Tombstone History
Tombstone, Arizona is certainly one of the most famous, and infamous, mining towns in the West. When Ed Schieffelin, a scout for the U.S. Army, left Camp Huachuca to prospect in 1877, he was told that the discovery of his tombstone was more likely than precious metals. Schieffelin did find silver however, and he named his first claim the Tombstone.
More prospectors entered the area, additional claims were filed, and in 1878 around 100 people occupied the settlement of Watervale. Schieffelin and two partners formed the Tombstone Mining and Milling Company, and built a stamp mill near the San Pedro River. With the district growing, a new townsite was laid out, and in March 1879 the settlement was named Tombstone after Ed Schieffelin’s original mining claim.
The silver mines yielded ever greater riches, and Tombstone grew rapidly in response. By fall of 1879, Tombstone was a bustling camp with several thousand residents, most of which were living in tents and canvas buildings. Cochise County was formed in 1881 and Tombstone became the county seat. The telegraph arrived early that same year.
In March 1880, the Tombstone Mining and Milling company was sold to investors from Philadelphia. A couple months later it was reported that the Tough Nut mine, which was one of the mines acquired by the Eastern investors, was mining silver ore as rich as $22,000 a ton. By 1881, 6,000 miners were working the numerous rich silver mines of the district.
In the early 1880s, Tombstone’s silver mines generated immense wealth, and the thousands of miners earning four dollars a day spent freely in the town’s saloons, gambling halls, restaurants, and stores. Although numerous films have portrayed Tombstone, none have truly captured the frenetic energy that must have filled the streets each day in what was then Arizona’s largest city.
As with most early boomtowns in the West, fires took a heavy toll on the city of Tombstone. The first fire on June 22, 1881, said to have started when a cigar ignited a barrel of whiskey in the Arcade Saloon, destroyed 66 businesses in the eastern half of the business district. Not even a year later, on May 25, 1882, a fire started in a Chinese laundry which burned most of the business district, destroying over 100 buildings.
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
Prior to the discovery of silver at Tombstone, Arizona was a remote and lawless territory. Bandits and horse thieves were common, and many of them were loosely organized into a gang called the Cowboys. The Cowboys considered a large area around Tombstone their territory, so when thousands of miners and prospectors started arriving in a short period of time, conflict was inevitable.
The now famous lawmen James, Virgil, and Wyatt Earp were early residents of Tombstone, arriving in December 1879. Virgil had been hired as Deputy U.S. Marshal for eastern Pima County, and in June 1881 he is also appointed as Tombstone’s town marshal.
By 1881, the Cowboy gang had been linked to numerous murders and robberies, including the attempted holdup of a stagecoach carrying silver bullion near Contention City. Virgil Earp, accompanied by his deputy brother Wyatt Earp, arrested several suspected Cowboy members, setting the two factions on a collision course that would culminate in the most infamous gunfight in the history of the American West.
The Gunfight at the OK Corral occurred on October 26, 1881, between members of the Cowboy gang on one side, and the three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on the other. Three Cowboys were killed, and Virgil Earp, Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday were wounded.
The details of this event span almost two years, and have been covered more extensively in the article Aftermath of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.
Tombstone in 1885 - As Described By Shorty Harris
Shorty Harris, discoverer of Nevada’s famous Bullfrog district and a legendary prospector of Death Valley, spent time in Tombstone in 1885. In a 1931 interview conducted just a few years before his death, Harris recalled the town as he remembered it during its waning boom years. The following account is drawn from that interview.
In ’85, I went from Frisco, now another ghost town, to Tombstone, and she was a beauty in those days. I’ve read quite a bit lately about some of the old-timers going back there and staging some of the exciting things that were pulled off 45 years ago.
They would have to go some if they made it as lively as it was then, for Tombstone was almost as hell-roaring a place as Leadville. The boys were all decorated with six-guns and believe me, they knew how to use them. The handiest on the draw stayed in town, but those that were too slow made a one-way trip to Boot-Hill.
