Tombstone...The Town Too Tough to Die

Our friend, Jenna, was here visiting this weekend and what better welcome to Arizona than to head to the Wild, Wild West. We went down to Tombstone on Saturday, which was a blast. The whole town really is reminiscent of the the wild west and there were many...and I mean many...cowboys! This was the main street in Tombstone.

We went on the underground mine tour of the first silver mine found in Tombstone (so named b/c Ed Sheifflin, the guy who discovered the area, was told that he was only digging his own grave by heading west). It is truly unbelievable to see how the first miners worked....hammering away at rock with a chisel lit only occasionally by candlelight...they apparently blew out the candles once they had started a hole in the rock to save them.

I was super excited to visit the Bird Cage Theater. This is the only surviving original building in Tombstone and as you walk through you can still spot many-a-bullet hole in the walls, paintings, bar, etc from the days of Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and other notorious cowboys. The theater is now set up as a museum, but many of the structures/objects remain in their original location within the bldg, such as the bar, piano in front of the stage, and poker table (where the longest poker game in history supposedly took place). It was cool to see the "bird cages" that overlooked the theater where men were quite entertained by the ladies of the theater...there were also essentially brothel rooms in the basement.

Uh-oh...they caught Brian and hung him...but he looks like he died happy with his big bottle of booze! This was taken in Big Nose Kate's Saloon. We had lunch here and later it was the location of a good old fashioned (and unstaged!) barfight complete with police and a guy who had his whole shirt torn off. We found it amusing that the police SUV's have the town phrase "The Town too Tough to Die" written on the side.

This was the reinactment that we went to of the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral between the Earps and Doc Holliday against the Clantons and some other family name that I can't remember.

We had a fantastic day. It's truly awesome to stand in locations and buildings that the people in history books have stood.