Tombstone, Arizona

Sunday - 4 January 2004 - Tombstone, Arizona: Since this is our third night at this ancient (yet friendly) camp ground, we thought maybe we should venture back to the touristy town center and walk the streets where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday spent their days years ago. Gee, guess what? Tombstone was a mining town! The town was founded in 1877 as a mining camp known as Goose Flats. When a prospector filed his claim at the county office, the clerks joked that the only thing he was going to find was his tombstone... so when he did strike it rich, the lucky miner named the town Tombstone. It was a thriving town, until the mines flooded and everyone cleared-out. There seems to be a pattern in these towns - fire or flood, and then everyone packs up.

Below are two street scenes of Tombstone - The Town Too Tough to Die. Big Nosed Kate was the steady girlfriend of Doc Holliday. John Holliday was a dentist, but because of a terrible cough from a terrible case of tuberculosis, he was unable to practice, so turned to gambling for income. Kate opened the first brothel in Tombstone, called a "sporting house" in a tent. Later she opened her famous saloon in the Grand Hotel. The hotel was the largest building on Allen Street and was considered the most elegant hotel in the area. But Doc Holliday became famous with his friends the Earp brothers during the famous "Gunfight at the OK Corral". In 1881 the Earp family and Holliday battled to the death with the Clanton boys. All of the Clanton boys are buried at Boothill Cemetery. Wyatt Earp said of Doc Holliday: "He was the most skillful gambler, and the nerviest, fastest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever saw." Those are the qualities I most admire in a dentist.

Big Nosed Kate's Saloon


Downtown Tombstone, Arizona

Next we visited the Bird Cage Theater. The Theater was famous in its prime as a music hall where such notables as Sarah Bernhart, Ethel Barrymore, Lillie Langtrey and even Enrico Caruso performed. It is also the site of the longest recorded poker game, which went continuously from 1881 to 1889 (8 years, 5 months and 3 days). When the mines flooded in 1889, the Birdcage also closed, but the owners covered everything and locked the building and it was reopened in 1995 as a tourist attraction. The main floor of the theater was filled with small round tables and the "cages" were on the second floor, like box seats in an opera house... except the cages were not exactly used for viewing the performances on the stage below.

A customer looks down to the theater floor from a "bird cage"


The Bird Cage Theater

The theater is now a museum with incredible artifacts from Tombstones notorious past. Photos of nearly every girl who worked in the Bird Cages are in the museum, with a little history. DT wondered how lonely the miners must have been to pay-to-party with girls named "Big Nosed Kate" or "Mustache Mary"? The rules for the girls are still posted - most the "rules" seem to be about how the management would collect their share! The museum also has the hearse used to carry every body (but 6) to Boothill Cemetery.

Boothill transportation


With such steady business, the Tombstone Undertakers
didn't need a marketing department

We had a quick lunch at the Tombstone Boarding House - a bed and breakfast that also runs a little Mexican cantina. We enjoyed ourselves quite a bit talking to the elderly cook who was from the Mexican State of Sonora, just over the border. The walls of the cantina were covered with large photographs of his home town. Delicious food.

After lunch we went up to Boothill Cemetery. When Lisa was 10, we visited the cemetery and we were surprised to see the recent improvements made to the plots. Of course, now there is a tacky gift shop, but maybe that is what the cemetery needed - a few tourist dollars to spend on the graves.

Jewish sepulcher in Boothill

There is a Jewish section at Boothill and 26 Jews are buried here. In the 1980's the Jewish area of Boothill was restored by a Yaqui Indian, Judge C. Lawrence Huerta. Huerta had been taken-in by a Jewish family while he was working (to help his tribe) in Washington, DC and decided to repay their kindness by restoring the graveyard in his home town of Tombstone.

Some of the dead buried in the main part of Boothill Cemetery are famous and some are infamous. Most are "unknown" and a few of the headstones are quite funny. Usually the graves are marked with the name of the dead and how they died. Most often they read "shot". Here are a few of the markers I found interesting:

 
The residents of Tombstone were not politically correct -
there is a large Chinese section at Boothill Cemetery.

 
Gold Dollar was a famous Bird Cage girl - she charged a gold dollar.


A view of Boothill Cemetery


Tombstone sunset

RV Park: The Tombstone RV Park