Visiting Tombstone was a bit of a dog-leg in our trip, but this place has been so immortalised in our childhood consciousnesses by Hollywood that we couldn’t resist spending a few days here.
The Wild West town, like many others of its era, was a mining boom town. Silver was the prize. It was founded in 1879 and grew from a population of 100 to 14000 over 7 years. Unfortunately in the mid-1880s the mines hit the water table and although heavy duty pumps kept the mines dry for a while a fire in 1886 destroyed the pump house and the pumps and mining was abandoned. It had a hay day of a mere 7 years. The town clung on by the skin of its teeth only because it was the county seat until 1929, avoiding becoming one of the many ghost towns left behind by the mining busts, and managing to retain its Wild West flavour. It also owes its survival to the lore and legend of its most famed event: The 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral.
This was a showdown between lawmen ‘goodies’: Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan Earp and their dentist/gambling associate, Doc Holliday, who shot and killed cowboy ‘baddies’: Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton. The exact spot of the gunfight is preserved, with a mannequin mock-up of the protagonists in their various positions, but there is also a live re-enactment show of events nearby. The lead up, and fallout of this 30 second short moment in time captured the imagination of Hollywood and is the setting and backstory for at least eight movies, a few TV shows and several songs. The town is a ready-made film set. The preserved main street is made from packed earth, lined with wooden verandas, a thoroughfare for horse-drawn buggies and lots of folks were walking around dressed un-ironically as cowboys, holstered revolvers on hips. This is the only place that we have seen civilians openly carrying firearms. And it all seems entirely normal.
Our stop for two nights was a small camp right in the middle of town. It was only about 50 metres from the OK Corral and the soundtrack to our stay was Ennio Morricone spaghetti western tracks and blank gunfire from the hourly re-enactment shows. Very mood inducing. We arrived in the tail end of the rain, get wet setting up, and then the sun came out again. Normal desert winter weather was resumed. We went full ‘tourist‘ during our stay, which is the only way to go here. We went to the gunfight show, toured the OK Corral site and associated museum exhibits, saw the film and cheesy, but quite impressive and informative, revolving diorama show, walked the streets having bizarrely developed slight swaggers and ‘itchy revolver hands’, had ‘old time photos’ taken in fancy dress, shot paintballs from a revolver at man-sized targets in a shooting alley and drank at the original long mahogany bar in an establishment called ‘Big Nose Kate’s’. (The Kate in question was the prostitute and on-off girlfriend of our gunfighting dentist, Doc Holliday. ) This is definitely a destination for the ‘themed party gathering’. There are numerous stores doing Wild West costume rental and sales, although not in great numbers whilst we were here. We did, however, see a group of four grown men wandering around in lion and tiger onesies. Either a case of wrong town or wrong costumes. Best not to ask.
I wonder what all the 1880s townsfolk would have thought about the craziness of the 21st century tourism in Tombstone, but I suspect that life was a much bigger heap of bonkers back then.
Awesome photo