Killings were so common that the Tombstone Epitaph, the paper didn’t have much to say about them — just a short paragraph for each one.
And the streets had names that sounded interesting — there was Toughnut street and Trigger alley, and both of them were good places to make a start for Boot-Hill. That camp had plenty of musicians, men who could play mighty well on the Winchester violina fiddle that can be tuned up damn quick!
Post Boom Years
Most accounts of Tombstone focus on the discovery years of the late 1870s and the great silver bonanza of the early and mid-1880s, when the city reached an estimated population of 10,000 residents. Yet, in contrast to many other prominent mining camps of the American West, remarkably few photographs survive from Tombstone’s boomtown era. As a result, one of the West’s most famous mining cities remains, in some ways, shrouded in mystery.
By the late 1880s, the richest ore bodies had been exhausted, while rising water levels in the mines forced many operations to close. Tombstone’s boom years had come to an end.
The famed Bird Cage Theatre, once described as “the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast,” closed sometime between 1889 and 1892, depending on the source consulted. Census records show the population had fallen to fewer than 1,900 residents by 1890, and to fewer than 700 by 1900.
Tombstone experienced a resurgence beginning in 1901, when the Tombstone Consolidated Mines Company acquired control of roughly 95 percent of the district’s mines and launched an ambitious program to dewater the flooded workings. With production restored, the town again began to prosper, and the population rose to around 2,500 residents. In 1903, Tombstone finally received a direct railroad connection to the outside world via the El Paso and Southwestern Railway, a comparatively late arrival for a mining district of such renown.
This renewed period of prosperity lasted until January 1911, when the Tombstone Consolidated mines shut down. That same year, the Engineering and Mining Journal attributed the “failure of silver mining at Tombstone” to “the cost of pumping 7,000,000 gallons of water with a thousand foot lift.”
Mining activity returned sporadically in later years. During World War I, manganese mining brought a measure of renewed activity to the district, while World War II-era lead mining briefly revived the local economy once again. Yet the exuberant days of the 1880s were long gone and would never be repeated.
In 1929, the seat of Cochise County was moved to Bisbee. Following World War II, Tombstone faded further into obscurity, though it was never completely abandoned. The post office, originally established in 1878, has operated continuously and remains open today.
Estimates vary widely regarding the district’s total silver production, but Tombstone is said to have yielded more than 32 million ounces of silver, worth well over a billion dollars at modern prices
From Mining to Tourism
Silver may have been the reason Tombstone was settled, but it was the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Gunfight at the OK Corral that would give the town an economic base well into the 20th, and then the 21st centuries.
The first popular book about the gunfight was published in the 1930s, and many more books and movies about the event were made in the following decades. In the 1961 the remaining historic town center was designated a National Historic Landmark District, described as “one of the best preserved specimens of the rugged frontier town of the 1870s and 1880s."
In the 1960s the remaining residents decided to embrace the town’s historic and infamous past, and promote Tombstone as a tourist destination. Some of the original buildings were refurbished and reenactments of the famous gunfight were performed on a regular schedule. The popularity of the town as a tourist destination steadily increased over the years and now around half a million people visit each year.
Historic buildings include the St. Paul's Episcopal Church, built in 1882; the Crystal Palace Saloon, one of the most luxurious saloons in the West; and the Tombstone Epitaph building, where the oldest continuously published paper in Arizona is still being printed. The Cochise County courthouse, built in 1882 at a cost of $45,000, is preserved and open to visitors as a museum.
Arizona Mining Photos
View over 35 historic Arizona mining scenes at A Collection of Arizona Mining Photos.
Arizona Gold
"Where to Find Gold in Arizona" looks at the density of modern placer mining claims along with historical gold mining locations and mining district descriptions to determine areas of high gold discovery potential in Arizona. Read more: Where to Find Gold in Arizona.