2015 Tucson: Tombstone (5/15/2015)

Friday, May 15, 2015 (continued)
From Boothill Graveyard, we entered the town of Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die. It was founded in 1877 by Ed Schieffelin during a scouting mission. He would often wander from camp looking for rocks, and was told he would only find his tombstone. Instead, Ed found silver and he named the mine The Tombstone. A town soon developed.

St Paul's Episcopal Church (1882, Gothic Revival style),
the oldest Protestant building in Arizona;
listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971

Parked and started walking.

Schieffelin Hall (1881, by Al Schieffelin),
considered the largest adobe structure still standing,
used as a theater and meeting hall

Former Jack Crabtree Livery Stable (1881) and
The San Jose (1881), Tombstone's first lodging house

The Tombstone Epitaph Building (1882),
the 2nd home of the local newspaper started in 1880 by John P Clum;
now a museum and still an active newspaper

Manual typewriter, flat-screen TV, and Washington Hand press

Safe from the Crystal Palace

5th Street wooden sidewalk

Stagecoach on Allen Street

The Crystal Palace (1882)

Folks in period dress

Tombstone cowboy (KAH)

This cowboy invited us to a shootout later in the day at one of the many saloons in town. We wouldn't be able to make it, but Karen wished him luck. He replied that, unfortunately, his demise was already scripted!

Bird Cage Theater (1881)

The Bird Cage Theater was the entertainment center of Tombstone, with stage shows, a saloon, dance hall, and gambling parlor. It is named for the curtained theater boxes that had drapes to conceal the activity within. Now it acts as the attic of Tombstone, and hosts ghost tours.

Bird Cage Theater lobby (KAH)

Steps to the "cages"

Big Nose Kate's Saloon (former Grand Hotel, rebuilt 1882);
Big Nose Kate may have been Tombstone's first prostitute,
and also a girlfriend of Doc Holliday

Karen with an Earp?

Karen with Cochise?

Allen Street, the main street of old Tombstone

The Rose Tree Inn holds the world's largest rose bush,
grown from a cutting sent from Scotland c. 1885

Maintenance-free garden

Historic home? Nope, built in 1980.

Cochise County Courthouse (1882)

OK Corral (KAH)

There is a daily noon re-creation of the Shootout at OK Corral. Perhaps the most famous event off the American Wild West, the gunfight was between lawmen Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp with Doc Holliday and outlaw cowboys Billy Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLaury. All the lawmen except Wyatt were injured, and the latter three outlaws were killed. The action actually took place on Fremont Street, a few doors from the rear entrance of OK Corral.

Tamiko with the three skeletons (KAH)

"Spring" skeletons

Old Tombstone City Hall (1882, designed by Frank Walker
in Victorian style adapted to Western Territorial),
listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972

Next: Bisbee.