XXII
Sunshine and Peace
Tombstone, that in its days of glory as the metropolis of Arizona had 15,000 people, had dwindled to a ghost town in 1900, when only 646 inhabitants stood between it and utter extinction. But the old town refused to die. It rallied in its last ditch. It added 500 to its census roll in the next quarter of a century. It now has a population of about 1,200. So, you see, Tombstone is growing.
Tombstone is a pretty live little town. You wouldn’t think so to look at it, but it is. You must be careful to distinguish between the physical town and the people who inhabit it. The buildings are of the dead past; the people of the live present. There is much public spirit. The town has its Commercial Club; the business men get together at a luncheon every week; the welfare and improvement of the town are always uppermost. Tombstone is on a coast-to-coast motor highway. Cars go through by the hundred every day. The historic associations interest these travellers, whose flying trade is of great annual value. Camps have been established; tourists are made welcome. To increase interest in Tombstone, it is planned to turn the old Bird Cage Theatre into a museum to be filled with mementos of the town’s early history. Which would seem an excellent idea. The town’s isolation is an element deterrent to its development as a business or manufacturing centre but the citizens hope in time to build it into a great health resort, for which its situation might seem ideal. Its winters are springlike and, because of its elevation, it is immune from the intense summer heat which prevails in some other sections of Arizona. It has an abundant supply of cold water piped from springs in the Huachucas; its air is pure and dry; its glorious sunshine perennial; and about it is the beauty of deserts and mountains.
The business section of Tombstone is much as it was in early days. The one-story buildings with wooden awnings shading the sidewalk are the same that Wyatt Earp and Johnny Behan knew. The old Oriental, where Doc Holliday dealt faro and Buckskin Frank tended bar, is a drug store, and dainty young women gossip over ice-cream sodas where hard-eyed gamblers once bucked the tiger. The Crystal Palace is empty; dust covers the windows through which in old days could be seen the monte tables piled with gold and silver money, the roulette and faro games surrounded by eager throngs, and the long mahogany bar lined with the men of the frontier. The place only recently closed as a moving-picture theatre, but one may be sure none of the dramas flashed on its screen equalled in thrilling interest the dramas of real life that once unfolded within these four walls. Bob Hatch’s old billiard hall is still a billiard hall, and ivory balls click a daily requiem where Morgan Earp was killed. In the old Alhambra, a grocer fills the market baskets of housewives and suavely explains a rise in the price of onions. The post office occupies the site where once stood Martin Costello’s saloon, where St. Louis beer was first sold in Tombstone. Mice play in the empty darkness of the Maison Dorée where Julius Caesar served his delectable dishes. The Can Can, run by a Chinaman, still flourishes as a popular eating house, where ham and eggs are seasoned with history. Johnny Montgomery’s O.K. corral is a garage.
The Bird Cage Theatre is like a building that has died and been embalmed. It looks natural, as they say when they turn down the sheet, but its songs, its dancing, its merry doings, and its tipsy revelry, which were its life, have vanished. The famous old honky-tonk has become in these days of evil fortune a storehouse for odds and ends of old furniture. The stage is deep with dust, and the dingy boxes where queens of song boosted beer sales between arias look down on piles of rusty beds and broken tables. On one of the walls offstage, you may read these names scribbled in black paint by actors and actresses who in the long ago appeared in the glare of the Bird Cage footlights: Amy Brandon, Ella Davis, Charles Keene, Manning Barthylarr, Nick Williams, William Walker, Ada Grayson, Jessie Field, Jules Garrison, Eddie Moore, Irry Conley, Jennie Melville, Lillie Melbourne, Tony Hewitt, Ollie Bingleford, Ida Grayson, Stella Elton, William Baker, Joe Fuette, Ella Gardner, Soldern & Dixon. These names may mean something to somebody somewhere.
Where the red lights used to twinkle is now a district of homes in pretty yards filled with trees and flowers, and in the midst of the residences rises the high school, Tombstone’s most imposing building. Fremont Street is empty and silent. Near the City Hall, built in 1882, is the vacant lot where the Earps and Clantons met in battle, a pile of tin cans and rubbish the only monument marking the historic spot. Tough Nut is a residence street; where the telegraph pole stood to which John Heath was hanged by the men of Bisbee is a cottage embowered in shrubbery and blooming plants. The old courthouse gives a touch of bustling animation to Tough Nut Street when crowds of lawyers, clients, and witnesses gather in the county seat during sessions of court. Near the south end of the thoroughfare stands the one remaining lamppost of Tombstone’s early days, looking as if it had risen from the dead. Its rays once dimly illumined Nellie Cashman’s boarding house, and around it formed the mob from whose fury Wyatt Earp saved Johnny Behind-the-Deuce.
Near the old lamppost is the cavelike aperture of the Million Dollar stope, so called because in this tunnel beneath the town the Grand Central mine “glory-holed,” taking out $840,000. The shaft caved in at this point in 1908, carrying down a horse and ice wagon; the wagon was demolished, but the horse was uninjured and was led out through an underground passage to the old mouth of the mine a quarter of a mile away. Most of the business part of town, it is said, is undermined and crisscrossed with old tunnels.
