1 February 2021
The 1993 movie Tombstone has a line when the character of Doc Holliday, played by actor Val Kilmer, tells Johnny Ringo, played by Michael Biehn, a man he is about to kill, “I’m your huckleberry.” The line is often repeated by fans of the film, perhaps because it makes little sense to a twentieth or twenty-first century audience. But the line is historically accurate. It is something the real Doc Holliday might have said.
Huckleberry is a name given to several North American plants in the genera Vaccinium and Gaylussacia, including the blueberry. The name probably comes from the English dialectal hurtleberry or whortleberry, a name for the bilberry, Vaccinium myrtillus. This literal sense of the word dates to at least 1670, when it appears in Daniel Denton’s A Brief Description of New York, in a passage describing the plant life of Long Island:
The Fruits natural to the Island, are Mulberries, Posimons, Grapes great and small, Huckelberries, Cramberries, Plums of several sorts, Rosberries and Strawberries, of which last is such abundance in June, that the Fields and Woods are died red: Which the Countrey-people perceiving, instantly arm themselves with bottles of Wine, Cream, and Sugar, and in stead of a Coat of Male, every one takes a Female upon his Horse behind him, and so rushing violently into the fields, never leave till they have disrob'd them of their red colours, and turned them into the old habit.
Several slang senses of huckleberry appear during the nineteenth century. It could mean a small amount or degree, probably from the small size of the berry. From James Kirke Paulding’s 1832 novel Westward Ho!:
For my part, stranger, I can't fetch my breath anywhere except in all out-doors, and had sooner lay down on a bed of leaves with a sky blanket, than sleep on one of your hard feather-beds, that pretty nigh break a man's bones. I wish I may be hoppled all my life to come, if I didn't once get within a huckleberry of being smothered to death in one of them beds with curtains all round 'em. Catch me there agin, and I'll give you leave to curry-comb me, anyhow.
It also commonly appears in the comparative phrase a huckleberry to/over a persimmon, again, probably relating the small size of the huckleberry to the much larger persimmon. Again from Paulding’s book:
We must make a straight wake behind us; for if the horn gets broadside to the current, I wouldn't risk a huckleberry to a persimmon that we don't every soul get treed, and sink to the bottom like gone suckers.
By the 1860s, huckleberry was being used to refer one’s sweetheart or friend, or simply to someone who is useful, the right person for the job. This sense probably arises out of the berry’s sweet and desirable taste. The phrase I’m your huckleberry is recorded in the 1862 papers of Val C. Giles, a soldier in the Confederate Army in reference to two gamblers cheating with loaded dice:
I’ll fling you a dose of high die for enough of Old Culpepper to treat this crowd.”
“All right,” said Mr. Bailey, “I’m your huckleberry.”
Bailey and Brownley kept loaded dice.
And it is used a few years later in Henri Wilkins 1879 play The Coming Man. In this scene, a doctor has instructed his servant Hank to not admit Prosey Greene, a suitor for hand of the doctor’s daughter, into the house:
P. G. Will nothing tempt you to forsake the wrong and espouse the right cause? Here is positive evidence that I am your friend, (shows money) Will you be mine and aid me in the consumation [sic] of my whole life's happiness?
Hank. (taking money) That kind of evidence will go farther towards convincing this jury than all the lawyer's learning, or poet's nonsense in the United States, (puts money in pocket) Now, I'm your huckleberry. Heave ahead and be lively, before the old man returns.
In the play, Hank is a Black man, but the phrase is not peculiar to Black speech.
So, the line in the 1993 movie is appropriate speech for a dramatization of events of 1881–82. We, of course, don’t know if Doc Holliday ever actually uttered those words (he does so twice in the movie, addressing Johnny Ringo both times), but it is something he very well may have said. The movie also has Holliday killing Ringo. Historically, Ringo was found shot in the head outside Tombstone, Arizona in 1882, and his killer was never identified. Ringo had been a suspect in the killing of Morgan Earp, and either Holliday or Wyatt Earp may very well have killed him in revenge. Or someone else may have done it. Ringo was not exactly lacking for enemies.
Huckleberry could also be used to refer to a child or to a person of little consequence. A chapter in Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Men is titled Huckleberries and is about two children who go berry picking and become lost. The title refers not only to the berries to be picked, but it also alludes to the two children, huckleberries of a different kind, although the text does not directly use huckleberry in any but the literal sense.
Mark Twain used this sense of the word at least twice in his writing. Most famously, of course, is in the name of Huckleberry Finn (1884), so called because he is the Finn boy, as opposed to his father. But also, because the term could be bestowed affectionately on a friend or sweetheart, the name would evoke the readers’ sympathies.
It also appears in the 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in the sense of a person of no consequence:
Expedition No. 3 will start adout the first of next mgnth on a search f8r Sir Sagramour le Desirous. It is in comand of the renowned Knight of the Red Lawns, assissted by Sir Persant of Inde, who is compete9t. intelligent, courteous, and in every mav a brick, and furtHer assisted by Sir Palamides the Saracen, who is no huckleberry himself. This is no pic-nic, these boys mean busine&s.
The typos here are deliberate; Twain is evoking the experience of reading “Arkansas journalism” of the late nineteenth century
The slang senses of huckleberry continued to be used into the twentieth century, but by mid century had faded from use. The literal sense, referring to the actual berry, is still in common use.
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Sources:
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys. Boston, Roberts Bros., 1871. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Denton, Daniel. A Brief Description of New York. London: John Hanco*ck, 1670, 3–4. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Giles, Valerius Cincinnatus. Rags and Hope, the Recollections of Val. C. Giles, For Years with Hood’s Brigade, Fourth Texas Infantry, 1861–65. Mary Lasswell, ed. New York: Coward-McCann, 1961, 56.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. huckleberry, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. huckleberry, n.
Paulding, James Kirke. Westward Ho!, vol. 1 of 2. New York: J. and J. Harper, 1832, 182, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: Harper and Bros., 1889, 247. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wilkins, Henri. The Coming Man, A Farce in One Act. Clyde, Ohio: A.D. Ames, 1879, 5. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Bruno Karklis, 2018, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Video credit: George P. Cosmatos, dir. Tombstone. Hollywood Pictures, 1993. Fair use of a 20-second clip to illustrate the topic under discussion.
