Tombstone -
Yup, it's real. And, yes, the fight at the OK corral among the Earps, Clantons and others actually happened. Boot Hill cemetery (there are several Boot Hills in other towns and cities) is certainly real and kept up well enough.
We're moving South and East of Tucson to find Tombstone. Technically speaking, and I DO love technically speaking, we would approach Tombstone by getting of Interstate 10 West bound at the first Bensen exit and picking up state route 80. And all one has to do is to follow 80 right in to Tombstone.
Here's a picture or two of Tombstone:
If you can make it out, there is a chain across the roadin the picture on the left. It marks the end of the current town of Tombstone. Beyond that point, the streets are dirt and the old buildings are what you see and enter. Big Nosed Kate's saloon is one of the favorite watering holes, just as it was back in the day...The people you meet will be dressed in the wear of the late 1800s (well, not the tourists, but people who live and work in Old Tombstone), and you can get a feel for what the town was like back then.
My own personal feeling is one of sand, wind, and dust, not to mention blinding sun. This section of Arizona is flat. As in, in the town of Willcox, which is further down I-10 toward New Mexico, there is less than 1 degree of slope from one side of the town to the other. That, my friends, is flatter than most self respecting pancakes. Tombstone has a little more topography, but not a lot.
The fight at the OK corral is relived every day in a closed off area behind walls: it's the only part of Old Tombstone that one is required to pay for before entering. Since guns make a lot of noise (even guns loaded with blanks) I elected not to go in and relive the fight. Instead, I puttered about looking in stores and talking to people and generally staying out of the sun.
Then I and the two people I was with went to Boot Hill...
There is a museum of sorts on the original site of Boot Hill: it has touristy things and also brochures about who is buried where and some of their stories. Because this was the cemetery for the whole town until back in the 1980s or so.
The day was like many in this part of Arizona, as I said, and the little breeze that swirled dust and twigs around as we walked toward the gate of Boot HIll did nothing so much as to dry out our mouths and make me sneeze from the sand (which is almost dust in this part of the state). We looked at as many of the tombstones and markers as possible as we walked along the flank of the hill. The markers, most of which were originally made of wood, have been either maintained as they were in the 1800s or, in the cases where they wood is so far gone that there's no way to use it any more, recreated to look exactly like the original marker.
The Clantons and the McGlaurys are together in one plot:
as are 5 men who were "Legally Hanged"
Here's the tombstone erected in 1945 for one John Swain. He was a former slave who moved to Tombstone in 1879 and lived there for te rest of his life. The soldiers at Fort Huachucha (Wah-CHU-kah) and the Friends of Tombstone raised the marker for him, noting that he was a "worthy pioneer".
There are all sorts of folk buried in Boot Hill, and it provides a fairly clear picture of the population. Entirely too many little tykes (the mortality rate was sky high), people from China, folk good and bad were laid to rest here.
And people walking around could feel it - this isn't a tourist attraction in the sense of having your picture taken leaning on a tombstone. It's a place where lives, either brief or extended, are noted. And it's treated appropriately by the folk who "come to see" and see more than they had thought when they arrived.
I'm going to sign off for now (must go to work), but I shall return a la Douglas MacArthur, because there's always Kartchner Caverns (a living cavern) and St. David, and the White Dove of the Desert, and Kitt Peak... (smiles and pulls out of the parking lot in Tombstone to head back the way I came...).
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