Looking back into Arizona’s colorful past, the hectic pioneer days of the early eighties, Tombstone was the toughest, roughest, richest little city in the entire southwest. With its rip-roaring atmosphere of a frontier town, its Apache Indians, cowboys, prospectors, professional gamblers, cattle thieves, stage robbers, burlesque queens, Mexicans, Chinese, mine owners, merchants, lawyers and doctors; Tombstone has emerged from it all with a reputation of “the town too tough to die.”
In this pictorial souvenir of Tombstone, Blythe endeavors to present to you the buildings of Tombstone as they looked in 1940s through pencil sketches, although the majority of the buildings were built between 1879 and 1882. One of the prime highlights of the town is the old Bird Cage Theatre, which offered in its heyday, “stupendous, colossal attractions” by night, gambling and drinking by day, has been turned into a museum and is filled with mementos of the town’s early history. You have missed a prime sight if you fail to see Tombstone, heart of the old Southwest where history was written with six-shooters.
Tombstone, like many other mining towns is but a ghost town compared to the pomp and glory of its heyday when life was one exciting episode after another. This town came into being when Ed Schieffelin discovered a rich silver mine in 1877. News of his strike spread to all parts of the country, as a result thousands of ofortune seekers thronged to the place.
Ed Schieffelin, a prospector since boyhood days came to the San Pedro Valley with a troop of Government Scouts, scouring that part of the country for Indians. Little did these scouts dream that underneath the drabness of the vast desert lay a storehouse of the nation’s treasures. It was Ed Shieffelin who discovered this. During one of their scouting trips his eye glanced toward a stone with a deep mineral stain on it. Silently he dropped it into his pocket, secretly he decided to become prospector again, hoping to find his pot of gold or silver, as it was in his case. Working over hills and hollows, braving Indian warriors, starvation and lonliness, he at last found the source of this richness, his dreams had come true.
Reflecting on a remark made to him by a fellow scout when he found Ed Schieffelin prospecting, “the only stone you will find in those Indian infested hills will be your tombstone,” he decided to call the place Tombstone. When he went to Tucson to file his claim, that name went into the official record.
Source
Blythe, T. Roger, A Pictorial Souvenir and Historical Sketch of Tombstone, Arizona, “The Town Too Tough to Die,” Tombstone, Arizona : Tombstone Epitaph, 1946.