This is my second or third trip back to this town and I still enjoy visiting it. Our first stop was Boothill Graveyard where the three men who where killed during the shooting at the OK Coral are buried. The epitaph on their graves notes that they were murdered. That is closer to the truth than legend would have the story spin. We saw a reenactment of the shooting and the way I saw it,the Earp brothers were itching for a show down! Doc Holiday(probably a bit drunk)fired a random shot which triggered an avalanche of bullets and soon three men were dead and two were wounded. There had been a lot of tension in town between the rich men from the north and the gentlemen cowboys of the south. Realize the fact that this was only 15 years after the Civil War. The dialog of the reenactment also mentioned Democracts versus Republicans-not sure whether that was for laughs,probably politics mattered very little to the cowhands of those days! Oh,and add to the mix the tension between the miners and the cowboys. This town was started because of the finding of silver. In the late 1850s Ed Schieffelin left the comfort of Fort Huachuca (despite the presence of Apache Indians)to prospect. He was warned that in doing so would guarantee him a tombstone. In 1877 he named his first strike Tombstone. The town was originally called Goose Flats,but later called Tombstone. We toured one silver mine located in town-it was interesting to see the veins of silver-small amounts of gold can also be seen in the rock. Apparently 140 mines of silver(some of them rather small) are in the area- because of the value of silver in the market today it just isn't worth mining. Processing the ore would just be too expensive.
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