We Visit The Town Too Tough To Die

Most summers, I take the girls on at least one day-trip out of town. Usually, we head up to the Phoenix area and have a lot of adventures up there. This year was to be a little different, seeing as how Nathan and I both had short out-of-state trips scheduled in the month of July. Those trips, combined with Lorelai's thriving pet-sitting business, meant our time was a little hectic. Ultimately, Nathan got to take the girls to Phoenix instead of me, mostly because my solo trip (to Comic-Con...more on that soon!) fell in late July, just before the beginning of school.

While I agreed with the plan on a scheduling level, I felt a bit left out. I was going to miss taking the kids up to Phoenix! Over the last few summers, it has sort of become our "thing." So naturally, I looked around to see if there was another place the girls and I could visit together. This spring, Lorelai became really interested in the Old West, due to a unit in her social studies class on the westward expansion of the United States. As a result, I started thinking that maybe this would be the year I took the kids to Tombstone, Arizona...aka, The Town Too Tough To Die.

Technically, Lorelai had been to Tombstone once before...she was still curled up in my stomach at the time! Nathan and I spent a fun weekend in Bisbee, Arizona, when I was pregnant with Lorelai; while on the way home, we decided to take a short detour and spent a few hours in Tombstone. Honestly, we were underwhelmed. Tombstone is a town with a colorful, rich history, but it is also a city that has transformed that legacy into a chintzy, often tacky revenue stream. Everything was very commercialized, overpriced, and inauthentic. The town had some bright spots, but overall we felt it was a sad city, crumbling around the edges while doggedly trying to preserve its "historical" facade for a casual public.

Although Nathan and I were unimpressed, we both thought that someday, the kids might want to see Tombstone and get a little taste of the "Old West" (however tacky that might be). This year, with Lorelai's interest piqued, I thought it might be time to revisit Tombstone, with the kids in tow. I suspected they would love the cheesy, "movie studio/theme park" feel of the town's historical district. We chose the day of our visit as July 6, 2016. Nathan was out of town on his trip that day (he went up to Colorado that week, to visit with his sister for a few days as she graduated the local Firefighter Academy). He promised us he wouldn't feel left out if we traveled to Tombstone without him, so off we went!

Tombstone was only about an hour and a half drive from our house. Since this was early July, I was a little worried about the weather. However, getting away from Tucson actually lowered  the temperature; it was overcast and relatively cool all day (it only got to the low 90s; very unusual for July in southern Arizona). We even got sprinkled with a little rain, and it felt wonderful!

Right after getting there, the girls stretched their legs (and found some swings) in a local park...

Not long after, we bought our tickets to the OK Corral Gunfight Site. It was one of the town's more expensive attractions, but also one of the most historically significant. Nathan and I had refused to fork over the money last time we visited, so I splurged this year for myself and the girls. As it turned out, it was a moderately interesting visit.

 

 

First of all, we were treated to a multimedia presentation featuring a large, rotating diorama, as well as an old movie (narrated by Vincent Price!) that described in some detail the history of the region. It was a little dated, but still interesting (well, interesting to me...the girls got a bit squirmy watching it).

 

Elsewhere at the site, there were quite a bit of period clothing, weapons, transportation, tools, household items, and other curiosities on display at the gunfight location. It wasn't a huge museum, but it did a good job of representing the time period and revealing more information about the history of the town.

The "corral" has mostly been overtaken by a series of small buildings, each containing different items of historical interest. One building was now a gallery of old photos taken of the region.

 

Another building was a recreation of a "crib," which was a tiny hut used by prostitutes. They would rent out the crib, then use it to host their clientele. It was an interesting exhibit, but also a little sad.

There was also a long line of old carriages and stagecoaches. At the end of this line was a functioning blacksmith's shop. Sadly the blacksmith wasn't around the day we visited; however, he had created a lot of hand-beaten iron sculptures, which were displayed for sale.

After we had spent a while looking around, it was time to go catch the gun show!

The actual "battle" at the OK Corral lasted less than a minute, but it was bloody and deadly. The "gunfight" portion of the show took place at the very end; for the first several minutes, several actors (portraying the Earps, Clantons, Doc Holliday, etc.) spent lots of time talking a lot of smack to each other and generally acting threatening. The play depicted a very condensed version of the feud between the Clantons and the Earps, which simmered for weeks before erupting into a shower of bullets.

 

The girls were getting a bit restless during the "talky" portion of the gun show; that made it all the more amusing when the shots began to fire. They were pretty shocked and caught off guard when it happened! One of the actors took a minute at the end of the show to reveal the ultimate fates of all the men involved in the notorious gunfight.

Overall, the gunfight site was a little more informative and engaging than I had feared. It didn't excuse the rest of the town for being so tacky, but at least they put some effort into this particular historical site to make it a worthwhile place to visit.

