Tombstone, Arizona

Seventy miles southeast of Tucson is Tombstone, a historic western city founded in 1879, and one of the last wide-open frontier boomtowns in the American Old West. In it’s heyday, the town’s mines produced $40 - $85 million in silver bullion, the largest productive silver district in Arizona. Tombstone is best known as the site of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a culmination of events that arose due to tensions between mining capitalists, ranchers, rustlers, and Confederate sympathizers. In various sites throughout the town, visitors can witness reenactments of the shootout between Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holiday (the good guys) and Ike and Billy Clanton, Billy Claiborne, and Frank and Tom McLaury (the bad guys). Various establishments throughout the town have been preserved (or recreated) to reflect the look and feel of the times, along with actors dressed in period costumes sharing historic tidbits to add to the overall atmosphere.

Just down the road from Historic Tombstone is Boothill Graveyard, used after 1883 only to bury outlaws and a few others. “Boot Hill” refers to the number of men who died with their boots on, and is the resting place of the McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton of The O.K. Coral shootout fame. Among a number of pioneer Boot Hill cemeteries in the Old West, Boothill in Tombstone is among the best-known, and it is one of the city's most popular tourist attractions. We took the time to walk through the graveyard (around 250 are interned here) and try to imagine the lives they led based on the sometimes cryptic, sometimes amusing, and sometimes quite sad inscriptions.