Tombstone – Deadliest Town in the West
This is my tenth and final post from a November, 2024 trip to Arizona and it will feature one of the most famous and deadly towns in the American West, the very aptly named Tombstone. In the last post we visited the truly amazing pinnacle rock formations of Chiricahua National Monument. Aside from being a place of great natural beauty, it was also a place of great violence where the Chiricahua Apache leaders Cochise and Geronimo fought both the incoming white settlers and the United States Army including the legendary all black unit known as the Buffalo Soldiers. In this post the action will move only about 60 miles (97 kms.) west to the frontier town of Tombstone where the violence continued, but this time mostly between ‘the law’ and ‘the outlaw’ with the shootout at OK Corral being the transcending event that still reverberates to this day. This is a place I have long wanted to visit and I hope you’ll join Alison and I as we explore the town and its famous Boothill.
However, before we get to Tombstone let’s make a quick stop at another one of Arizona’s famous frontier towns, Bisbee
Bisbee
Writing this after having visited both Bisbee and Tombstone, I can say that you could not get a greater contrast between two places located only 24 miles (39 kms.) apart. The photo above shows Bisbee’s main street lined with multi-storied buildings, hosting a variety of businesses, most aimed at the tourist market. Keep it in mind when I put up a photo of Tombstone’s main street.
Bisbee was founded in 1880 when the fabulous mineral lode known as the Copper Queen Mine was discovered nearby. This was one of the greatest deposits of copper ever found and you can see the massive open pit as you drive into town from the south side on State Road 80.
It was mined for an astounding 105 years, something almost unheard of in a business where mines are found, towns are built, the ore runs out and soon you’ve got a ghost town. Not so in the case of Bisbee, which after the closure of the mine in 1985 reinvented itself as a tourist town with one of the main attractions being an underground tour of some of the 157 miles of tunnels that were built to extract the copper, gold and silver that lay underneath the town.
Today Bisbee has an eclectic mix of art galleries, antique stores, restaurants and other interesting places to visit including the Mining Museum in front of which where you’ll find this mine train that once hauled the ore to the surface.
Although we didn’t stay here, we did take a tour of the once majestic Copper Queen Hotel which is the oldest continuously run hotel in Arizona and alleged to be haunted.
This is a photo of Alison on the third floor balcony which provides a nice view of the town below.
In my opinion the most interesting building in Bisbee, of which there are many, is the striking Covenant Presbyterian Church which would not look out of place in Scandinavia.
So, if you are planning a visit to Tombstone, don’t overlook Bisbee which has a totally different feel to it.
Tombstone
This is the main street of old Tombstone and it looks more like a movie set than a real town. Contrast it to the photo of Bisbee’s main street. It is in fact a National Historic Landmark District and has been since 1961. Although today there is no question that it is primarily aimed at the tourist market and some might call it a ‘tourist trap’ as it definitely has some of those elements, it also has some genuine historical buildings such as the Bird Cage Theatre, site of the longest running poker game in history. 24 hours a day from 1881 to 1889 a poker game with a $1,000.00 buy in was played here. Participants included Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Diamond Jim Brady, George Hearst and Adolphus Busch. Some of the most famous acts of the day played here and it also doubled as a brothel.
There is also the former Cochise County Courthouse which is now, somewhat bizarrely, an Arizona State Park.
And of course, the most famous building in Tombstone, the OK Corral where the controversial gunfight never actually took place, but rather in a vacant lot nearby. Today you can pay to see a recreation of the gun battle inside the corral or take a stagecoach ride through old Tombstone that passes by it.
So why did Tombstone and Bisbee end up taking such different paths?
It all started with this man, Edward Schiefflin, who founded and named Tombstone in 1879. He was a prospector in the days when prospecting could make a man fabulously rich if he ‘found the mother lode’. When Schiefflin came to the area in 1879 looking for gold or silver, the Apaches were still a force to be reckoned with and he was told by soldiers at nearby Fort Huachuca that all he would find was his own tombstone.
Turns out the soldiers were wrong as Schiefflin did find several very rich deposits of silver that led to a rush of other prospectors to the area and Tombstone became the most famous boom town in American history. It went from a population of around 100 in 1880 to over 14,000 seven years later and was actually larger than San Francisco for a while. What separated Tombstone from nearby Bisbee which was also booming at the same time was the nature of the mineral deposits and who owned them. In Bisbee there was the colossal Copper Queen mine, owned by the giant mineral corporation Phelps Dodge corporation which ran the place essentially as a company town and controlled most aspects of civic life including law enforcement.
Tombstone on the other hand had many much smaller deposits than the Copper Queen and there was the real potential that anyone could pull off what Schiefflin had done and become rich overnight. This attracted prospectors from around the world and just as importantly those who catered to them and those who preyed on them. At its heyday Tombstone had 110 saloons, over a dozen gambling halls and enough brothels to satisfy the needs of everyone who needed to use their services. In addition there was already a group of former Confederate soldiers known as The Cowboys who specialized in rustling cattle from ranchers across the Mexican border operating in the area. The newly created wealth from the mines around Tombstone made for a much more lucrative target than cattle rustling and robbery and murder escalated to a scale unseen before or since in the United States.
Matters really came to a head on October 28, 1880 when Tombstone’s first elected Marshal, Fred White was shot, apparently by accident while making an arrest, by Curly Bill Brocius. Brocius and other members of The Cowboys had been carousing and literally ‘shooting up the town’ which led White and his then deputy Wyatt Earp to disarm them. He died two days later and matters escalated from there. This plaque beside the Bird Cage Theatre marks the spot where that shooting took place, but doesn’t mention that White was not killed instantly or that Brocius was acquitted of murder.
