History & Significance
Tombstone sits in the semi-arid basin and range country of Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, about thirty miles from the Mexican border. It was established in 1879 after Ed Schieffelin, a prospector who had been told by soldiers at Fort Huachuca that the only stone he would find in Apache territory was his own tombstone, located the silver deposits he had been searching for and named his first claim accordingly. The mine he found became the Tough Nut, and the boomtown that grew around it became one of the most famous in American history.
The silver deposits at Tombstone were among the richest ever found in the Arizona Territory. The ore veins ran deep and wide, and within two years of the discovery the area was producing millions of dollars in silver annually. The town that served the mines grew from a tent camp to a city of 10,000 people between 1879 and 1881, with dozens of saloons, gambling halls, hotels, newspapers, churches, an opera house, and the full apparatus of a wealthy frontier community competing for the money flowing from the mines.
The town's most famous thirty seconds took place on October 26, 1881, when Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and Doc Holliday confronted a faction of cowboys near a vacant lot adjacent to the OK Corral and killed three of them. The fight lasted about thirty seconds. Three men died: Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury. The legal and personal consequences of the fight continued for years: a coroner's jury cleared the Earps and Holliday, but the feud continued with assassination attempts on Virgil and Morgan Earp before Wyatt left Arizona permanently in 1882.
Cochise County, named for the Chiricahua Apache chief who had fought the US Army to a standstill in the early 1870s and negotiated a peace in 1872, was organized in 1881. The county's land records document a landscape that had been Apache territory within living memory of many of the county's first settlers.
The silver, the mines, and the pumping problem
The silver deposits at Tombstone were extraordinarily rich in their upper levels. The ore near the surface yielded silver in concentrations that justified immediate extraction, and the mining companies that formed around the original claims invested heavily in infrastructure: stamp mills to crush the ore, amalgamation equipment to extract the silver, and wagon roads to bring supplies in and ore out. The Tombstone Mining District produced an estimated $30 million in silver between 1879 and 1886.
The deeper the mines went, the wetter they got. The Tombstone deposits sat above a subsurface water table, and as the shafts descended they began to fill with water. The solution was steam-powered pumps, which kept the mines operating through the early 1880s. In 1886, a catastrophic flood overwhelmed the pumping capacity and filled the deeper shafts. The cost of pumping the mines out was greater than the value of the remaining ore at prevailing silver prices, and most of the major operations shut down.
The collapse of the silver market following the Sherman Silver Purchase Act's repeal in 1893 ended any prospect of reopening the deep mines. Tombstone shrank dramatically as the mining workforce left. The town that survived was the governmental center of Cochise County, a small agricultural service community, and eventually a tourist attraction built on its own mythology. The Cochise County deed records document the rapid transfer of mining properties from individual claimants to corporate ownership and then through the successive stages of corporate failure and reorganization that followed the mines' decline.
The Earps, the Cowboys, and the conflict that defined the town
The conflict between the Earp faction and the Cowboys who gathered around the Clanton and McLaury families reflected a genuine political and economic division in Cochise County. The Earps and their allies were associated with the Republican establishment, the mining interests, and the town-based commercial economy. The Cowboys, a loose term applied to the ranching and rustling networks operating in the county's vast open range, were largely Democratic, rural, and antagonistic to the law enforcement the Earps represented.
The gunfight at the OK Corral was the violent expression of a conflict that had been building for months, involving cattle rustling, stage robberies, competing authority claims, and personal animosity. It did not resolve the conflict. The Earps were charged with murder, subjected to a lengthy hearing before Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer, and ultimately cleared on the grounds that they had been acting as law enforcement officers. The Cowboys' response was violent: Morgan Earp was murdered in March 1882 and Virgil Earp was ambushed and crippled. Wyatt Earp then conducted a violent vendetta ride through the county before leaving Arizona.
The legal record of these events is extensive: the coroner's inquest, the Spicer hearing transcript, the Cochise County court records, and the contemporary newspaper coverage from the Tombstone Epitaph and the rival Tombstone Nugget provide one of the most detailed contemporary documentations of a frontier conflict in American history. The newspapers, which were aligned with opposing factions, provide competing versions of the same events in real time.
The Apache presence and the land before silver
The Cochise County landscape had been Chiricahua Apache territory for generations before American settlement. The Chiricahua, led through the 1860s and early 1870s by Cochise, had maintained their hold on southeastern Arizona against both Mexican and American pressure through a combination of military effectiveness and geographic advantage. The Apache Pass country, the Dragoon Mountains, and the Chiricahua Range gave them defensive terrain that frustrated military expeditions for years.
Cochise negotiated a peace with General Oliver Howard in 1872 that recognized a Chiricahua reservation in the Dragoon and Chiricahua mountains, the heart of Apache territory. When Cochise died in 1874 the arrangement survived briefly, but American political pressure to remove the Chiricahua from their homeland led to the dissolution of the Chiricahua Reservation in 1876 and the forced removal of most of the band to the San Carlos Reservation on the Gila River. The resistance that followed, led by Geronimo and others, continued until the final Chiricahua surrender in 1886.
The silver rush of 1879 occurred in the middle of this conflict. Tombstone's early settlers were mining in a war zone. The military presence at Fort Huachuca, established in 1877, was partly there to protect the mining operations from Apache raids. The Cochise County land records from the early 1880s document the rapid private occupation of land that had been Apache territory within the previous decade.