Imagining Tombstone

The Town Too Tough to Die

Kara L. McCormack

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780700622238
  9780700622238
• eBook ISBN:
  9780700622740
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

When prospector “Ed” Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all he’d find would be his own tombstone. What he did discover, of course, was one of the richest veins of silver in the West—a strike he wryly called Tombstone. Briefly a boomtown, in less than a decade Tombstone was fading into what, for the next half-century, looked more like a ghost town. How is it, Kara McCormack asks, that the resurrection of a few of the town’s long-dead figures, caught forever in a thirty-second shoot-out, revived the moribund Tombstone—and turned it into what the Arizona Office of Tourism today calls “equal parts Deadwood and Disney”?

A meditation on the marketing of “authenticity,” Imagining Tombstone considers this “most authentic western town in America” as the intersection of history and mythmaking, entertainment and education, the wish to preserve, the will to succeed, and the need to survive. McCormack revisits the facts behind the feud that culminated in the Earp brothers’ and Doc Holliday’s long walk to their showdown with the Clantons and McLaurys—a walk reenacted by so many actors that it became a ritual of Hollywood westerns and a staple of present-day Tombstone’s tourist offerings. Taking into account decades of preservation efforts, stories told by Hollywood, performances on the town’s streets, the fervor of Earp historians and western history buffs, and global notions of the West, Imagining Tombstone shows how the town’s tenacity depends on far more than a “usable past.” If Tombstone is “The Town Too Tough to Die,” it is also, as this edifying and entertaining book makes clear, the place where authentic history and its counterpart in popular culture reveal their lasting and lucrative hold on the public imagination.

1

Making History

Modern-day Tombstone, Arizona, seems like a contradiction in terms. Billing itself as a town stopped in time—in 1881, the most famous, and many would argue most important, year of the town’s past—the town acts out its history on a daily basis to tourists who come to the historic district to experience and relive the fantasy of the Wild West. Make-believe shoot-’em-ups, barroom brawls, and public drunkenness keep the tourists entertained, as do the reenactments of the “Gunfight at the OK Corral” and other street performances that go on each day. There is history there—after all, the battle outside the OK Corral is an actual historic event, and the town is a historic landmark district, designated by the US Department of the Interior in 1961 as a “nationally significant historic place,” one “possess[ing] exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.”¹ But history in and of itself appears almost secondary. While it is important to tourists and residents alike—acting to legitimize the town’s very existence—the performance, the entertainment, seems to trump history at least partially, if not altogether. As one cowboy performer outside the OK Corral remarked to a tourist walking by: “This is Tombstone, there’s no history here!”²

Indeed, though fashioned after itself in the 1880s, Tombstone has the feel of a western movie set, one in which performances and reenactments draw thousands of visitors on an annual basis. But Tombstone’s history and its performance are contingent on each other, and the two must coexist to ensure that the town survives. Tombstone is only 4.3 square miles, with the Tombstone historic landmark district occupying only forty-two acres of that land at the town’s center. But the historic landmark district is also the central business district, one that promotes tchotchkes as enthusiastically as it does historic spaces. Gunfights and brawls, performances of public drunkenness and subversion define the streets of Tombstone, both within the popular imagination and in this living monument to the Old West.

One block from the main street of Tombstone’s historic district stands a building that many believe is one of the few places that present the town’s “true” history to visitors: the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park. Through preservation efforts in the 1950s, the building was salvaged from destruction, turned into a museum, and designated a state park in 1959. In 2010 the Arizona State Parks Board voted to close the courthouse due to state budget shortfalls. Acknowledging that this site represents what many in town believe is the most authentic articulation of Tombstone’s history, and with a keen understanding of the importance of that history to the town’s existence, Tombstone officials worked diligently with the state to prevent the closing of the museum, and operations were transferred to the town in April of that year.