For the rest of the story we need to go to the most famous cemetery in the American West, Boothill.
Boothill
On the outskirts of Tombstone you’ll find a small privately owned plot of land that was the town’s first cemetery. Boothill is a generic term first used in Hays, Kansas and later applied to a lot of western cemeteries, none more famous than this one in Tombstone. In use only for a few years, it contains the remains of less than three hundred people of which around 250 are in marked graves in eleven rows. The admission fee is $6.00 and with that you get a pamphlet with a list of all the marked graves and more information about a lot of the deaths. You can see a digital copy here.
Don’t be surprised if you spend as much time in Boothill as you did in old Tombstone. It’s really a fascinating place.
This is the grave of Marshall Fred White which triggered the events that led to the Gunfight at OK Corral almost a year later to the day.
After White’s death Virgil Earp became the town marshal and he along with his two brothers Wyatt and Morgan and family friend Doc Holiday effectively became the face of the law in Tombstone. The death of Marshal White while attempting to disarm a number of The Cowboys prompted the tow council to pass a law banning the carrying of firearms within town limits. They apparently had more sense 144 years ago than they do today, because you can now rent a real gun to wear around town.
But I digress.
The outlawing of open carry in Tombstone did not stop any of The Cowboys from doing so and on October 26, 1881 Virgil Earp decided he was going to enforce the law and disarm five members of the gang who were in town. Facing the Earp brothers and Doc Holiday were Billy Claiborne, Tom and Frank McLaury and Ike and Billy Clanton. Thirty shots were fired and in seconds both McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton lay dead. The photo below shows their graves and one marker added by Ike Clanton stating that they were murdered.
Ike Clanton, who had run away before the shooting started, did succeed in having the lawmen charged, but all were set free after a preliminary hearing finding that they had acted lawfully.
But that did not end the feud between the Earps and The Cowboys. On December 28 Virgil was shot three times in the back and permanently crippled. On March 18, 1882 Morgan Earp was assassinated when a gunmen fired at him from an alleyway. Neither shooting resulted in any charges as The Cowboys essentially all alibied themselves. That left only Wyatt and he decided that the niceties of the law was not the answer to taming The Cowboys. He formed a posse and went after any member of The Cowboys he could find and in the next two weeks four members. of The Cowboys were slain, including Curly Bill Brocius, the man who had shot Marshal White.
Wyatt and Doc Holiday knew it was time to ‘get out of Dodge’ and they both moved on. By the time he died in Los Angeles in 1929 Wyatt Earp was truly a living legend and The Gunfight at OK Corral a major part of the aura of the Old West.
What is really amazing about the graves in Boothill is that they almost all involved violent death. There are at least fifty murder victims, a dozen or so legal hangings, several suicides, fatal mining accidents, illegal lynchings and more. Let’s take a closer look at just a few. You can’t help but laugh at reading this elegy to poor George Johnson for whom the outcome was no laughing matter.
Johnson made the mistake of buying a stolen horse from the man who stole it, thinking he was the legitimate owner. It was really true that there was a time you could be executed for stealing a horse.
Colonel John Van Houten was a Canadian from British Columbia who came to Tombstone to search for silver and instead was found beaten to death by a rock to the head at his cabin outside of town. The culprit was alleged to be Frank Stillwell, the man also blamed for killing Morgan Earp. Stillwell in turn was killed by Wyatt Earp in Tucson not long after.
One of the worst cases of violence in Arizona in the 1880’s was the Bisbee Massacre in which four innocent bystanders including a pregnant woman were killed by five outlaws who thought they were robbing the Copper Queen Mine payroll, but it turned out they had the wrong day. All five were hunted down, tried for murder and executed in Tombstone in March 1884. This is their graves. But that’s not the end of the story.
John Heath was a former lawman turned saloon keeper who had helped plan, but did not participate in the robbery that triggered the Bisbee Massacre. He was found out and sentenced to life in prison, which as you can tell from the grave marker did not go down well with the folks in Bisbee. They created a lynch mob and took Heath out of his cell in Tombstone and hung him from a telegraph pole.
There are a number of China Marys in Old West lore, none more famous than Ah Lum who was a very successful and respected Tombstone businesswoman running restaurants, saloons, brothels and opium dens. Who says your business has to be legal to be respected? She was portrayed in an episode of the TV show Wyatt Earp by legendary Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong.
Some stories are more likely myths than factual such as the one behind this grave marker. Margarita and Gold Dollar were real prostitutes who did their business out of the Bird Cage Theatre, but whether or not Gold Dollar, in a fit of jealousy over a man called Billy Milgreen, stabbed Margarita in the neck with a stiletto while she sat on his lap, is not backed up by any contemporary evidence.
Lester Moore was a Wells Fargo office clerk who had the misfortune of delivering a damaged package to one Hank Dunston who showed his disapproval by shooting Moore four times in the chest. Along with George Johnson he does have the honour of having one of the most well known epitaphs in Boothill.
I could go on and on as there are so many great stories about how one came to be buried in the Boothill at Tombstone. Just the names of some of the deceased are noteworthy – Red River Tom, Stinging Lizard, Three-fingered Dunlap, Freddie Fuss, Rook, Happy Jack, Dutch Anne and Kansas Kid to name just a few. But it’s time to head back to Tucson and tomorrow start the long drive back to Nova Scotia.
However, there will be some interesting stops along the way starting with Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis. Hope to see you there.