After sitting out in the hot sun for a while watching the gunfight, the kids were pretty hot and hungry. We decided to eat lunch at the Golden Eagle Brewery, one of the town's older restaurants.

 

The food wasn't anything to write home about (it was maybe a step or two above fast food), but the interior decor was pretty cool...

I don't drink alcohol, but I would have loved to have a seat at the gorgeous bar!

There were also some cool dead-animal heads adorning the walls.

 

My favorite part of eating at this restaurant was seeing all the actors from the gun show we'd just watched, coming in to order their lunch. It was amusing and anachronistic to pass by them at their table and see them texting on their smartphones, while still in full Old West costume! I guess you had to be there, but we all found it funny.

 

After lunch, we spent a lot of the afternoon wandering the "main drag" of the historical district. That meant a lot of window shopping, and a lot of photographs of other historical buildings, like the Bird Cage Theater (which we did not visit).

There were a lot of "haunted/ghost tour" attractions in town, many more so than at my last visit. I suspect this is Tombstone's way of trying to keep up with the times & hop on the "ghost-hunters" trend, in order to stay fresh & appealing to tourists.

We didn't go inside every store, but we did check out many of them. The girls had each brought some of their allowance money, to buy themselves a souvenir or two. Some of them (Celeste!! But not naming name), were a little more indecisive than others. This meant we spent a lot of time wandering from store to store, before finally deciding on something to get.

 

 

The grossly overpriced nature of all these souvenir shops made finding fun, cheap, kid-friendly keepsakes a little harder than we'd expected.

 

 In between all the shopping, we found time to visit a couple of other, more "historical" places in town. The Tombstone Epitaph is the local newspaper, and it's been running all the news that's fit to print for more than one hundred years! Best of all, they have a tiny "museum" filled with old printing presses, and it doesn't cost anything to view them and learn a thing or two about the history of printing.

 

 

Plus they sold cool T-shirts (we managed to resist buying it, though). As you can imagine, the movie Tombstone is kind of a big deal in Tombstone; pretty much every store I visited had a television that was playing it! There were also movie posters everywhere for Tombstone, as well as other Old West movies that took place in the area.

We also checked out the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park. Nathan and I had visited this old, stately building on our last visit, and were fairly impressed. Even more than the OK Corral site, the courthouse had a lot of detailed, in-depth exhibits featuring historical artifacts and facts about Tombstone's colorful inhabitants over the years. It also has a lot of documents from the period detailing the OK Corral fight, and seeing how they matched up with the information from the gunfight site was interesting.

 

Of course, the kids loved seeing the courthouse recreated, and loved snooping around inside the old bank vault.

But their favorite part was the gallows out in the back. Yikes!

We had one more stop to make before heading back home. Even though I've complained about the tackiness of Tombstone, there was one thing I really wanted to do before leaving...

...get a tacky Old West-style photograph of myself and the girls! Deep down in my cynical heart, I have always wanted to take one of these silly pictures. I am so glad the girls were good sports about it. It was kind of a long wait to get the photo, but I think it was worth it. Plus, the girls looked totally adorable! (They were a little disappointed that their beautifully colored dresses didn't look as nice in the sepia-toned photo, but we were aiming for authenticity, you know??) We scanned the photo to keep on the computer, then Nathan proudly took it to work when he returned from Colorado, where it adorns one of his shelves.

On the way out of town, we made a short visit to Boot Hill Graveyard, the final resting place of the notorious Billy Clanton and the McClaury boys, the unlucky victims of the Earp's pistols at the OK Corral fight...

There are also several gravestones with some pretty humorous epitaphs.

In the end, each girl was pretty happy with their souvenirs. Lorelai bought a coonskin cap; she was overjoyed to have found one. She'd read a lot about Davy Crockett in school this last spring, and even though this cap had a large "TOMBSTONE" patch on it, she still wore it with pride. Celeste, who had initially wanted a small cap gun but was unable to afford one, finally settled on a rubber-band wooden pistol. She had a lot of fun shooting us all with it over the next several days. Aurora found a pair of cheap handcuffs, which delighted her to no end. One of her career aspirations is to be a police officer, and she reasoned that she needs some cuffs in order to prepare her for that job. To this day, she has been using the cuffs on herself, her sisters, and every friend that lets her! She is taking her future job very seriously.

The girls were a little tired after our day, but they really enjoyed Tombstone. As for myself, I thought it was a better visit than my previous one. Perhaps it was better to see the town through the eyes of some excited kids, rather than my own jaded gaze. I am glad we visited the OK Corral site, and also the Courthouse. For those interested in "authentic" history, those are the two best places in town to visit. I did think our visit dragged a bit; I was not nearly as interested in shopping for souvenirs as my girls! However, if you have older kids like mine, I do think Tombstone is worth a few hours of your time. Its glory days may be behind it, but it still has some enjoyable diversions.