The courthouse museum is the site of decades-long efforts to preserve and tell Tombstone’s history and, more recently, is central in debates around the importance of heritage tourism in Arizona. The museum also symbolizes the durability of Tombstone and its efforts to tell its history to visitors, while its location off the main street of the historic district also represents the peripheral yet imperative role “authentic” history plays in the town’s survival. The history of the courthouse museum—as both courthouse and museum, as vendor of “true” history within its walls while performative history goes on without—underscores the imperatives of economics and heritage history to Tombstone. It is important to explore the different ways Tombstone’s history is told both inside the museum and outside on the town’s streets, with performance, romance, and museumification. Through this discussion, we begin to understand the ways the different approaches to representing the historical narrative are important to the visitors, to townspeople, and to the town itself.

This chapter will first take us on a tour of the historic district, pointing to the main tourist attractions as one drives southeast along Arizona State Route 80 and walks onto Allen Street, Tombstone’s central business, historic, and tourist district, where performances and souvenir shops charm visitors. It will then take us to the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park, the site many believe offers the most neutral and accurate representation of Tombstone’s past. The tension that exists between what is deemed “authentic” history and entertainment and the centrality of both to Tombstone’s ongoing survival are also the focus of this chapter.

Tombstone’s Historic Landmark District

Called “a living testament to the Old West” and known as “the Town Too Tough to Die,” Tombstone, Arizona, is off the beaten path: visitors must drive twenty-five miles south of I-10 from Benson, Arizona, on Arizona State Route 80 through the small town of St. David and the vast beauty of the desert landscape to get there. It is a destination—not merely a place one visits on the way to somewhere else (although many do go further south to Bisbee, another mining town that has marketed its past). Arriving in Tombstone is like being transported into another time, 1880s Tombstone—through a combination of history and kitsch, heritage site and entertainment. Tourists visit Tombstone to experience how life was in this Old West mining town, and Tombstone may be one of the best extant examples of that historical time period. Historic sites intermingle with performative displays, all of which serve to set such locations apart, as sociologist John Urry argues, to mark them as distinct from the modern and make real notions of the rustic and wild Old West.³

The brown sign on the outskirts of Tombstone declaring the town a historic landmark proclaims the site significant. Signs like this direct the tourist gaze to “features of landscape or townscape which separate them off from everyday experience.”⁴ Urry and Adrian Franklin both argue that part of the pleasure of the touristic experience is the encounter with something completely beyond or outside the familiar.⁵ At the same time, tourists arrive at these spaces with some expectation “constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices,” including television, film, literature, and magazines—all of which, as we will see, contribute to the atmosphere of Tombstone’s historic district. Indeed, Tombstone is both out of the ordinary and the actualization of tourists’ manufactured ideas about the late nineteenth-century Old West supplied by the popular media for generations.

Before arriving in the historic district, SR 80 passes Boothill Graveyard, one of the most popular places in Tombstone that blend the historic with the entertaining. As it says in the “Descriptive list of the more than 250 graves” brochure that they give out at the Boothill gift shop, “Because of the many violent deaths of the early days, the cemetery became known as Boothill Graveyard. . . . Buried here are outlaws with their victims, suicides, and hangings, legal and otherwise, along with the hardy citizens and refined element of Tombstone’s first days.” Originally known as Tombstone Graveyard, the site was neglected after the town built the new Tombstone City Cemetery on West Allen Street in 1884. In the 1920s the city took on the project of restoring the graveyard to its original state. It was renamed Boothill Graveyard after Boot Hill Cemetery in Dodge City, Kansas, which had been attracting tourists for years.⁶ While the cemetery was reconstructed and named in a conscious effort to bring tourists to Tombstone, the graveyard is real (on its website, it states “actual graveyard”), and many of the people who were buried there have marked graves. The original wooden grave markers were prone to deterioration because of the temperature and high winds, so the markers were replaced in the 1940s with steel replicas. In 2012 the city requested the markers be replaced again with replicas made of wood to make them seem more “authentic.”⁷ John Heith, lynched by an angry mob in 1884, is buried here, as is Marshal Fred White, killed by Curly Bill Brocius in 1880. The three men killed behind the OK Corral in 1881—Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury, and Tom McLaury—are also all buried at Boothill Graveyard. The fact that for decades the site was uncared for underscores how secondary the gunfight was to the history and public identity of the town prior to the 1930s.