The hill above the town is desolate. The last attempt to work the mines was made in 1901, when E. B. Gage merged all the properties in the Tombstone Consolidated Mines and installed pumps with a capacity of eight million gallons a day. The company went into bankruptcy in 1911, having lost $5,000,000. At a receiver’s sale in 1914, the Phelps-Dodge interests, which own the Copper Queen in Bisbee, purchased the properties for $500,000. A little mining is still done by leasers. Forty of the mines are under lease to thirty-five individuals and 110 men work in the shafts daily. Fifteen hundred tons of ore a month are shipped to the Douglas smelters. The ore averages $8 or $9 in silver to the ton. The company furnishes power; the leasers pay the company 20 percent of the value of their ore. Their 80 percent, it is said, amounts to a little better than day wages. Ed Massey and Bill Williams, leasers, struck a pay streak in 1924 and took out $50,000 apiece. This is the only strike made on the hill since early days. The company, after paying taxes, perhaps breaks even. The Tombstone mines, experts declare, probably will never be worked again.
You will find many people in Tombstone who have lived there twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five years. Not a few were there during John Slaughter’s terms as sheriff. But not more than eight or ten date back to the days of the Earps. A. C. Cummings is one of the oldest inhabitants. Also the wealthiest. He owns many of the old landmarks, including the Bird Cage Theatre. Mrs. Martin Costello, now of Los Angeles, probably owns more Tombstone property than Mr. Cummings. What Mrs. Costello doesn’t own, Mr. Cummings does, is the way the town folks put it.
The famous figures in Tombstone’s early history are, for the most part, dead. Sheriff Behan became superintendent of Yuma prison and later special agent of the Department of the Treasury with headquarters at El Paso. He served in the quartermaster’s department of the army in Cuba during the Spanish War, then in the Philippines, and in China during the Boxer Rebellion. He died in Tucson in 1912.
If you drop into the Old Pueblo Club in Tucson, a liveried servitor will take your card and fade across soft carpets through portières. When he ushers you into the luxurious lounge of the establishment, you will find a distinguished-looking gentleman, white of hair and moustache, fingering your card. This is Col. William M. Breakenridge, known as Billy Breakenridge in days of happy-go-lucky adventuring among Curly Bill’s outlaws. The Colonel is in his eighties, hale, vigorous, and full of interesting talk of old times. If you should happen to miss him at his club, you will doubtless find him at the pleasant quarters of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, where the old-timers of the frontier foregather, and where strangers within the city’s gates are made welcome by E. L. Vail, president, and Mrs. Edith Kitt, custodian, with the courtesy and kindliness that are the essence of the old frontier’s spirit of hospitality.
Ike Clanton, who, with boastful tongue, swaggered among Tombstone’s bars and whose running feet left indelible prints across Tombstone’s early history, was killed in 1887 on Bonita Creek twenty miles west of Montmorenci. Deputy Sheriffs J. V. Brighton and George Powell, who held a warrant for his arrest, waited in hiding for him at his cabin. “Hands up!” was the last articulate sound the outlaw heard on earth. Yuma yawned for him; liberty was sweet. He put spurs to his horse and fell dead with two bullets between his shoulder blades before he had gone twenty yards. Finn Clanton, last of the famous family, died in bed at his ranch near Miami after serving ten years in prison for cattle stealing.
Tales of the old, wild days in Tombstone were heard in Boston at the recent trial of the Crabtree will case in the Suffolk Probate Court, and caused the prim, bluestocking city of the Puritan Fathers to gasp in scandalized bewilderment. Lotta Crabtree, famous stage beauty, died in Boston without known heirs and left something like $4,000,000 to charity. Mrs. Carlotta Crabtree Cockburn of San Gabriel, California, claiming to be a niece, sued for a share in the estate. According to the plaintiff’s story, Jack Crabtree, only brother of Lotta, married Anne Leopold in San Francisco and lived with her in Tombstone in 1880–81. After the birth of a daughter, he deserted his wife and baby and joined his sister, in the management of whose theatrical affairs he had a hand until his death five years later. Soon after he disappeared, his wife levanted, it is said, with Jack Rabb, a gambler. Within a few years, she also died. Deserted by both parents, the little girl was adopted by Ed Bullock, a Tombstone liveryman and Jack Crabtree’s most intimate friend. The girl grew up in Bullock’s home in California, and at her marriage became Mrs. Cockburn. In seeking to invalidate Mrs. Cockburn’s claims, lawyers for the Crabtree estate contended that Jack Crabtree and Anne Leopold were never married and that Bullock was the child’s father.
