News of Schieffelin’s discovery flew far and fast, and from the four corners of the West came the stampede of fortune hunters. From the ends of railroad steel at Deming on the east and Yuma on the west, they poured into the Arizona valleys. Gila River trails were white with their canvas-topped caravans. Their mule teams, ox teams, and pack trains crawled under burning suns across the Santa Cruz deserts, streamed in endless procession through gaps in the Eastern mountain wall, and came into the promised land of the San Pedro through Dragoon Gap, Texas Canyon, and Mustang Pass. Villages in New Mexico and southern California were almost emptied, northern mining camps were deserted, and industries in many Western cities felt the drain of the exodus. Many died in the rush: froze in the mountain snows, famished in the flaming deserts, fell by the way from hardships and accidents. Apaches, watching from their mountains, swooped down upon the stragglers, leaving dead bodies beside the trails among the blackened ruins of burned wagons. Buzzards and coyotes had fat pickings on the Mogollon plateau, and skeletons bleached along the lonely sands of the Camino del Diablo.
Tombstone, magic city of the desert, was born in . Where the Hills of Silver stretch out a lion’s paw into the mesa to the east, the town blossomed flowerlike as a cluster of white tents. No faint presage of the future glimmered in this shabby genesis. But beyond the desert’s rim, the tidal wave of destiny was curling to its crest. Evolution became the swift process of a dream, and the town, in swirling metamorphoses, rushed to full development. A twinkling camp fire on the mountain grew into a splendour of lights; a miner’s canvas shelter changed into streets and homes and marketplaces. A year was compressed into a minute; a century was packed into an hour. Daybreak surged to blazing noon; while the dawn was still red, the clock struck twelve. A city suddenly stormed into being out of a clear sky.
Tombstone soon covered the lion’s paw down to the claws in the mesquite. Allen was the main street, paralleled by Tough Nut and Fremont, also business thoroughfares. Allen was a street of stately width. From the O.K. corral at one end to the Bird Cage Opera House at the other, it was solidly built up with one-story business houses of frame, brick, and adobe, above which two or three two-story structures towered like skyscrapers. The sidewalks were sheltered from the sun by projecting roofs—wooden awnings—supported by posts at the curb. These long arcades swarmed with people—mine labourers, cowboys, capitalists, Mexicans, children out of school, flashy women of the half-world, dainty young ladies out for a promenade or a tour of the shops, whose windows were gay with bonnets, lingerie, and fashionable gowns.
The broad street roared with traffic. Wagon trains loaded with lumber were coming in from the sawmills in the Chiricahuas and Huachucas. Rustlers were arriving from the San Pedro or the San Simon. Sheriff’s posses were clattering out on the trail of stage robbers. Stages were departing, shotgun messengers on the box beside the driver, for Benson, Bisbee, Fort Huachuca, Tucson, Lordsburg, and mining towns across the Mexican border; stages robbed so frequently that the stamp mills cast the silver bullion in two-hundred-pound bars which road agents found difficulty in carrying off on horseback. Heavy wagons loaded with ore and drawn by sixteen mules, two abreast along a trace chain half a block long, were constantly rumbling through town from the mines on the hill to the mills at Charleston and Contention. The skill with which the skinners brought these teams around a corner was a form of art; these drivers, it was said, could flick a fly from a mule’s ear at twenty paces with their long whips. One sees the ruts of these ponderous wains today, cut three and four inches deep in solid limestone in the old trails.
Night was distinguished from day in Tombstone only by darkness and stars. Saloons and gambling houses were never closed. Day and night, the long bars were crowded. Night and day, the gambling tables girdling the saloon walls were surrounded by tense throngs. Gamblers dealt or sat lookout with their sombreros on and their six-shooters buckled around them. Monte tables were stacked with gold and silver money. Faro was played in feverish silence. The little ivory ball in the roulette wheels and the dice in the chuck-a-luck boxes rattled noisily. When a player dropped out at the tables of stud poker and draw poker, another was waiting to take his chair. Play at noon was as heavy as at midnight. A thousand dollars won or lost at a sitting was nothing to cause excitement; a loser today was a winner tomorrow. Professional gamblers lived in clover and were known at a glance by their immaculate clothes, their silk shirts, and their headlight diamonds.
The saloons were not the boozing kens of old frontier tradition. Such places as the Crystal Palace, Oriental, and Alhambra were resplendent with oil paintings, mirrors, brass and mahogany, three bartenders—sometimes five—always on duty. Few rough fellows thumped on the bar and roared out orders for raw whisky; Tombstone displayed connoisseurship in mixed drinks. The spruce, white-aproned chaps behind the bars were adepts in concocting cocktails, mashes, sours,