Tourists pour into the cemetery grounds to roam among the graves. They follow the guidebook with names and descriptions of everyone in the cemetery, taking pictures of markers possibly of someone with the same last name or of all the “Unknowns” (which one visitor joked must be the “Smith” of the Southwest). In fact, despite the literal morbidity of the site, people pose and laugh as much as they do at any other attraction in town. Some of the gravesites are marked with small crosses with a name and a short description, such as “Miles Sweeney, Murdered” and “May Doody, Diphtheria.” Others have full headstones, a few with unconventional descriptions that are the focus of many photographs. One marker reads, “Here lies George Johnson, hanged by mistake. 1882. He was right, we was wrong, but we strung him up and now he’s gone.” Another reads, “Here lies Lester Moore, four slugs from a .44. No Les, no more.”⁸ The Lester Moore headstone is by far the most popular, and has been commodified for purchase in the gift shop on the cemetery grounds as salt and pepper shakers, banks, sew-on patches, magnets, key chains, T-shirts, shot glasses, mugs, and baseball caps.

Boothill Graveyard received the Readers’ Choice award from True West magazine for Best Historical Cemetery of the West in 2014.⁹ But like other sites in Tombstone, and Tombstone in general, Boothill is variously viewed by visitors as authentic and inauthentic, as historical and artificial. One traveler commented that the site is “restored but less authentic.” He went on to say that he expected the site would be run down with “broken tombstones and half dug graves” (perhaps like the suspended decay at Bodie State Park that DeLyser discusses) but instead found it “very clean and well organized,” which took “some of the appeal away.” In regard to the eccentric—and historically accurate—epitaphs, he wasn’t sure “if these were authentic or not.” Another visitor described the site as too commercial, asserting that the “rhymes on the grave markers” made it all seem “a little too ‘touristy.’” While another sightseer wanted to “commend the folks who have done what they can to preserve this historic site and still make it available to the public,” adding that her experience “felt as authentic as one could reasonably expect,” yet another guest declared, “There was no hint of history left in this place.”¹⁰

Further along SR 80 toward the historic district is the renovated Wyatt Earp House, outside of which stands an impressive bronze statue of Wyatt Earp that was commissioned by the house’s owners and unveiled at a “major event” in November 2008. Sculpted by artist Tim Trask and called “Stepping into Legend,” the statue, according to the press release of the event, “shows Wyatt Earp poised to take that first stride toward the notorious OK Corral, where the most famous Old West gun battle took place.” Romance was used to both create the statue and describe it in the press release, which states that the bronze Wyatt’s “steely eyes are sharply focused with courage and determination. No other depiction of Wyatt Earp is as haunting or as evocative as Trask’s timeless bronze sculpture.”¹¹ Ironically, because it is not situated within the historic district, the house is easy to miss. And while the interior has been renovated and some furnishings arranged for the appearance of authenticity, the space is used as an art gallery for local artists attempting to capture the allure and wildness of Old Tombstone and the events of the gunfight rather than as a museumized site highlighting the ways Wyatt Earp and his common-law wife, Celia Ann Mattie Blaylock, may have lived. The home does not get a lot of foot traffic according to its owner, and the statue of Wyatt was meant to draw more people to the site.¹² That objective has not yet been fully realized.

