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 , 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 , 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 , 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 , having lost $5,000,000. At a receiver’s sale in , 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 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 .
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 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
