While the saying “I’m your huckleberry” carried some wallop as an insult when issued by the likes of Doc Holliday in the days of the Old West, today the phrase has not only lost its power to taunt an enemy but it seems many are unsure of what it means to be a huckleberry.

The saying may have made its first appearance in Walter Noble Burn’s 1927 book Tombstone, said True West magazine editor Bob Boze Bell. But most people are more likely to remember Val Kilmer delivering the line as Doc Holliday in the 1993 movie Tombstone.

“It’s an old term, a southern put-down,” Bell said. “It’s like saying, ‘If somebody wants to fight with me, I’m your huckleberry.’ It means I’m your man.”

True West magazine receives many inquires about the meaning of the phrase, Bell said. From what he has uncovered, the saying was popularly used in the 1800s along with others like, “You are a daisy if you do,” which also has origins with the infamous gunslinger Holliday.

While the daisy line gained so much popularity that variations on it commonly appeared in newspaper headlines in the 1870s and 1880s, “huckleberry” didn’t have the same gravitas, Bell said.

“(The saying) doesn’t show up anywhere in the original inquest to the O.K. corral,” Bell said. “The first time we can track it to the Earp story is in the Burns book, which is unfortunately pretty late.”

According to the Dictionary of American Slang, the use of huckleberry as an epithet originates in 1895. The term can be used as a very mind and affectionate insult describing a “sweet agreeable person,” who consequently can be duped.

Tombstone historian Ben Traywick said he traces the origins of the phrase to the American South where the huckleberry bush is common.

“The huckleberry is a small version of the blueberry,” Traywick said. “It grows wild in the mountains of east Tennessee and Georgia.”

“It’s just a saying they had. Like the plant, it’s prevalent in that part of the country.”

Still, others like Tombstone resident Russ Jennings said the saying has nothing to do with the plant.

“I don’t think it was originally huckleberry,” Jennings said. “I think it was ‘hackle-berry.’ In the Old West a hackle-berry was a pallbearer.” Hackle-berry, or hackle bearer, is understandable considering the handles on caskets are also known as hackles.

Jennings said he speculates it could have been a thick southern accent that has thrown people off all these years.

“It was picked up as huckleberry instead of hackle-berry,” Jennings said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense in the context it was used.”

“It makes sense for him to say, ‘I’ll be your hackle-berry, I’ll burry you…If you mess with me, I’ll put you in the ground.’”

Jennings said he first came across the term as a kid reading Louis L’Amour’s cowboy adventure stories.

He added that writers like L’Amour and Zane Grey came to Tombstone to do research for their books. L’Amour, he said, spent time at the Bird Cage Theatre listening to locals regale stories of the Old West.

According to Bell, author Robert Burns also came to Tombstone to gain inspiration while writing his account of Doc Holliday.

“He did talk to the old-timers,” Bell said. “Somebody probably told it (the saying) to him. That’s where it came from.”