Map of Tombstone Historic District given out to visitors, 2014. (Courtesy of Janice Hendricks, Tombstone Information, Tombstoneweb.com)

Just a few blocks away from the Wyatt Earp House is Tombstone’s National Historic Landmark District, lying between Fremont Street and East Toughnut Street and South Third Street and South Sixth Street. Allen Street was closed off to drivers from Third Street to Sixth Street in 2004, again marking it as a tourist site, both historical and consumer-driven. There are horse-drawn carriages that provide tours to the town’s landmarks and attractions and a lesson about their historical significance. On either side of Allen Street are wooden sidewalks and wooden and brick buildings reminiscent of the Old West. There are also metal markers erected in 2009 that offer brief histories of the buildings that line the streets. There are a number of saloons, some of which are historical, like Big Nose Kate’s (originally the Grand Hotel), named for Mary Katherine Horony Cummings, the common-law wife of John “Doc” Holliday; and the Crystal Palace, rebuilt and named in July 1882 after the building saw total destruction by fire in May of that year. Others are modern, such as Doc Holliday’s Saloon, opened in 2011 by the owner of Six Gun City, which burned down in 2010.¹³ Visitors meander in and out of gun stores; smoke shops; photography studios where they can get sepia-toned photos of themselves dressed in period costume with “wanted” stamped across the top; and a plethora of shops selling turquoise and silver jewelry, “western” wear, and the typical tourist souvenirs (postcards, shot glasses, T-shirts, mugs, key chains, magnets, etc.). Depending on the day, the street is bustling with tourists clamoring for space along the wooden planks to people watch, eat ice cream and fudge, read the Tombstone Epitaph (a souvenir reprint of the original 1881 reports of the “Gunfight at the OK Corral”), and take pictures of the scene and of the locals dressed in period costume who walk among the visitors.

It is not unusual to see people dressed in period costume—as lawmen, gunslingers, maybe outlaws, or members of the ladies’ auxiliary. In fact, one reenactor told me how imperative he feels it is that all the locals dress in period costume.¹⁴ Casey, who works at the Visitors’ Center, agrees. She says that people come to Tombstone with certain expectations, and it’s up to the locals to oblige them. And most, it seems, do. Three men walking along the wooden sidewalk on Allen Street wearing black dusters, bow ties, and “gunfighter” hats said that while they volunteer as performers at the OK Corral, they dress this way because this is just how they dress. They claim that the people walking around town in 1880s costume are locals who actually dress and behave as though they live in 1880s Tombstone (although, of course, there is electricity and running water in twenty-first-century Tombstone). These men had all only recently moved to the city: one is a retired schoolteacher, one a recent high school graduate from Tucson, and one a New Englander who teaches at the local high school. All arrived within the previous three years.¹⁵ All first visited as tourists and decided to stay, extending their touristic experiences, one might say, by actually becoming part of the touristic experience—representing sociologist Adrian Franklin’s idea of tourism being infused in the everyday. They also unreservedly exemplify Hal Rothman’s conception of the neonative, those who come to a particular western place as tourists and then transform themselves into locals, even becoming the most vocal defenders of the touristic ideal and promoters of the space to future visitors.¹⁶ Many Tombstonians were once tourists, and in many ways, they still are—at least in the way they continue to experience the site. Franklin argues that tourism is the space in which “fantasy has become an important social practice” and that “the everyday world is increasingly indistinguishable from the touristic world.”¹⁷ Indeed, tourism to a great extent is absorbed into the daily life of Tombstone. Former tourists reenact or perform events from Tombstone’s past for other tourists. In Tombstone the public, touristic identity is in fact the identity of the city and the people themselves.

OK Corral, 2013. (Courtesy of Nancy Sosa, History Raiders Research and Consultation)

We see an interaction and intermingling of identities at the Crystal Palace Saloon, a historic site and favorite watering hole for tourists and locals alike. A man in a cowboy hat sidles up to the bar so he can ask one of the barmaids—who are dressed like showgirls and women of the evening, in feather boas, bustiers, and lots of lace—for a T-shirt that says “Crystal Palace: Good Whiskey and T...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Making History
• 2 Preservation and Performance
• 3 The Earp Legend in Film
• 4 The Global Mythic West
• 5 Historians’ Gunfight
• Epilogue: Vigilantism and the Border
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover