Too tough to die

Too tough to die

Tombstone -- the “town too tough to die.”  You can visualize ladies with long dresses, ruffled petticoats peeking out from underneath; perhaps you can see a lady of the evening hanging out of a window calling sweetly to a cowboy; maybe you can hear the cowboys with their spurs jingling on their boots as they walk across a dirt street, or you can hear the hooves and see the horses pulling wagons or a stagecoach, with the smell of horse sweat wafting along in the heat.

The stagecoaches were offering guided rides about town.

 

Tombstone – a place of gun fights, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and all the bloody history, the home of Boothill Graveyard, 1878 – 1884, where the first pioneers -- housewives, miners, gamblers, cowboys and many more are laid to rest.   

We spent the evening and most of a day wandering the streets, partaking of Tombstone, seeing stagecoaches and wagons pulled by horses and mules, seeing the duster-clad men toting hog irons on their hips, some of them waiting to participate in the gunfight at the OK Corral, and us drinking a Tombstone Sarsaparilla.

Tourists have photos taken with gunslingers, lawmen or marshals.  It's an everyday occurrence in Tombstone.

Tombstone Sarasparilla ... it hits the spot.

And there were a few other things to photograph that were just interesting.

The reenactment of the OK Corral gunfight did not draw our attention on this day.  We preferred to meet Johnnie, the man responsible for the Tombstone Sarsaparilla, chatting with him and seeing his dog, Jennie, who looked like she may have had one too many of the drinks herself.  But she was a good watchdog.

Johnnie removed the cap for me.

 

Up and down the main street we went, wandering by and in some of the touristy shops selling everything you could imagine that is connected to an old west town.  Museums, Big Nose Kate’s 1880s Saloon.

Big Nosed Kate's.

Just in case there were any doubt.

The piano in Big Nosed Kate's. 

It was all great fun to look at, knowing that what we were seeing was not a town built as a Hollywood set.  It’s a real town with real buildings from the 1880s and a very real history.  We settled on ice cream. 

There’s so much to see in this town, but we were drawn to the graveyard.  The graveyard has more than 250 graves.  The name Boothill came about because there were so many violent deaths. 

Some are tragic … Eva Waters, 3 months old, scarlet fever.

Delia William was the colored proprietress of a lodging house.  She committed suicide by taking arsenic.

Others are natural deaths, but most are death by unnatural causes. 

Mrs. Ah Lum had a great influence among the Chinese residents in Tombstone.  Born in China, some believed she had Tong affiliation. 

John was nearly 100 years old when he died.  He arrived in Tombstone in 1879 with the John Slaughter family and spent his life in and around Tombstone.

These two died of leprosy.

Van Houten was beaten in the face with a stone until he died  The trouble was over his mining claim that he had not recorded.

This is where the original good, bad and ugly came from … ladies, babies, suicides, outlaws and their victims.  It’s a sad tribute to mankind, but … again, a piece of history.  And I do enjoy a good cemetery, grown over in some places by the crucifixion thorn. 

Billy Clanton, Tom McLaury and Frank McLaury were murdered on the streets of Tombstone in 1881, results of the OK Corral fight which took place between the Earp Brothers with Doc Holliday and the cowboys.  Three men were killed, and three were wounded. 

More than 250 graves ... known, unknown.

And at least one that was a mistake.  George Johnson bought a stolen horse and suffered the consequences.

Dutch Annie was known as the Queen of the Red Light District.

 

And some that don't have a story.

The graveyard was the final resting place for many and after 1884 a new area was opened.  Boothill was then neglected, with much of the old cemetery going back to nature.  By the late-1920s when Boothill was in a ruin, Tombstone citizens restored it from early burial records.