Rewilding Doc Holliday is a practical experiment in Rewilding History where we split the legend into two complementary layers: a free-culture archive of contested Facts and original sources, and a living chorus of first-person Perspectives written by many authors. The core promise is simple: the stories stay tethered to the record, and the record stays readable, reusable, and open enough for new stories to grow.
The archive lives in the Hard History Archive, where we collect court-room material, contemporary newspaper reporting, and other primary sources that shape what we can responsibly say about Doc Holliday. Some of these sources are “facts” only in the historical sense: they are sworn statements, accusations, recollections, and print reports that may conflict with each other, but still deserve preservation as evidence of what people said, believed, and tried to prove at the time. Our stance is not that the archive is neutral, but that it is inspectable.
A key early anchor is the 1881 Tombstone preliminary hearing that followed the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, where testimony and legal framing become part of the story-world itself. These documents give us names, timings, distances, and the shape of public claims, and they also reveal the limits of knowledge and the theatre of a courtroom. In a rewilding context, the hearing is not just “background”, it is a narrative engine: it shows how reputations are manufactured and how violence is narrated into law.
From that factual ground we cultivate Perspectives: short, disciplined first-person accounts that try to inhabit Holliday’s world without smuggling in modern hindsight. Writers are encouraged to make their work auditable by linking each scene, claim, or sensory detail to a small set of nearby archive items. When the sources disagree, the writing can branch, but it must declare the branch as a choice of interpretation rather than a secret invention.
A special focus of this project is Voice, in the literal sense. We treat accent, register, and idiom as part of material culture: not a decorative flourish, but a clue about class, region, education, and social survival. We invite native speakers and dialect specialists to record readings of narrative passages, so the reader can hear multiple plausible versions of “Doc” and his contemporaries, instead of settling for one generic cinematic West.
We also explore AI Voice as a careful extension of the commons. Where we have explicit permission, we can train or fine-tune voice models that reproduce a contributor’s reading style for specific project uses, while always giving clear credit to the human voice authors and never laundering provenance. The goal is not to replace performers, but to preserve and remix performance as a credited cultural layer, alongside text and image.
Everything we release aims to be part of a Cultural Commons. That means we separate truly public-domain materials from newly created community work, and we license the new work in a way that supports reuse, remix, and attribution. In practice, the archive can become a template: “primary sources as public infrastructure, creative layers as free culture, all provenance explicit”.
Out of the growing library, we curate a Hitchhiker-style Guide to Doc Holliday. This Guide is not a single authoritative narrative, but a braided publication where the best Perspectives sit next to the relevant Facts, and where disagreements are treated as teachable features rather than editorial failures. The reader can jump from a dramatic monologue to a transcript excerpt, then to a map, then to a counter-voice written by another author, and feel the tension between myth and paperwork. Quality is managed through a community-focused Peer Review process designed to welcome both artists and academic experts. Artists help keep the work alive, surprising, and emotionally true. Historians and archivists help keep it honest about its claims and careful about sourcing. Editors help the collection remain readable, fair, and appropriately uncertain where the record is uncertain. The deeper purpose of Rewilding Doc Holliday is to make historical literacy feel like a creative practice rather than a scolding. We do not “debunk the West” so much as compost it: we keep what can be evidenced, we label what is contested, we add new growth in the gaps, and we publish the whole habitat as a shared resource that others can fork, remix, and extend.
# Related pages - Rewilding History - Facts and Primary Source - Perspective - Public Domain - Cultural Commons - Voice and AI Voice - Peer Review - Guide, Guide Writer and Field Researcher
# External references
- en.wikisource.org 
- law2.umkc.edu
- picryl.com
- [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/creativecommons.org]
- [https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/creativecommons.org]
- en.wikipedia.org