Nothing in recent years had given Tombstone such a delicious morsel of scandal to roll over its tongue as this interesting case. Citizens divided into two factions. Whether Jack Crabtree and Anne Leopold were married and whether the baby was their child were questions which threatened to precipitate a vendetta in Tombstone society comparable in flaming intensity to the Earp-Clanton feud. Tombstone pioneers in many parts of the country gave depositions on one side or the other. Among these witnesses were Wyatt Earp, William Breakenridge, and Mrs. Alec Derwood, once the wife of Buckskin Frank Leslie. John B. Wright, lawyer of Tucson, who has fought Mrs. Cockburn’s battle from the first, went to court in Boston armed with sixty depositions from old Tombstone citizens in support of his client’s claim.
Mr. Wright, Arizona lawyer for thirty-four years, enlivened the Boston court proceedings with a frontier anecdote.
“I was on a train bound for Tombstone,” said Mr. Wright, “when it was boarded by two masked robbers. I was travelling with a deputy sheriff who wore two six-shooters. ‘Are you a good shot?’ I asked him in a whisper out of the corner of my mouth as we stood in the aisle with our hands above our heads. ‘No,’ he replied emphatically. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘for God’s sake, don’t shoot.’ The robbers took our money and watches and the deputy sheriff’s guns, but politely returned my office keys.”
The Boston court, in its decision, denied Mrs. Cockburn’s claim. It held that Jack Crabtree and Anne Leopold had never been married, that their relations did not even constitute common-law marriage, and that Mrs. Cockburn was not an heir and had no legal claim of any kind upon the Lotta Crabtree estate.
Life goes pleasantly in Tombstone, if quietly. It is a sociable, hospitable little community. The women are forever entertaining. There are church affairs and Woman’s Club affairs and Literary Society affairs and amateur theatricals by the Drama League and concerts by the high school band. Roads about town are excellent; it is an easy, pleasant drive to Tucson, Benson, Bisbee, Douglas. Motor parties go frequently to Agua Prieta, Naco, and Nogales across the Mexican line, where they dine on enchiladas, tamales, and frijoles, and, if the truth must be known, drink a few bottles of ice-cold beer. One drives in an hour to Naco, pleasant oasis of wetness.
The Epitaph, as in old days, keeps Tombstone abreast of the times. It is a weekly now, published in a plant equipped with linotype machines and modern presses, and with its scareheads and typographical technique, it looks much like a big city newspaper. William H. Kelly, who edits it and manages its business affairs, is the grandson of George H. Kelly, state historian. He is a college-bred man and a trained journalist, and he gets out a lively and interesting paper. Tombstone has already elected Billy Kelly an alderman and promises to send him to Congress some day.
The gossip and happenings of Tombstone as recorded in the Epitaph are widely different from those of an earlier time. … Mrs. William Lutley entertained at bridge last evening. … Mrs. A. C. Cummings gave a delightful dinner. … Mrs. Porter McDonald’s card party was an enjoyable affair. … Mrs. A. H. Gardner read a paper before the Literary Society. … Mrs. Ethel Macia was hostess at a dinner dance. … Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Taylor returned from a visit to Warren. … Judge and Mrs. Albert M. Sames are back from Douglas. … C. J. Sheldon presided at the luncheon of the Business Men’s Club. … Porter McDonald spent yesterday in Naco, driving over in his new car. … Bud Marr is making good in his new position as chief of police. … Jeff Milton was in from Fairbank. … A. M. Morris, superintendent of the Bunker Hill Mining Company, has been transferred to Montmorenci. … Greenway Albert has returned from California. … J. T. Kingsbury and wife spent Sunday in Nogales. … R. B. Krebs, and J. A. Ivey, and wife are visiting in Bisbee. … Sheriff George Henshaw and Mayor Charles Schneider are back from Tucson. … This sort of thing constitutes news in Tombstone nowadays.
Allen Street, with its dilapidated old stores, looks a little forlorn in daylight, despite its asphalt and its automobiles. But when a coyote lifts a weird song in the mesquite and the moon hangs over the Dragoons, it is easy to imagine it the frontier boulevard it used to be. Then the disfiguring scars left by the years disappear, and the ancient buildings, bathed in the soft light as in a fountain of youth, seem clothed in the strength and freshness of old days. The present fades; the past rises like a picture. There in the street are the lumber trains coming in from the Chiricahuas; the sixteen-mule ore teams with their clanking trace chains, the yells of mule-skinners, the cracking of whips. The arcaded sidewalks are crowded. Swing doors of saloons flail back and forth. Laughter of roistering throngs comes from the brightly lighted bars. You hear the click of faro chips, the rattle of roulette wheels. The scent of spiced drinks and orange peel is in the air. That tall man there with the six-shooters buckled around him is Wyatt Earp. Doc Holliday is lounging in a doorway. Yonder are Virgil and Morgan Earp. Johnny Behan bustles along. And the Clantons and McLowerys and Buckskin Frank and John Ringo in his great buffalo coat, his hands rammed in his pockets on his guns. And Curly Bill and his bold buccaneers, riding in from the San Simon, go clattering past … when a coyote lifts a weird song in the mesquite and the moon hangs over the Dragoons.
Tombstone flames no more. Its wild days are a tale that is told. It lives with its memories and its ghosts. Sunshine and peace are its portion. Once it was romance. Now it’s a town.