Arizona, Day Three

Another beautiful day in Arizona.  I hear it's possible to get tired of the sun, but I am skeptical.

Boothill and Tombstone are today's destinations.  The stuff of legends and all that. Legends have a tendency to infuse the facts with romance and intrigue, leaving out the stench of reality.

Boothill overlooks a panoramic view of desert and mountain ranges, breathtakingly beautiful, raw and stark. Over two hundred bodies lay beneath the mounds of rocks heaped up to discourage predators.  The grave markers elicit a mixture of gallows humor and muted melancholy.

The late 1800s seem especially deadly.  Infants succumb to diseases that are treatable today. Two  young brothers, drown, one trying to save the other.  One especially well-marked site, surrounded by decorative cast iron fencing is the final resting place of a new mother, dead from an overdose of chloroform given during childbirth.

Then there are the hangings, stabbings, shootings, murders in general, and suicides.  One marker reads:

Here lies George Johnson

Hanged by mistake in 1882

He was right and we was wrong 

But we strung him up and now he's gone 

It seems poor George innocently bought a stolen horse and was mistaken for the thief.  It is easy to forget these were people not so different from us; they lost their lives during a violent time in an unforgiving and harsh landscape, far from law, justice, or medicine.

The desert town of Tombstone sprang up to serve the men working the silver mines in the desolation and heat of the southwest.  The real money-makers were the merchants and pimps.  Soiled doves, as the ladies of the night were called, worked from dawn to dusk, plying their trade for virtually nothing, trying to survive, while their handlers made fortunes.  Many of the girls eventually died of alcohol and drug-related illnesses. Some died of disease, others of suicide.  A few made their own fortune and managed to escape back to "civilized society." I study their faded photographs and wonder at the story that brought each of them to this place.

Movies like Tombstone glamorize the town's harsh history with heroes like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.  Were they heroes? Or villains?  It's impossible to say.  Whatever they were, it affects me to see the place they lived and died. 

The Birdcage Theater raises the hair on my neck, or at least it feels like it as I walk through the dim, musty rooms, largely untouched since the long-dead residents of Tombstone worked and played in them. Courage and grit, violence and abuse played their hands here.  I see the table that hosted more than eight years of non-stop poker, played 24/7.   Cards and chips still lay scattered and the smell of old dust and forgotten memories permeate the place with a stifling and oppressive aura. I can feel them here, the men and women of legend who once filled these rooms.

Nine years after it opened, a flood shut down the theater.  It remained locked for fifty years, until it was reopened as a museum, although mausoleum might be the more accurate term. I am relieved to get back into the sunshine, to see the actors staging drama on the town's streets.  Wyatt and his brothers come back to life as they harass the McLowrys and set the stage for the upcoming shoot-out that kills three men, all buried now at Boothill.

I am glad I came. And I am glad to leave. The weathered boards and stone walls held in place with straw and mud, crumbling after more than a century, leave an impression on me I can't shake.  The shoot-em-up westerns fail to convey the truth.  The sacrifices and sorrows of those who pioneered the harsh and unforgiving landscapes of the west can be sensed in Tombstone.  The determination and unflagging spirit of the men and women who dealt not in a fantasy of legends, but in the bitterness of reality, is a tangible presence in this old desert town where death stalked both young and old, righteous and evil, men and women.  What courage to face the unknown! 

They must have been heroes after all.