The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday

Chris Enss author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Globe Pequot Press

Published:1st Oct '19

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

According to Kate cover

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 fifty years 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 Big Nose Kate stock-piled 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 OK Corral and exchanged words with the likes of Wyatt Earp and Josephine Marcs. 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.

Kate Elder believed her story was worth a small fortune, and Chris Enss proves she was right. Chris has won a galaxy of awards for her storytelling and earned every one of them. As one of the most reliable researchers in the trade, she traces Maria Izabella Magdolna from her birth in Hungary in 1850 to her death as Mary Cummings at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home at Prescott only five days shy of her ninetieth birthday. As Chris writes, Kate Elder mostly left historians “only the legend to draw from—and that’s a fact.” -- Will Bagley, bestselling and Wister Award-winning author
Once again, master storyteller Chris Enss has enriched the annals of American history with her blockbuster chronicle of “Big-Nose” Kate Elder, a woman whose life over nearly a century intertwined with such noted Western figures as Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers. From Kate’s birth in Hungary in 1850, through her sometimes risqué exploits across the United States, to her death in Prescott, Arizona, in 1940, Kate Elder led a most interesting life, and Chris Enss reveals it all in this meticulously researched and well-documented biography. -- James A. Crutchfield
In According To Kate, Chris Enss sorts through the facts and the myths surrounding Kate Elder (aka Big Nose Kate) one of the west’s most mysterious figures. Enss constructs a clear and credible time line as Kate and Doc Holliday made their way across the country and into history. This is a must for studies on Kate and Doc Holliday. -- Thomas Cobb, award-winning author of Crazy Heart and Shavetail
Oftentimes in western history, the women have been left behind. Fortunately for that history—and for us—author Chris Enss repeatedly chips away at stone, delivering one passionate account after another of the West’s women. In her latest work, According to Kate, Enss provides a picture of Kate Elder’s life, including her decades after Doc Holliday and the Gunfight at the OK Corral, as she continued to make her own way on her own terms in the bawdy West. -- Deborah Morgan, award-winning author in both the western and mystery fields

  • Winner of Will Rogers Medallion Award, Western Biographies 2020
  • Winner of Foreword INDIE 2019 Silver Winner for Biography 2019

ISBN: 9781493037735

Dimensions: 236mm x 159mm x 17mm

Weight: 404g

184 pages