ethnic tourism

Tombstone, Arizona, is often remembered as the wildest town in the old west. The place where the Earps (Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil) and Doc Holliday gunned down their enemies at the OK Corral and where around 100 people were murdered between 1879-84, the years Boot Hill Cemetery operated.

But there’s a forgotten side to Tombstone. The funny side. At night, the locals in the many surviving bars from that era are only too pleased to regale visitors with stories of the time John Wayne lost his trousers or of Wyatt Earp’s drug addiction.

Because life was so cheap last century, it wasn’t taken too seriously and there are plenty of dismissive and humorous epitaphs still evident in the town.

Take Boot Hill. The most famous epitaph in “Wild West” history belongs to poor old Lester Moore. He was a Wells Fargo station agent until gunned down by one Hank Dunstan who’d become irascible because of a parcel that had been mangled in the mail. The inscription reads: “Here lies Lester Moore, Four slugs from a 44, No Les, No More.”

Another favourite acclamation painted on the constantly maintained wooden “headstones” also earns a laugh from the 200,000-odd annual visitors to the site: “Here lies George Johnson, hanged by mistake 1882. He was right, We was wrong, But we strung him up, And now he’s gone.”

It might be more understandable if these epitaphs were the work of an undertaker with a vicious sense of humour, but they were the work of the victims’ friends and their relatives.

Not that the undertaker lacked humour. “Why walk around half dead,” says a contemporary poster from Tombstone Undertakers, “when we can bury you for only $22.” A footnote says: “Ask about our layway plan!”

Wyatt Earp didn’t see the humour in having his brother killed and in the next six days shot and killed four men suspected of having a part in the murder. One of the four men was a prankster called Frank Stilwell who allegedly divided his time between holding up stage coaches and acting as deputy sheriff of Cochise County.

The Earps were supported by the editor of the local paper, John Clum. Clum had sufficient sense of irony to call his paper The Epitaph and sufficient breadth of enterprise to be mayor and postmaster as well. Clum started a column called Death’s Doings to record the occasions when Tombstone had “a man for breakfast”.

These days the local newspaper, The Tombstone Tumbleweed (Motto: Gathering the news of the town too tough to die), carries ads for the Curl Up and Dye Hair House, R&P Last Chance Gas & Grocery and Grandma Fudpuckers’ souvenir stall.

The fine tradition of mangling language also lives on at the Bird Cage Theatre, which is described in a local brochure as “an adolescent old maid in her infancy”. But visit the place and you can understand what they mean.

The Bird Cage only ran for nine years (1881-89), before being mothballed for 45 years. Many of the original furnishings remained untouched until it became an historic landmark in 1934.

It was the site of 16 gunfights and the West’s longest running poker game (eight years, five months and three days). Even today 140 bullet holes remain in the walls and ceilings.

The Bird Cage Theatre was named for the 14 cages suspended from the ceiling of the casino and dance floor. Prostitutes (or “shady ladies” because a Tombstone ordinance required them to walk on the shady side of the street) sat in the cages awaiting customers. It’s said the song “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” emanated from these coops.

Visit Tombstone and experience the forgotten side of it. The funny side.